Starting today, we will begin turning off out-of-date online services and servers for many older games in the Epic family as we move to solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features. Most titles will be playable offline, while some will no longer be playable. We apologize to the players affected by these changes.
We have started removing games that were still available from all digital storefronts and are disabling any in-game DLC purchasing as of today. We also removed the Mac and Linux versions of Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star from storefronts today, as well as the mobile title DropMix. Players who already own these titles will still be able to play.
Battle Breakers will shut down and no longer be accessible to players on December 30. We will automatically refund players for any in-game purchases made via Epic direct payment 180 days prior to today. Unreal Tournament (Alpha), Rock Band Blitz, Rock Band Companion app and SingSpace will be shut down and no longer accessible to players on January 24.
I have noticed this before; if I try to browse a sale catalogue, I get through about 2 pages and then boom it sends me back to the headline “Browse” page. It’s infuriating.
Also I notice some games on sale randomly appear or don’t appear in the catalogue.
It’s just terrible.
Edit: it even does it on the main Browse page once I get a couple of pages in.
It is nice that Epic is doing daily freebies during their holiday sale instead of the usual weekly tempo. Some of them so far are retreads, but I hope they will throw in a few first-time A-list freebies as well. With the holiday spirit and all that.
Oh yes I imagine it’s mostly profit. Sure Epic has a huge team building content for the game, but I don’t think they’re dealing with a thin margin. Every individual hat, dance, costume, weapon skin, etc, taking an artist a couple of hours to produce must bring in untold millions of dollars.
The fact that Epic have been exposed as criminals is the problem. When you read the FTC docs they come across as having no regard for privacy laws and being very dedicated to the cause of screwing over their customers.
Any gamedev that makes the choice to do an exclusivity deal with them now - well that sends a message. No reflection on people who did so in the past - I don’t think it was really known things were this bad.
And people can say Epic has changed - well Sweeney is still in charge. He did this.
