If we did one of our weekly polls on which game platform/store is your favourite, I would be very surprised if anything other than a miniscule minority of readers selected the Epic Games Store. I barely ever use the thing and even I know it's not the most enjoyable experience. But that might not be the case for much longer, as there's a big update coming.

We first reported on plans for a technical overhaul of the Epic Games Store in February. Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison told us at the time that the improvement is "pretty profound."

New slides out of Unreal Fest, posted on X by Pirat_Nation, describe a complete redesign of the launcher, and the big claims are that the "ground-up rebuild" will lead to a "5x faster cold start (average)" and "6.5x faster systray restore to library (average)." In other words, much quicker to boot up, either from the system tray or cold.

I thankfully have a small enough library on the platform that it isn't too sluggish, but I've heard some real terror tales from colleagues with bigger libraries. Our Jacob (different Jacob) wrote about the phenomena back in 2023 when comparing to the Heroic Launcher.

I have no reason to doubt him, either, given the general difficulty I have using the app. For example, launching games on-press rather than displaying more info, and popping up a separate window for downloads.

Other changes shown on the slides include:

• Personalised game recommendations on the home page
• Quick-access categories for easier single-page browsing
• Product detail pages tailored to each player, "connecting players to the game's community, story, and their own progression"
• Patch notes on the game's storefront

We reported in February that there are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

According to Pirat_Nation, the Epic Games Store will also get cross-region game gifting, publisher-funded coupons, and a tool to check how games will run on your system.

A lot of this of course sounds very similar to how Valve does things on Steam, and that's not a bad thing in my books. For one, most PC gamers use Steam and it's what they're used to. And second, well, it's just a better design. If you click a game page, for instance, you want to be able to access anything relevant to that game, whether it's patch notes, reviews, or whatever else.

Let's just hope the new rebuild lands before too long and follows through on what its promises. I'll be particularly keen to see how actual in-app navigation feels in terms of snappiness. Launchers are tools after all, not products in themselves—they should keep out of the way as much as possible.

It is a "time of both crisis and opportunity" for the games industry, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in his concluding remarks at today's Unreal Fest address, where the Unreal Engine and Fortnite maker demonstrated new features coming to its development tools.

The kids are playing more games than ever and Fortnite is growing again, Sweeney said, but "a huge number of the new releases of major games are failing."

"We're seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of dev cost, followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and the dev costs are continuing to grow," said Sweeney. "It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the AAA game business."

Sweeney's assessment of the problem echoed sentiments I heard repeatedly at the Game Developer's Conference back in March: Gamers want social online experiences, but it's extremely hard to break in and compete with the biggest platforms, like Roblox. Players go where their friends already are, and are more willing to buy in-game items in games they know will still be around in a year.

"One view of the future is that Roblox grows and eats gaming," Sweeney said. "A lot of people are saying this online, but you know, what you have there is a centralized platform with a single gatekeeper that commoditizes all content, takes more than 70% of revenue, and has 450 million users on board, and so that's a real challenge to game developers."

Epic believes in a "much brighter" future for developers, said the CEO, in which they rally around Epic's metaverse vision to collectively take on Roblox with a network of Unreal Engine games, "linking up our content, linking up our communities, and linking up our economies."

"We're going to need to build better games," Sweeney said. "We're going to need to build them more efficiently. We're going to need to design up front and build for connected games, where all of our playerbases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together."

Rather than focusing on graphics tech, Epic is pitching the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 as an upgrade to efficiency (it's getting generative AI integration) and interoperability. Make a game in Unreal Engine, and not only can you release it as a standalone executable, but also as a game within Fortnite, or within another Unreal Engine product.

The ecosystem Epic currently offers up is generous compared to the Roblox example. Unreal Engine is free to use for game developers, and Epic collects a 5% royalty only when a game surpasses $1 million in revenue. The Epic Games Store offers a similar deal, waving fees for the first $1 million in revenue, and after that taking a 12% cut.

Sweeney has also been a vocal critic of Steam's 20-30% cut, as well as its requirement that games use its payment processor for in-game purchases, something he's famously gone to battle with Apple over. Developers are free to bypass the Epic Games Store's fee for in-game purchases by using their own payment processing solution.

A Roblox-sized network of games and players based on those terms—low fees, the freedom to publish across many platforms, and so on—does sound like a boon for developers of that kind of game. But the natural question I'm left with is: How do the games I like fit into this vision?

A "global ecosystem" of social experiences, where no one bats an eye if Darth Vader walks into a room next to Homer Simpson, would not seem appropriate for, say, The Witcher 4, which featured at the last Unreal Fest. Is the "tidal wave" of growing development costs really going to wash away the old-fashioned 'make a big RPG and sell it' model, turning even those games into hangout spaces optimized for brand partnerships and cosmetics sales?

Epic doesn't seem to think so—it, after all, funded Alan Wake 2 and the new Fumito Ueda game—but based on today's address, it's not where it foresees its next billions coming from.

The once budget handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, recently received an astronomical price hike, with Valve citing "global logistical challenges" (otherwise known as the global memory crisis) for this decision. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney soon weighed in on the matter, drawing attention to Gabe Newell's $500 million superyacht in the process.

Commenting on X, Tim Sweeney says, "Everyone’s being too harsh here. There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts."

For the unaware, the Leviathan is a 111-meter superyacht built for Gabe Newell with an on-board hospital, submarine garage, and 15 gaming PCs. It's the 50th-largest yacht in the world right now. It also comes with two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, and diving platforms. It's luxurious is the point I am trying to make.

It does sort of seem like Sweeney is just taking swings for the sake of taking swings here, because, although Gabe Newell does own a superyacht (that was likely super expensive), it's hard to believe the Steam Deck price hikes will exactly cover that cost.

The price of memory is sharply surging upwards, and Valve is just one of many companies that have raised prices to accommodate it. Without knowing the specific price of the hardware, it's hard to say if Valve is making a bigger profit or not from the rise than it was pre-memory crisis.

The comments on Sweeney's post are not very happy with it. The top one, as of the time of writing, says, "Hey Tim when was the last time Valve laid off their employees? Oh yeah never?"

It seems like the last public round of layoffs made at Valve was back in 2019, where 13 were let go. And tens of staff were let go six years prior, in 2013. Epic Games, on the other hand, let go of 1,000 employees just two months ago, with one employee saying, "We only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well."

Despite prices of Steam Deck models rising by almost 50%, it still somehow sold out in North America less than 24 hours after the hike. If the Steam Deck can be successful way above its original price, it does make me a little worried that I'll need a superyacht to afford a Steam Machine for my living room, even if it may not be Valve's fault.

Responding to recent statements by Epic Game Store VP and general manager Steve Allison in a Game File interview, indie publisher Santa Ragione has again publicly criticized EGS' handling of Horses, a controversial art game that was delisted from both the Epic and Steam storefronts⁠—Santa Ragione has argued in both cases that the storefronts employ uneven standards with adult games, and that they failed to clearly communicate the reasoning behind Horses' removal.

Speaking to Game File, Allison said that "[Santa Ragione] went through the self-publishing process and [Horses] went through," referring to how the studio filled out an International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) form to determine it had an M-rating⁠—and thus, was fit for EGS⁠—leading to its initial listing on the platform.

Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal. They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us

— @santaragione.com (@santaragione.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-09T16:33:02.957Z

“My understanding is the trust and safety team thought [Horses] was worth taking a fresh look, and they determined that it indeed was against our policies on a couple fronts," said Allison. Epic performed its own IARC assessment of Horses and judged it to be Adult's Only (AO), the ESRB's X-rated kiss of death, leading to the game's removal from the Epic Store a day before launch.

"And so, the call came late—and we love that studio; we did their previous game as a short exclusive—but because that [trust and safety] team, that’s their job and that is, if you do the letter of the law on our policies, it is what it is.”

As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, Epic told Santa Ragione that it does not carry AO games as a matter of policy, with an exception "for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology."

Allison told Game File that the second look at Horses was prompted by news and discussion about the game close to release. While Horses had been delisted from Steam for two years, Summer 2025 saw a series of high profile instances where conservative activist groups (via payment processors like Visa and Mastercard) pressured Steam and itch.io to remove adult content.

This, in turn, brought renewed attention to Horses' delisting from Steam, particularly in the face of much more high-profile games on the platform with realistic, uncensored full-frontal nudity like Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, equally disturbing subject matter like Fear and Hunger, or both, like the Outlast series.

Horses portrays a surreal "farm" in rural Italy where hypnotized, nude human beings in horse masks are treated as livestock and dominated by a sadistic overseer. Horses has been compared to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous voyage into the fascist id⁠.

The second half of the game, in particular, portrays or implies brutal acts of sexual violence, but always visually censored⁠—the "horses," as well as the horrible things that happen to them, are all obscured with a pixellation effect.

Santa Ragione took to Bluesky to dispute Allison's framing of these events. "Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal," the studio wrote. "They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us."

Santa Ragione also points to the existence of unredacted longplays of Horses on YouTube and Twitch as evidence the AO rating was misapplied by Epic⁠—both platforms have made news in the past for aggressive moderation of speech and explicit content. Horses also remains available for purchase on both GOG and the Humble Store.

"Horses is interesting for other reasons too, and I hope that the unfortunate situation of its release won't stop us from considering what the game is actually doing, whether it works, and where it fits in with the conversation of the wider texts it draws inspiration from," PC Gamer contributor Maddi Chilton concluded in a review of the game last December.

"Despite its shortfalls, Horses is a genuine attempt to approach, through videogames, the spaces that film and literature take for granted, and we shouldn't overlook that just because Steam was squeamish."

I like puzzle games but I'm not especially good at them, so it's very important to me that any puzzle game I play finds the sweet spot between looking difficult, but not actually being difficult. I love The Talos Principle games, for instance, but I noped out of the third part of the Road to Elysium DLC because it's such a brutal 'eat this, smart guy' from Croteam and my brain just isn't built for that kind of thinking.

I bring this up because Botany Manor sounds very much like my kind of puzzle game—lots going on, but not too intellectually taxing—and it's free right now on the Epic Games Store.

Botany Manor is a cozy first-person puzzle game that casts players as botanist Arabella Greene, who despite her apparent retirement is exploring a Victorian manor in the late 19th century in order to complete her botanical research book. It's got a little bit of a Witness vibe, maybe some Blue Prince, but unlike those games (neither of which I came close to finishing) the goal in this one isn't to make you feel bad for not being smart.

"We have put a lot of thought into this game because it has a very nice peaceful setting," lead developer Laure De May told us in 2024, just ahead of Botany Manor's launch. "We didn't want the puzzles to be too challenging, but obviously also not too simple. I guess the challenge in this game comes from, how many clues there are to find, how many steps there are, how many things to keep in mind, and also how far things are spread out."

That sounds more like my kind of puzzle-game scene, and the reviews on Steam (which we rely on because Epic doesn't do user reviews) bear that out. Even some of the negative reviews are, well, positive: One says it's a "great game for cozy/casual gamers" but warns that if you're looking for something more akin to The Witness, Blue Prince, or Myst—all of which, as I mentioned, Botany Manor kind of superficially resembles—"this is not for you." So, yeah, it's for me!

(I should note for the record that I did finish Myst, and I did it without a guide, because guides hadn't been invented back then. (Okay, fine, they had been invented, but you had to put a lot more effort into getting your hands on them, and in some cases pay like $2 per minute to call a 1-900 hint line, and no I am not making that up.) So I am capable, I just don't have that kind of energy anymore.)

This is the first time Botany Manor has gone free on the Epic Store, so that makes it notable too: There's definitely no chance you've already picked this one up in a previous giveaway. And yes, the Epic launcher sucks, I know, they know, everybody knows, but this year for real it's going to get better. And if it doesn't, hey, there's always Heroic.

Botany Manor, along with the Poison Retro Set for Pixel Gun 3D, is free on the Epic Games Store until February 12.

If you're anything like me, your Epic Games Store account is a kind of Library of Alexandria of free-but-unplayed games. Every so often you open the site, add whatever the current free game is to your collection, then never, ever, ever play them. Perhaps some day a long winter will come, and we'll all sit down and chew through our collections like they're so many acorns in our cheeks.

For now, though: the Epic launcher is bad. It's just not a good launcher—it's slow, bloated, and continually forgets who you are. That's not just me saying that, it's Epic. Last year, Epic head honcho Tim Sweeney straight-up said the launcher was "clunky," and now EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison has told Eurogamer that "the launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow."

Allison says there are "a lot of things we need to fix. We have needed to fix them for years. We've been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff."

Which is pretty similar to what he told PCG when we sat down with him for a chat about the storefront's future (sans the "sucks"). Up to now, the EGS has been making "calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around," explained Allison, which is why you might experience lag on slower connections. Apparently, that's all set to change.

In essence, Allison says Epic's devs are hard at work stripping out the EGS' innards and putting in new, faster innards. "We're basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in… It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, 'Holy shit. It doesn't suck so much.' And that will be a win for us." The EGS team is also working on adding community spaces to the storefront. To be frank, the absence of anything resembling the notoriously toxic Steam forums has been one of the things in EGS' favour so far as I'm concerned, but I guess others disagree. Anyway, small, achievable goals.

Which, okay, sure. It's nice when corporations acknowledge reality—it's harder for them than it perhaps should be—but let's bear in mind that Sweeney was copping to the EGS' clunkiness almost a full year ago and the store itself has been available since 2018. At no point in that long tenure has it been good. Rather than shuffling out once a year to have the bosses shamefacedly take their lumps for how bad it is, it'd be preferable for it to just stop being bad.

Hey, that's what Allison promises, and that sounds great, but I also won't be paralysed with shock if you and I meet here again next year when some other exec performs the shame ritual.

The Epic Games Store development team is now squarely focused on "the things that players need," says store GM Steve Allison.

After launching the store in 2018, Epic prioritized building features aimed at game publishers, because "there's no store without content," Allison said on a call with PC Gamer this week. Attention was then turned to building the mobile versions of the store, but the time has now come for a major effort to improve the user experience.

That includes a technical overhaul coming mid-year—"We're ripping out the guts of the Epic Games Launcher on PC," Allison said—as well as new social features. There are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

Epic remains more cautious than Steam about social features

The addition of forums represents a shift in approach. Back in 2019, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that the Epic Games Store would not have its own message boards, and encouraged developers to link to external forums.

At the time, Epic also opted not to emulate Steam features like user reviews, presenting its launcher as a light-touch intermediary between developers and players more than a destination in itself. Epic's account system is a good example of that philosophy: Unlike the Steamworks API, which only lets games interface with Steam's social features, Epic's Online Services can connect players across platforms and stores.

That interest in interoperability hasn't been abandoned, but Epic is now open to building a more active community within its launcher, with limits that keep its approach distinct from Valve's.

In the case of user reviews, Epic introduced a system in 2022 that asks random users who've played a game for more than two hours to assign it a star rating. Allison says the system has been "fairly bulletproof" as a way to include player ratings without allowing review bombing.

"The brigading that happens on the Steam platform against games, when they do things like cap a frame rate at 30 frames or whatever, that can turn a game's commercial outcomes upside down, that's something we want to not be able to facilitate," he said.

Steam has introduced features to mitigate review bombing, such as identifying surges in "off-topic" reviews, though the ability to collectively express anger via a mass thumbs-downing is no doubt something some Steam users would say they like about the platform. The moderation of Steam's forums and user groups is also notoriously lax.

Epic may never cater to users who want a free-for-all, but Allison says they know that more social features are desired, and they're going to build them.

"Right now, the first thing we're going to explore is adding a forum and using our trust and safety team to moderate the forums," said Allison. "But we're open to all that stuff now. We still have issues with and believe that those things [such as review bombing] need to be mitigated, but it's on us to figure it out."

Speeding up the launcher

The other big announcement, a technical overhaul of the Epic Launcher, has been in the works since October, and is expected to roll out this summer.

"The goal there is to eliminate the experience that players have where [the Epic Games Store] feels a little slow," said Allison, "Like you go to your library and it takes two seconds to load in, the system resourcing for when it's in tray, the time to load."

Allison said that the improvement is "pretty profound."

In its year in review dispatch, Epic also shared some of the store's statistical achievements from 2025, most notably record spending on third-party games.

Although Epic's user experience doesn't currently match Steam's, it has attracted game developers by offering them a better deal—a lower revenue cut which as of last June doesn't kick in until after a game reaches $1 million in annual sales—and has had success attracting users with its free games program, which Allison plans to continue for the foreseeable future.

It took until February but the Epic Games Store has published its year in review for 2025, and it seems like it was a pretty good one all in all: Spending on third-party games—those not developed or published by Epic—went up by 57%, as did the amount of time people spent in them, and the store achieved 78 million monthly active users on PC, a new record.

Other interesting tidbits: The Epic Games Store now offers more than 6,000 games for purchase, and players sunk 6.65 billion gameplay hours into Epic Store games in 2025, which is actually down year-over-year, but hours spent in third party games went up by 4%. The amount of money players spent on the Epic Store also went up, by 6%, to $1.16 billion.

It's all rather dry, especially when compared to Steam's annual 'Replay,' a rundown of all the things you (yes, you) did over the course of the year, like spending half your total gameplay hours in Bongo Cat. (I regret nothing.) But the intended audiences seem very different: While Steam's retrospective is mainly a bit of fun—a way to compare your gaming proclivities to everyone else—Epic's annual review is more about reminding developers and publishers that it exists and (fractional audience aside) offers some pretty compelling advantages.

That's particularly visible in the repeated emphasis on the Epic store's significantly lower revenue cut: While Steam takes 30% of revenues to start and then reduces that percentage as certain sales milestones are hit (25% once sales surpass $10 million, and 20% after $50 million), Epic claims a comparatively paltry 12% across the board—and, as of June 2025, takes nothing on the first $1 million in sales.

Epic also made note of its new Web Shops, and the fact that developers can use their own payment systems in their games, on which Epic takes nothing—all very much in line with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's long-standing criticism of other digital storefronts.

Another upcoming developer-focused, uh, development I find interesting is a new program, set to kick off in the first half of 2026, that aims to "help developers sell more games on the Epic Games Store by leveraging the marketing power of Fortnite." Anyone who buys a participating game on the Epic Store will also get a Fortnite cosmetic item and a matching avatar for their account profile. Initial program partners include Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games. I don't play Fortnite myself, but an awful lot of people do, and in hindsight I kind of wonder why this didn't happen years ago.

Which isn't to say that there's nothing in this year in review for people who buy games rather than make them. For all the upbeat talk about how well the Epic Games Store is doing, there's just one small problem: The Epic Games Store launcher sucks. And that's not me saying so, that's Sweeney and Epic Store general manager Steve Allison copping to it. (Although I say so, too. Because it does.) Which is where we store users come more squarely into focus.

Epic trumpeted some of the improvements made to the store over 2025, noting for instance that more than 100,000 gifts were sent via the store after it rolled out gifting in November, and promised that more are on the way. The biggest on the list is a long-overdue rebuild of the launcher, which Epic said "will make the storefront on the launcher responsive and feel good to use, with fast load times and greater stability."

Let me be, not the first to say it, nor the last, but one of the many in the middle: It's about time. Epic's focus on developers appears to have paid off to some extent (it's still alive and kicking, and when you're throwing down with the all-powerful behemoth of Steam, that's not nothing) but the fact is that a lot of potential users make a point of avoiding the Epic store because the launcher is just downright unpleasant. "Clunky," as Sweeney put it in May 2025, is accurate but also probably a lot more polite than most of us would be about it.

And that sucks, because Epic is doing good things for developers, and Steam could certainly use some proper competition. Personally, I don't care much about user reviews or forums or social network features, but it is very important to me that when I fire up your launcher, I'm not given sufficient time to go make a sandwich while I wait for it to load. So, fingers crossed Epic is serious about finally getting that sorted.

Naturally, there's an infographic. There is always an infographic.

If I was to put this in pro wrestling terms, I would say the Triple Threat match has become a surprise Fatal Four-Way, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, I mean that Remedy Entertainment says Alan Wake 2 would not exist without Epic Publishing. Does that clear things up for you?

Okay, maybe not, so let's recap. The whole thing began when New Blood honcho Dave Oshry said the studio's stealth FPS Blood West saw a 200% increase in sales on Steam while it was available for free on the Epic Games Store over the holidays: "Turns out having your game be free on Epic is great advertising for Steam sales!" In response, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took the high road, saying sometimes Steam comes out on top, sometimes Epic does, "but one thing is constant on every transaction: gamers and developers win by having more options and better deals."

That sparked a reaction from Larian Studios publishing chief Michael Douse, who retweeted Sweeney to say that although Epic fully funded the development of Alan Wake 2, keeping the game off of Steam may have done more harm than good in the long run: "This altruistic pro-developer talk doesn't sit well when Remedy seemingly went into financial crisis because they couldn't tap Steam for AW2 sales suffering potentially hundreds of millions in lost revenue."

Which brings us to today's admittedly-kinda-torqued analogy: Like the Undertaker showing up at Wrestlemania 40, Remedy has now entered the ring.

"Hi. There would be no Alan Wake 2 without Epic Publishing," the studio wrote. "The publishing deal with Epic was very fair to Remedy. While these complex deals can often take even a year to reach their conclusion, and may not always be fair to the developer, this one was. And it only took months to get done. Epic Games was, and is, an excellent partner to us. Steam or no Steam."

XUnlike the world of rasslin', there are no faces or heels here. Douse is at least potentially correct to the extent that Alan Wake 2 may have sold much better than it did if it was on Steam. It took more than a year before the game started to turn a profit for Remedy.

But Remedy's satisfaction with the deal seems legit. It had no obligation to speak up in defense of Epic here (although it never hurts to be nice), but more to the point this isn't the first time it's done so. In 2023, Remedy communications director Thomas Puha threw some pretty serious praise to Epic on X, writing, "They let us make the game we wanted. Nothing but supportive. Epic's production team especially KILLED it on Alan Wake 2. They really care. Never have I read so much good feedback from milestones and have producers play so much of the game constantly."

In a follow-up post, Douse wrote, "Realistically I think if you want to be consistent in dev positive messaging you just take an easy PR W by amending the contract to allow them to drop the game on Steam now everyone has made their money and the drop-off in UA has made that angle negligible."

Remedy's hit shooter Control originally launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive in 2019 and came to Steam a year later, but that game was published by 505, prior to Remedy acquiring the property in 2024. Alan Wake 2 came out on Epic in October 2023 and is still not available on Steam.

The Epic Games Store's Holiday Sale is now underway—it actually started on December 11 but we were a little busy with other things you may have heard of—and that means, aside from deals, a whole bunch of new free games to pick up. First on the block is a very big one indeed: The hit Harry Potter sim Hogwarts Legacy, which is yours for keeps if you claim it before December 18.

Hogwarts Legacy is the proverbial problematic fave: As PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde laid out in 2023, there was quite a bit of controversy when the game first launched over whether or not it was okay to play it, thanks to the notoriously anti-trans politics of author JK Rowling. Rowling wasn't involved with the development of Hogwarts Legacy but she does profit from it, and some portion of her money goes to support anti-trans organizations.

But Harry Potter remains much beloved, and Hogwarts Legacy was and still is a hit: Nearly three years after it launched, there are currently more than 18,000 people playing the game on Steam alone. Unsurprisingly given that fact, the price remains pegged at the original $60.

That makes Epic's giveaway—the first time Hogwarts Legacy has gone on the freebie block—a very attractive offer for anyone who hasn't played it yet and still wants to.

Hogwarts Legacy is the first of Epic's annual Holiday Sale, which includes discounts, 20% back on purchases that you can use on other purchases, and finally, gifting. That's right, seven years after the Epic Games Store launched and 18 years after Steam figured it out, you can now buy games on Epic and give them as gifts to your friends.

As usual, the free game situation will accelerate dramatically once the Hogwarts giveaway is over. Epic says 17 games will be given away in total over the course of the sale—so, 16 more after this one—which isn't quite one every day, but it's close enough that you'll probably want to check in on the regular. "Epic Extras," including cosmetic packs, in-game currency, XP boost, and other stuff from a variety of different games will also be thrown out like candy at the Santa Claus Parade over the course of the sale.

So, to recap: Epic's Hogwarts Legacy giveaway is up until December 18, and the Epic Games Store Holiday Sale—with plenty of other free games on the way that don't support odious causes—runs until January 8, 2026.

A week after the indie horror game Horses was banned from Steam, and just one day before it was set to launch elsewhere, Epic Games has decided that it too will not allow the game to be sold on its storefront. Publisher Santa Ragione said in a blog update that Epic informed it of the decision at 5 pm CET/11 am ET on December 1, saying the game violates its policies on "inappropriate content" and "hateful or abusive content."

Epic didn't tell Santa Ragione how exactly Horses violated its guidelines, according to an email from the publisher sent to PC Gamer, but only made what it described as "broad and demonstrably incorrect claims" about it. Santa Ragione filed an appeal, but it was rejected 12 hours later with no further explanation. Epic also indicated the game could be updated to bring it into compliance, but "the email did not include any information on what would need to be changed," Santa Ragione said, and even if it had there'd be no way to make extensive changes one day ahead of release.

Epic was not more forthcoming on the matter in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We set clear guidelines for the content that can be distributed on the Epic Games Store and found violations of those guidelines during our extensive review," Epic Games communications director Jake Jones said.

Part of that review process, Epic told Santa Ragione, included filling out an International Age Rating Coalition questionnaire on Horses, which it says resulted in an Adult Only (AO) rating. This seems odd: Santa Ragione said it had already filled out the questionnaire as part of Epic's submission process, and did not receive an AO: "We received a PEGI 18 and an ESRB M rating, as currently displayed on the Horses coming soon page on the Epic Games Store." Both of those ratings can still be seen on the storefront.

Santa Ragione also questioned why Epic would redo the questionnaire at all, given that developers have to fill it out themselves in order to be allowed to sell their games in the first place. It further claimed that builds of Horses had already been submitted and reviewed by Epic, "with the final achievements-ready build being approved for release 18 days prior to launch."

As it did following the Steam ban, Santa Ragione argued that Horses "does NOT contain explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior."

"All nudity in the game is completely censored via pixelation," the publisher wrote. "There is never any visible sexual act involving genitalia and all animations are stylized and unrealistic. Additionally, in the three hours of gameplay contained in the game, there are only four brief and censored sexual sequences, with two of them happening mainly off camera. And finally, we explained that the content presented does not in any way promote abuse (including animal abuse). The game is a strong critique of violence and abuse in general."

Horses does have some nudity, though, as well as adult themes, and that can be vexing for an industry that's often more focused on selling product than making art, or even mere provocative statements—particularly when it's already facing pressure from major payment processors over adult-oriented content. Epic has always been more selective about what it allows on its storefront than Steam, which is home to numerous hardcore sex games, so it's not entirely surprising that Epic would bow out of Horses too.

But that it would wait until this last minute to make the move—literally the day before release—doesn't speak especially highly of its processes, and it makes me wonder if this isn't so much about the game as it is about the public's perception of it, largely the result of Steam's refusal to carry it.

Despite the Steam and Epic bans, Horses is still available on GOG, Itch.io, and the Humble Store: Humble had initially intended to distribute the game via Epic Store keys, but with the new ban in place it opted to go with a DRM-free direct download instead.

It's hard to believe I'm writing this in the year 2025 CE, but I've double-checked and it sure seems to be right so here we go: The Epic Games Store now supports preloading.

"Preloading is now available for PC pre-purchase products on the Epic Games Store!" developer Local Bald wrote in the Epic Games Store forums (via Reddit). "This new feature allows players to download titles they have pre-purchased up to five days (120 hours) prior to release via an encrypted build. Preloading ensures that players can jump into the game quickly on day one, which is especially beneficial for titles with large downloads."

Preloading is a practical feature but not very glamorous as these things go; what makes it notable here is that it's been available for years on Steam. Yet Epic, despite being hell-bent on breaking Steam's nigh-monopoly on the PC digital market, hasn't seen fit to add it until now.

And it's not as though Epic isn't aware that the absence of preloading, and other such mundane but useful features, is a problem. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and EGS general manager Steve Allison both acknowledged in May of this year that the Epic Store sucks—or, as Allison put it more politically, that "there's still a ton of work to be done to deliver a world-class experience."

He's not wrong, but as PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens noted at the time, the Epic Store went live in December 2018, which means it's almost seven years old now, yet it still lacks a lot of functionality that we take for granted on Steam. And that doesn't get into issues with the Epic launcher, which Sweeney said is "clunky," a characterization I would describe as a tremendous understatement.

Epic has built a user base for its store primarily through its extremely generous weekly game giveaways, which has cost the company untold truckloads of cash, but I can't help thinking that by now, the thrill has worn off and it's time to start pouring some of those resources into the store itself. It's a little weird to be thinking of preloading functionality as a significant improvement, but for the Epic Store it is—and hopefully we'll be seeing more such baseline functionality following soon.

If it exists, you best know Epic Games is probably going to get its hands on it and churn out a 1,200 V-bucks skin for the pleasure of feral Fortnite fans. Something it seemingly won't be snagging anytime soon, however, is a Helldivers 2 collaboration despite Fortnite's newest season leaning very heavily into that game's whole shtick.

That's according to Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani. As spotted by VideoGamer, someone in the Helldivers 2 Discord asked Jorjani if we could ever expect to see the studio's elite soldiers squashing bugs in the likes of Swarmy Stash or Canyon Crossing anytime soon. "Not a priority," he wrote in response. It doesn't seem like Jorjani is totally willing to close that door altogether, though. "But who knows one day. [Fortnite] is cool. And quite big."

A rather succinct response, but not wrong. Fortnite is certainly both cool and big. And as much as I tire of the endless collaborations and how it's led to the Fortification of just about every damn videogame these days, I can only assume they're often mutually beneficial arrangements for both Epic and whichever piece of media it's working with.

After all, the entire reason I even started dabbling in the battle royale is because of the Hatsune Miku skins that were introduced at the beginning of the year, and I've no doubt a few Helldivers would make the jump over just to rock their favourite skins in a different game. This stuff works, so I can't blame Jorjani for not wanting to put a hard "no" on that kind of question.

The little sicko part of my brain hopes if it does ever happen, though, it's a full-blown crossover. Let Jonesy and Peely be Helldivers. Let them squash bugs. Let them do it for democracy. It's unlikely, unfortunately—creative director Johan Pilestedt has previously said he doesn't want to "dilute" the game with a bunch of nonsense crossovers that don't make much sense in the Helldivers 2 universe. Listen, I understand, but I'm still disappointed.

Monument Valley is a wonderful puzzle game: I know it, Josh knows it, and now you can know it too and without spending a dime, because Epic Games has made it free for the week to kick off its 2025 End of Summer Sale.

Originally released for iOS and Android mobile devices in 2014, Monument Valley is a visually striking and deceptively simple tale of a princess on a quest for forgiveness that carries her through structures and landscapes of impossible geometry. It was a big hit back then and deservedly so, because it's really good, yet it took almost a decade for the game to eventually make its way to PC.

The upside to that long wait is that when Monument Valley did finally turn up on our shores, it was enhanced with support for widescreen and ultrawide displays, making the game world more visible than was previously possible on mobiles. That's a big plus for a game that looks this good.

This is the first time Monument Valley has gone free on the Epic Store, and you'd be well advised not to miss it. Just head to the store page, click the "get" button, and thank me later. You've got until September 11 to pick it up, after which it will be replaced by a big trio of games: The sequel, Monument Valley 2, plus Ghostrunner 2 and The Battle of Polytopia. Epic's End of Summer Sale runs until September 18.

The Steam Summer Sale is over, but that doesn't mean that opportunities to snag cheap games you'll probably never play are over—or free ones, for that matter. The Epic Games Store's 2025 Summer Sale kicked off today with a nice array of deals, a big boost to Epic Rewards, and a very nice freebie to get things started: Civilization 6 Platinum Edition, which includes the base game, the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm expansions, and six DLC packs.

That's a hell of a deal, to put it bluntly: The Civilization 6 Platinum Edition normally goes for $80 and you can have it for $0 until July 24. This isn't the first time Civ 6 has gone free on Epic, but the last time it happened—in 2020—it was only the base game. So even if you already own it, the Platinum Edition is a not-to-be-missed giveaway. (And yes, you'll still be able to add it to your library even if you already own the base game.)

There are some non-free good deals to be had in Epic's Summer Sale too. As usual, Epic doesn't offer the raw deep discounts that Steam does in its bargain bonanzas, but there are definitely deals to be had: It Takes Two for $12, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for $14, Alan Wake Remastered for $4.49, Far Cry 5 for $9, Dragon Age: The Veilguard for $30, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak for $5, and Titanfall 2 Ultimate Edition for $4.49.

A little tip if you're digging for the real cheap stuff: Epic's browsing tools aren't nearly as robust as those of Steam, but if you select "Summer Sale" from the Events dropdown on the browsing page, you can then select the price range you're looking for and it will filter based only on games in the sale, which will exclude a lot of the chaff on Epic that normally comes in under a fiver anyway.

In case I explained it poorly, it looks like this:

(This is where I like to shop.)

Epic makes up for its relatively modest discounts with its rewards program, which has been boosted for the Summer Sale. 20% of your purchases on the store—games, add-ons, and virtual currency—will be automatically returned to you in the form of "rewards" (hence the name, Epic Rewards) that can be used for other purchases. So, buy The Veilguard for $30, get $6 back, and you can have Titanfall 2 for free—or whatever turns your crank. It's a bit more mathematically complicated than just hacking down prices, but it can sometimes work out to be a better deal than other storefronts in the long run.

The Epic Games Store's 2025 Summer Sale runs until August 1, but be aware that the Civilization 6 Platinum Edition giveaway is only on until July 24. Get it while you can. The next Steam Sale dates for storewide discounts are a ways away: the autumn sale won't start until late September.

I am an invisible sprinting rifleman with unlimited stamina and ammo. If I switch to my SMG it will teleport me, blink-style, whenever I double jump. And if an enemy somehow shoots me they're pinged in red, visible through walls, as my shields automatically regenerate to patch the damage.

I am a Fortnite god.

I still find a way to lose, of course.

As it often does, the pressure of reaching the final two players makes me grip my mouse tighter. I whiff every shot as we carousel around a bandstand in Pleasant Park, and our awkward dance only ends when my opponent blasts me cleanly with their Exotic shotgun.

Thankfully, in Fortnite’s newest mode, Blitz Royale, redemption is never far away. Five minutes later, armed with different superpowers and down to the final three, I ambush a dueling pair with my own Exotic shotgun, which boosts my speed as I land damage, and get my win.

Bitesize battle

As I write this, more people are playing Blitz Royale than anything else in Fortnite. Its five-minute rounds are dopamine machines designed with phones in mind but, judging by the community reaction, it's hooked players on every platform. And while it is technically temporary, confirmed to last until at least mid-August, I'd be shocked if Epic discarded it. Its popularity demands permanency.

What I fear is that it will draw people away from the main battle royale modes, draining them of the player bases they need and fragmenting an already siloed community into even smaller packs.

But what I hope is that Blitz Royale's instant gratification draws new players, or encourages old ones to return, and ushers them towards other game modes.

Blitz Royale drops 32 players into a small map. Everyone has the same randomly selected medallion from a pool of 12, each with a powerful ability: one gives unlimited stamina and turns you invisible when you sprint, another improves damage on ranged weapons. Everyone also starts with an identical powerful weapon, currently an Avatar: The Last Airbender elemental attack.

Chests are everywhere, 'boons' that grant new abilities are plentiful, and you can swipe extra medallions from supply drops. The effects stack and if you can survive three minutes you'll feel supercharged. You don't choose which boons or medallions you find, but most synergise: a boon that boosts your speed if you mantle cover, for example, pairs perfectly with one that reloads your weapons during parkour.

Aggression is mandatory, both because you cannot hope to hide on a map this small and because killing levels you up, handing you top-tier weapons including Mythics and Exotics. If you're not firing at an enemy then you're falling behind the loot curve, and you'll suffer in the late game.

Knowing you can't stand still focuses your mind. It feels exhilarating to swing from one fight to the next: as one enemy falls, you're already sprinting to another you saw in your peripheral vision on a nearby hill, with a plan to kill them and grab a nearby supply drop after. It is relentless and demanding, and if rounds were longer it'd be exhausting.

It is also an ideal combat training ground. Rounds are so short, and the next begins so seamlessly, that deaths barely matter, so I push beyond my comfort zone and take fights I usually wouldn't. I can already feel my aim improving, my nerve steadying in 1v1s.

It cuts out what you might harshly call the boring bits of Battle Royale, the mid-game lull when you're hunting for fights to improve your loadout, or looting quiet locations. And it shortens the wait between the most exciting moments: a handful of players armed with the powerful gear and confidence they've accumulated across the match, smushed into a violent, final mosh pit. In regular Battle Royale you can feel that rush every 25 minutes. Here it's virtually instant, and it's hard to resist the pull of just one more round.

But as much as I'm enjoying it, it will never be my favourite mode. Tension matters: 100-player is a slow drumroll building to chaos, and the rewards feel bigger because of it. Trimming the 'boring' bits erodes the lulls that make those high points feel so good. And when you can win several games in a single sitting, as you can in Blitz Royale, each victory crown feels less special.

That’s not me claiming regular Battle Royale is better than Blitz Royale—it is purely personal preference. But I know I’m not alone in preferring a slower burn.

If Blitz Royale lingers long-term, and I hope it does, it will never struggle for players. It guarantees action and adrenaline, and I will keep diving in when I want a quick fix, or if I can't spare the time for a 100-player match.

But I’m hoping that for at least some of the 180,000 diving in each day, Blitz Royale is their introduction, or re-introduction, to Fortnite, and that they'll branch out to other modes.

There's no building in Blitz Royale, so Zero Build is a natural stepping stone and, I'd argue, a more rewarding one. There are fewer absurd powers, fewer kills, fewer medallions, and fewer opportunities to feel like a god. But being a mere mortal in Fortnite can be just as fun.

Apple has unveiled its newest attempt to make more money from App sales while skirting EU law with tiered developer options. Spotted by The Verge, this new strategy was announced on Thursday, and changes the Store Services fee to this new system that will limit the features available to developers for their app depending on how much money they have decided to give Apple.

At the lowest tier developers will pay a five percent commission on all in-app purchases. This fee will give them access to basic app features including reviews, privacy information, and some access to Apple Support. That's a pretty bare-bones option, so if developers want access to anything else inducing automatic updates and downloads, they'll have to go for a higher tier on the Store Services chart.

Tier 2 is currently the only other option, which costs more than double tier one at 13 percent commission. This is likely the option most developers will need, and will be selected by default. For anyone that can manage with the more basic package, they can downgrade to the lower option. Here's hoping the EU fights to bring about a better solution like it has before.

Alongside these changes, Apple is rolling out a new fee. The Core Technology Commission is being introduced which will allow Apple to take a 5 percent bonus on any outside purchase made within App store apps. Given most of these changes are in response to the $570 million USD penalty Apple recently faced for its "anti-steering" practices responsible for placing restrictions on developers ability to direct consumers to alternate payment methods.

Whether or not these changes will appease the EU is hard to tell. They mostly look like renaming things to skirt rules rather than actually addressing issues raised. Epic boss Tim Sweeney—who's no stranger to legal dealings with Apple—certainly doesn't think it will do any good, stating that the new plans are "blatantly unlawful in both Europe and the United States".

Now we wait for the EU Commission to review Apple's proposed changes before making a decision. It could be that the megacorp is set to see more compliance fines on top of the interest on that whopping $570 million worth of fines it's still yet to pay.

With the ROG Xbox Ally X and Xbox Meta Quest 3S on the horizon, Microsoft is going some way to upgrade its software on non-Xbox-made hardware. Perhaps the biggest and most useful push so far is the upcoming ability to play non-Xbox games straight from the Xbox app. Unlike the former hardware collaborations, this, I might actually use.

Announced via Xbox Wire, Xbox Insiders will be able to boot up games from "Xbox, Game Pass, Battle.net and other leading PC storefronts" all directly from the Xbox app. Xbox Insiders get the ability to do so starting this week, though I haven't yet got access.

This could be a software change to set the groundwork for the ROG Xbox Ally X, a Windows handheld gaming PC with some Xbox-branded flourishes. As well as having the Xbox buttons, it comes with software from Microsoft intended to make it all feel a bit more like a console. The Xbox Ally X is set to launch later this year.

This new Xbox App change is rather intuitive in concept, though we will have to get hands-on to see for ourselves. Effectively, you should just be able to install a game and find it in your library.

Steam and the Epic Games Store aren't cited by name in Xbox's announcement, but it would be rather misleading to announce support for 'other leading PC storefronts' without including arguably the two most important.

Unfortunately, though, the Xbox App won't let you install games from other storefronts; it effectively just cuts out the middleman that opening up launchers can be. Given that the Epic Games Store is very tough to navigate, awkward to update, and a pain to boot up, the idea of entirely working around it appeals to me.

This could be especially useful for handheld gaming PCs—devices that are ostensibly designed to be a tad more console-like than a full-blown desktop setup.

The Xbox app won't replace the likes of Heroic, which can install and update straight from your Epic Games library, but it can replace day-to-day Epic use, should you regularly play the likes of Fortnite or Genshin Impact.

If you're looking to test out the new library function for yourself, you will have to join the Xbox Insider program, sign up for the PC Gaming preview, and then wait until you get access. If you don't fancy signing up to be an Insider, normal Xbox app users will likely get this update later this year.

Three months after removing Dark and Darker from sale, Epic Games is going a step further to erase any trace of its existence on the Epic Games Store: An email being sent to owners says Epic will remove the PvPvE dungeon crawler Dark and Darker from their libraries on November 1. Refunds will be issued to anyone who purchased the "Legendary Status" upgrade, but refunds for the Redstone Shards premium currency will not be offered.

"We removed Dark and Darker from sale on the Epic Games Store on March 5 in consideration of a court decision in Korea between Nexon and the game's publisher, Ironmace," the message states. "On November 1, 2025, we will be removing Dark and Darker from your library, at which point it will no longer be playable via the Epic Games Store."

The "court decision" in the message refers to a February 2025 finding that Ironmace did not commit copyright infringement against Nexon, but did infringe on Nexon's trade secrets. Nexon had accused the studio of building Dark and Darker on assets and code "stolen" from a similar project, codenamed P3, which it cancelled in 2021. Ironmace is now on the hook for nearly $6 million.

Epic confirmed that the email, which is being shared on Reddit and social media, is legit, and provided a copy of the message to PC Gamer.

Removing a game from sale is one thing, but pulling it from libraries of existing owners is something else entirely, and an unusual step: More typically, games on digital storefronts that are removed from sale remain available to owners. Epic didn't go into detail about why it's taking this extra step, only saying that the removal was prompted by Korea's court decision.

For now, Dark and Darker remains available on Steam, free and with the same "Legendary Status" upgrade option that was previously also offered on the Epic Store. Some Steam players have expressed concerns that Dark and Darker will be removed from libraries on that storefront as well, which I suppose possible (especially if the Epic takedown was the result of some new, as-yet-unannounced court ruling) but seems unlikely, given that the game is still up for grabs. I've reached out to Epic and Ironmace for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

Epic's game giveaways aren't quite the whiz-bang thrillers they used to be—after six years of freebies, it's all become a bit routine—but every now and then it still manages to hit one out of the park. Today is one of those days, because today, and until June 12, you can pick up Arkane's excellent Deathloop for the low, low price of absolutely zero dollars.

It speaks to the strength of Arkane's lineup that even though Deathloop is far from the studio's strongest offering—it's no Prey, or Dishonored, or Arx Fatalis—it's still a hell of a good game: A clever, compact, and stylish take on the immersive sim genre that makes your worst botches, the sort of thing you might be tempted to reload over, part of the fun.

And it's genuinely impressive how the game's disparate parts come together over the course of the game: Bumbling blindly through Blackreef's four regions in the early days of Deathloop slowly gives way to understanding, focus, and ultimately, a plan that's genuinely satisfying when it all (eventually) comes together.

Deathloop's invasion-style multiplayer is a lot of fun too (and now that I'm thinking about it, I'm feeling a genuine itch to reinstall the game specifically so I can jump in and become a headache for other people). It took me longer to warm up to Deathloop than other Arkane games, but by the time it was all over I was absolutely there.

All of which is to say, if you haven't played Deathloop yet you really should (unless you absolutely hate immsims or shooters in general for some reason), and now there's no excuse not to because it's completely free: Just pop around to the Epic Games Store, click the appropriate button, and enjoy. (This is also a notable giveaway because, according to our running tracker of free games on the Epic Games Store, this is the first time Deathloop has gone on the block.)

Deathloop is the reason for the season, but it's not the only freebie this week: You can also pick up Ogu and the Secret Forest, a 2D adventure-puzzle game in which you'll "befriend bouncy characters and defeat strange creatures to unravel the mystery of the charming world." Very different sort of vibe but it looks cool too, and holds a "very positive" rating on Steam, where it initially launched in July 2024.

Deathloop and Ogu are free on the Epic Games Store until June 12. After that comes another notable giveaway: Two Point Hospital, the not-entirely-serious (and exceptionally good) hospital building and management sim from Two Point Studios, which is also going up for giveaway on Epic for the first time ever.

In August 2020, Apple kicked Fortnite off of the iOS App Store for violating its terms after Epic Games bypassed Apple's 30% transaction fee by adding its own payment processor to the battle royale game. Almost five years later, Fortnite is finally available on the US App Store again.

The return isn't entirely triumphant for Epic, but at this point Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is ready for a truce.

After the 2020 stunt that saw Fortnite get the boot, Sweeney took Apple to court over its insistence that iOS app developers use only Apple's payment processor—and pay its fee—and emerged with a partial victory.

The court did not give Epic what it really wanted, which was to make Apple let iOS app developers include their own in-app payment options, but it did say that Apple couldn't stop them from directing users to external websites to make purchases.

Apple wasn't willing to cede even that much ground, though. It 'complied' with the order by implementing a new fee that applies to out-of-app purchases and finding new ways to warn users against using third-party payment options.

Epic protested, and in April of this year Apple was seriously reprimanded by the court, which said that the iPhone maker's compliance "strains credulity" and insisted that it immediately stop interfering with out-of-app purchases.

That was good enough for Sweeney, who called for peace. "If Apple extends the court's friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we'll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic," said the CEO.

Despite insistence from the court that it "will not tolerate further delays," Apple still withheld approval of Epic's Fortnite resubmission, leading to more protestation from Epic until today, when Sweeney finally announced that the game has returned to iOS devices, tweeting "we back fam."

Apple and Epic have told the court that they've resolved their differences (for now at least), and Fortnite is once again available in the US App Store. It is also available in Europe on the mobile version of the Epic Games Store, which Epic can operate on iOS in Europe and not the US due to EU regulations. (It's also on another third-party iOS app store called AltStore.)

As Epic prepared for its return to the App Store after the court's ruling, it offered players a 20% bonus for making purchases through its payment system rather than Apple's.

We have no idea when Grand Theft Auto 6 will arrive on PC, but that doesn't mean we have to lead GTA-less lives until then. The Epic Store's 2025 Mega Sale has a discount on GTA 5 Enhanced—and several other games—to keep you busy.

Even though GTA 5 won't be required reading for GTA 6, it's a good excuse to play it if you haven't, or to jump back in with the Enhanced version's upgrades. Robert Zak called the updated game's ray tracing as important to Los Santos as it is to Cyberpunk 2077's Night City.

Epic has GTA 5 Enhanced for cheaper than usual and you'll get 20% of the cost back as a coupon if you buy it through Epic's payment system. And who knows, you might need that 20% to offset whatever Rockstar decides to charge you for GTA 6 when it finally comes to PC.

Epic's sale runs from May 15 to June 12, but the 20% back deal lasts until August 31. It isn't a one-time thing either—any time you buy a game the coupon will be added to your account. That means you can chain the deal on multiple purchases, which helps make up for the prices not going quite as low as Steam's.

Alan Wake 2, Stalker 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria are some of the highlights from the sale, and there will be free games and other in-game goodies given away during it too.

Steam also has a sale going on right now that is centered around Pokémon-like games, like Palworld. There isn't a whole lot of overlap, but it might be worth double checking you're getting the best deal you can on each platform.

'The Epic Games Store launcher sucks less than it used to' is not very high praise but it's about as far as I'm willing to go. It has improved, undeniably, but it's still painfully slow, awkward, and just not pleasant to use—not to the point that I refuse to use it, but if I have a choice between Steam and Epic, all else being equal I'm going with Steam. My PR pals at Epic may not be super-happy to hear me say that out loud, but I'm not the only one who feels that way: Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney thinks so too.

"One of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games launcher as clunky is because the Epic Games launcher is clunky," Sweeney said during a recent interview with Lex Fridman. "We need to improve this."

"We've not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We've recognized this very clearly multiple times and we've gone through multiple refactorings. But you know, that's definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users."

It has indeed been disappointing: In our 2024 comparison of the many launchers available for PC, Epic scored a miserable 41%—better than the Microsoft Store, EA, and Battlenet, to be fair, but still a far cry from Steam, GOG Galaxy, and even Itch.io.

One of the challenges facing Epic, according to Sweeney, is that its launcher's problems aren't "uniform," but can vary dramatically depending on the user's distance to a CDN (content delivery network) and the size of their collection. Speaking from experience, that rings true: I have no idea where my neighborhood CDN is but I do have pretty crappy internet, and loading up any kind of sizable Epic library is an exercise in frustration—especially when compared to Steam, which flows like water by comparison.

Comparisons with Steam also came up in the interview, naturally: Sweeney reiterated his long-held position that the Epic launcher shouldn't adopt all the features offered by Steam, but said he does want "all of the convenience features that makes it as easy and fun to use as Steam."

He also predicted—boldly, I would say—that in the long run, "the benefits of the Epic Games approach are going to outweigh the benefits of this Steam approach, especially as gaming becomes multi-platform."

"Your game vastly benefits by connecting all of its players together and not segregating them off into different online platform populations and so on," Sweeney said. "I think the future trend is in that direction. I wish Valve had opened up Steamworks to just work on all platforms. They could have easily done it, we did it, but they seem to be using it as a lever to keep people locked into the Steam PC game store."

Sweeney also took a moment to call out "a very toxic group of Steam users" who engage in "harassment campaigns" against developers who use Epic Online Services. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, for instance, suffered a spate of early negative reviews on Steam because it automatically installed Epic Online Services along with the rest of the game in order to enable crossplay and synchronized friends lists.

"Developers do that so they can connect their players across platforms and have friends across platforms and voices across platforms," Sweeney said. "But, you know, suddenly that's trying to be turned into a negative."

Whether Sweeney's prediction that Epic will ultimately outlast Steam (or, I suppose, that he'll one day convince Gabe and company to open their walled garden) remains to be seen. For now, though, I think we can all agree that he's right that we're right about the Epic launcher: It is definitely clunky. Fortunately, if you're one of the Epic users struggling with it, there are options: GOG Galaxy will do the job, and for something more purpose-built, Heroic "is miles better at being the Epic Games Launcher than the Epic Games Launcher," according to PC Gamer dot com.

Following its major courtroom victory over Apple earlier this week, Epic Games has announced upcoming changes to the Epic Games Store aimed at enticing more developers to use it, and putting a little bit of a thumb in Apple's eye in the process.

The first change is a reduction in the amount of money Epic takes from developers on its storefront. Epic currently takes 12% of revenues from sales on the storefront, significantly lower than most others: Steam, for instance, takes 30% on the first $10 million of revenues earned, 25% once the $10 million mark is surpassed, and 20% on anything beyond $50 million. Under the new scheme, Epic will take nothing on the first $1 million in revenues earned per app per year, after which its usual 12% cut will kick in.

This is a pretty big deal for smaller, indie developers. Valve took some heat when it adjusted its revenue share formula in 2018 because it clearly favored big publishers and major successes; Epic's shift comes at it from the other end, offering a boon to makers of games that aren't runaway hits.

Along with the adjusted revenue split, Epic is also adding a new feature that will enable developers to launch their own "webshops" on the Epic Games Store. And why would they want to do that?

"These webshops can offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google, and others charge exorbitant fees," Epic said. "With new legal rulings in place, developers will be able to send players from games to make digital purchases from webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the European Union and United States."

The issue of in-app purchases were at the center of the legal fight Epic picked with Apple five years ago: Epic decided it wasn't going to pay Apple's 30% cut on Fortnite purchases and added its own payment processing option to the Fortnite app, and Apple reacted entirely predictably.

Epic lost that battle, but five years and some unexpected twists later, it's finally won itself a compromise: Apple has been told unequivocally that it can't stop iOS app developers from linking to out-of-app web payment forms, and can't charge commission fees on those out-of-app purchases. Now Epic is opening the door to all developers to sell their stuff without paying Apple's big fees.

To sweeten the pot further, any purchases made through Epic's webshops will earn 5% in Epic Rewards, which can be put toward other purchases on the Epic Store. It's not a huge amount, but if you're buying a bunch of stuff anyway and the choice is to get 5% or get nothing, well, that seems like pretty easy math to me.

Epic's updated revenue share and webshops are both set to go live sometime in June.

Harmonix's Fuser was an excellent game that had a regrettably short tail. It released in late 2020, offering a flexible DJ experience that let you mash together layers from all kinds of different songs… or, y'know, just dropping Smash Mouth into everything instead.

Unfortunately, the game was delisted a mere two years later, leaving wannabe DJs/inappropriate Smash Mouth users with no outlet for their song smash shenanigans. Until now. Kinda, anyway.

In case you weren't aware, Epic actually snapped up Harmonix back in 2021. Since then the developer has lent its musical expertise to a sort of diet Guitar Hero in the form of Fortnite Festival. Music tracks get added pretty regularly, and they can even be used outside of Festival mode to create jams—where other players in close vicinity can contribute different tracks and instruments, and they'll all sync up together to create a new banger or some auditory horror.

Usually you need other players to come along for a full jam, but this week's 34.40 update has changed that: You can now solo jam by selecting different instruments and songs, and it's basically a semi-resurrected Fuser.

It's not quite as intricate, of course. You can't queue up songs or transition them smoothly like you could in Fuser, but it's close enough that I had way too much fun tinkering around with it for 10 minutes in a private lobby.

Sadly I don't actually own that many songs in Fortnite so I was fairly limited in what I could do, but I smashed together a couple of moments from Britney Spears' Work Work and Jennifer Lopez's Love Don't Cost A Thing and hey, it sounded pretty dang good.

It'll definitely be one of those things that's more fun if your music library is more plush with songs than mine is, but I can't help but wish Epic would let Harmonix turn this into a full Fuser Lite mode sometime in the future. You could deal out a rotating list of songs just like Fortnite Festival does and then let people dressed as Goku or Godzilla create some melodic abominations for a while.

As a certified rhythm game fiend—hell, Fortnite Festival is the whole reason I even installed the game originally—I'm all here for more ways Harmonix can twist and contort its old ideas and jam it into Fortnite's mould. Though if they could fix how outta whack Festival's whole calibration is first, I'd be even more grateful.

We described Botanicula in our 2012 review as "the result of Monkey Island and Terry Gilliam falling into a vegan's blender: A gorgeous-looking mix of point-and-clicking surrealism, whipped together out of nature, discovery and adorable humour." And yup, that about nails it: It's weird, funny, heartwarming, and—this is why we're talking about it right now—free for the week on the Epic Games Store.

Botanicula is an Amanita Design game, and if you're familiar with any of the studio's other work then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. It follows the bizarre adventures of five insectoid weirdos living in a tree that's come under attack by parasitic spiders. That might sound grim, and the spiders are definitely a little creepy, but it's really a lighthearted, upbeat experience overall.

It also bears more than a passing similarity to Amanita's 2018 slapstick adventure Chuchel: Solving puzzles is technically the name of the game, but the real fun is in the aftermath of getting it wrong. As we said in the Botanicula review, "Getting the right answer first time is rubbish: it means you miss out on seeing the failed attempts."

Anyway, Botanicula is a great game, one of Amanita's best (although truth be told, I could point to pretty much any Amanita game and say that), well worth its regular price, and now it's free, which means we really don't need to be talking about it at all—just go grab it.

And yes, for the record, this is the first time Botanicula has been free on the Epic Store—here's our running list of everything that is and has been free from Epic over the years, if you're curious about that sort of thing. This being our first crack at Botanicula makes it an even more notable addition to the freebie lineup.

Botanicula is free on the Epic Games Store until April 24. We'll have this conversation again on that day, because the next Epic freebie is Chuchel. Trust me, you don't want to miss that one either.

Epic's weekly game giveaways are now as familiar a part of the PC gaming landscape as eye-wateringly expensive graphics cards and Half-Life 3 conspiracy theories. But this week's offering is a little bit different.

For starters, there are three games to download and keep for free this week, rather than the traditional two. The first is Arcadegeddon, a cooperative rogue-like shooter developed by IllFonic and released in 2023. This is already available for free anyway, but you get $20 worth of the in-game currency 'Arccoins' with this download. The other is River City Girls, the well-liked side-scrolling beat 'em up originally launched in 2019.

The main event, though is Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a clicker take on Dungeons and Dragons where parties of DnD characters fight enemies and extract hoards of gold from their corpses, while you mainly unlock new characters and faff about with their formations. Jody ran a few quests with it back in 2017, noting that "Idle Champions is a game designed to play itself. It even carries on in your absence when you shut it down, welcoming you back with a pile of gold the heroes earned while you were away."

But Idle Champions appears to have grown quite a bit since then. Recently, it added the central party of Baldur's Gate 3, letting you click away the hours with Astarion, Shadowheart, Karlach etc.

Like Arcadegeddon, Idle Champions is a free-to-play game, so the Epic giveaway similarly gives you a bunch of extra stuff gratis. Considerably more extra stuff, in fact. Alongside the Lobita the Guardian Familiar pack, which adds a friendly canine companion to your party, the giveaway also furnishes you with a total of 9,760 Platinum, the game's premium in-game currency. Combined, these extras are apparently worth over $100, and that doesn't include the value of River City Girls or Arcadegeddon's $20 in Arccoins.

In short, it's a hefty chunk of free stuff. It may seem like an awful lot to give away, but Epic's free games programme has been apparently working wonders for getting users to spend money on the platform elsewhere. Epic's Tim Sweeney explained this himself in a call with press last year, stating "you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness."

On the subject of raising awareness, I'm going to finish by highlighting that next week's free games include Botanicula, Amanita Design's hilarious microorganism adventure game from 2012, and possibly my favourite point and click ever. If you want to keep track of all Epic's free game giveaways for 2025, make sure to regularly check into our Epic Store free games list.

Steam’s spring sale might be over, but with so many stores, you’re never short on opportunities to demolish both your bank balance and free time. Stepping up to bat yesterday was the Epic Games Store, beginning their latest two-week-long round of discounts. Sadly they’re no longer doing ridiculously discounted loss-leader ‘coupons’, but there’s still plenty of very good games going cheaper than seems reasonable.

Here’s a few picks to get your bargain-hunting off to a good start:

• Alan Wake 2: Deluxe Edition (-50%) - An absolute gem from Remedy, and still one of the Epic Store’s highest-profile exclusives. Now with two excellent rounds of DLC and recently tuned up with even better ray-tracing, for the high-end crowd.
• The Outlast Trials (-60%) - The co-op frightfest just got a fresh chunk of time-limited story content, making this a great time to drag your friends into ‘therapy’ with you.
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard (-50%) - A steep discount on what might well be the end of the troubled but much-loved series. For all its flaws, a fascinating game that survived development hell.
• It Takes Two (-70%) - While its genre-hopping successor Split Fiction is rolling in praise, this co-op gem is still well worth playing. Plus, the writing’s better in this one. Only one player needs to own it, thanks to the Friend Pass system.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (-80%) - Still one of the best RPGs around, holding up great thanks to a next-gen update and seeing a fresh round of modding interest thanks to CD Projekt’s extensive efforts to bring their tools to the community.
• Pacific Drive (-40%) - Automotive Stalker in the Pacific Northwest. An excellent and offbeat road-trip survival game, and due for a big update adding mid-run saves and new content next week.
• Saturnalia (-80%) - It wouldn’t be a sales roundup from me without at least one deep cut indie pick. Saturnalia is like a lurid, Giallo-style Alien Isolation, set in a randomly generated Italian mountain town.

And of course, Epic are keeping up their free game firehose for those with wallets already drained but free time to spare. For the next week, you can snag a pair of cartoon cat-themed games, Cat Quest and Neko Ghost, Jump! completely free.

The former is a good’un—part of a series now up to its third game, and a great way to introduce younger audiences to Diablo-like hack n’ slash ARPG mechanics. The latter is an unusual pick: a perspective-switching 3D platformer that’s been stalled in early access for years. Hopefully not a sign that Epic has run out of noteworthy giveaway deals for the year.

And if you’ve been picking up those freebies for a while, chances are you’re struggling to keep track of a game library that spans far beyond Steam’s comforting bounds. I personally cannot recommend Playnite highly enough. It’s a free, open-source app that tracks and collates all your games across however many stores you may have to wrangle, and lets you directly install and launch stuff from most of them. Basically what GOG Galaxy was meant to be, only modular, community-run and just better overall.

The Dark and Darker saga has taken yet another strange twist, as the game has once again been removed from sale—this time from the Epic Games Store. Making the situation even stranger, while the base game has been taken down, the Legendary Status upgrade, which adds a range of paid options and bonuses to free game accounts, is still available for purchase—and developer Ironmace doesn't seem entirely clear on what's going on.

"Epic Games has decided to delist Dark and Darker from the Epic Games Store," Ironmace wrote in the Dark and Darker Discord (via PCGamesN). "The decision appears to be based on claims made by opposing parties in an ongoing legal dispute. We are currently working to understand the exact reasoning behind this removal.

"It seems that the removal process is not yet fully complete, as Dark and Darker is no longer listed, but Dark and Darker: Legendary Status is still available for purchase. Please be aware of this potential confusion."

Ironmace didn't specify who the "opposing parties" might be, but there's one easy guess. The studio has been embroiled in a legal dispute with Nexon over Dark and Darker pretty much since the game first appeared: Simply put, Nexon alleges that Ironmace developed the game using "stolen" code and assets from a project it cancelled in 2021.

A South Korean court recently ruled that Ironmace did not commit copyright infringement with Dark and Darker, but that it did infringe upon Nexon's trade secrets, a distinction that's going to cost Ironmace nearly $6 million.

Despite the win, it's not necessarily the end of the beef. Nexon said the award was "meaningful, as it addresses illegal infringement actions that disrupt fair market competition," but added that it plans to "seek further legal judgment through a higher court." It's possible that the Epic Games Store takedown is related to that, in the same way the legal dispute forced Dark and Darker off of Steam in 2023—although for now, Dark and Darker remains available on Steam.

That, at least, is good news for Ironmace. With all due respect to Epic, the difference between being delisted from the EGS and Steam is like the difference between running over a speed bump and crashing full-speed into the side of a dill pickle factory: One might startle you a bit if you're not paying attention, the other will change your life and quite possibly ruin your clothes.

Which isn't to suggest that Ironmace is going to just let it slide: The studio said on Discord that it's "working on alternative solutions" in case Dark and Darker becomes unplayable on the Epic Store, and will announce more information on that front as soon as it can. In the meantime, I've reached out to Epic to ask why Dark and Darker was delisted in the first place, and will update if I receive a reply.

With 2024 now well behind us, the Epic Games Store has shared its annual look back at the year that was. On the whole, it sounds like a pretty good year for Epic, which saw the number of games on its store, and the number of people using it, both take big jumps.

The Epic Games Store rang up 295 million users in 2024, an increase over 2023 of 25 million, and the "Epic ecosystem" grew as well, to 898 million "total Epic cross-platform accounts," up by 94 million from the 2023 number. What really surprised me, though, is that 1,100 new games were released on Epic in 2024, taking the total number of games on the storefront to over 4,000. Frankly, I didn't realize there were 1,100 games on the Epic Store in total.

That's still a far cry from Steam, which saw nearly 19,000 new games arrive in 2024, but it's definitely movement in the right direction. Epic credited that growth of its game selection to continued adoption of its self-publishing tools, the Epic First Run exclusivity program and Now on Epic program for older games (which has been extended to January 31, 2026), growing daily and monthly active user numbers, and Epic's generous revenue share options.

Epic ran into unexpected financial issues in 2023, saying it was "spending way more money than we earn" and laying off 800 employees as a result. Nonetheless, the game giveaways continued apace in 2024, with more than 595 million free games claimed—up from just under 586 million freebies in 2023—averaging out to $2,229 in "total value per player." Epic also confirmed that "the program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile."

The Epic Games Store launcher is still a little rough around the edges: Epic said in its 2023 year in review that it had made performance improvements "reducing loading time to a third of the prior load time according to benchmarks from Q1 2023 for 95% of users," and it's definitely better than it used to be (for me, at least) but still a little sluggish, particularly when dealing with large libraries. Work on that will continue in 2025: The download manager expected in 2024 is set slated for the first quarter of 2025 (so, soon), enabling users to "control the timing of updates, schedule downloads, and reorder your queue, amongst other quality-of-life changes."

Other notable features on the way include gifting, preloading, an overhaul of search and browse functionality "with several under the hood improvements," and new social features including "all new voice chat, text chat, game independent parties, invite/join/play and looking-for-group features across all Epic Games Store supported platforms."

Epic also shared a rundown of its top PC games in 2024, and while specific numbers aren't included it's interesting to see how they break down across three separate categories. Farming Simulator 2022 raised my eyebrow, but 2023 and '24 editions weren't released, and the most recent version, Farming Simulator 2025, didn't come out until mid-November 2024.

Mythic

• Genshin Impact
• Rocket League®
• Honkai Star Rail
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Fortnite

Legendary

• Wuthering Waves
• EA Sports FC 24
• Destiny 2
• Fall Guys
• Alan Wake 2

Epic

• EA Sports FC 25
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Sims 4
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Dead by Daylight
• Satisfactory
• Warframe
• Farming Simulator 2022
• Dead Island 2

(Why isn't "Epic" the top tier in the list? I do not know, but it seems like a pretty big oversight to me.)

Not a bad year overall, then, and more free games in 2025 is definitely something to happy about. And yes, there is an infographic—get the crash course version of Epic's year in review below.

Dredge is great. We called it "a fantastic fishing game with a sinister mystery lurking in its depths" in our 89% review, and also named it Best Setting in our 2023 Game of the Year Awards. And now, for the first time ever, you can pick it up for free from the Epic Games Store.

Along with being great, Dredge is also a wee bit deceptive, at least at first glance. A cute little fishing boat, a lovely sunset, a quaint seaside village—the octopus is a little weird, yeah, but fish, right? They're weird by nature. But things take an odd turn in a real hurry, and I'm not talking about wind in the wire making tattletale sounds here: There's something decidedly not good happening in the depths.

"Dredge has the most immaculate vibes of any game I've played this year," PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor wrote about Dredge in 2023. "By day it's a relaxing and serene fishing game, but once the sun sets it turns into an unsettling realisation of how isolated your tiny boat is on those big dark waters. Dredge plays to that polarity wonderfully, crafting a delightfully spooky world that has my usual horror-averse self desperate to dig deeper into its mysteries."

And if "nyctophobia horrors" aren't your thing, Dredge also offers a "passive mode" that maintains the creepy atmosphere but tones down the outright awfulness. ("Awfulness" used here entirely in a complimentary fashion, to be clear.)

So Dredge is really good, and it's now really free—but only for the day. The Epic Games Store is in the midst of its not-quite-daily giveaways for the holidays (15 games over a three-week stretch) so you've only got until 11 am ET on December 25 to grab it.

Ever since the advent of digital distribution (which despite what some may think, does pre-date Steam), gamers have worried about ownership of their games. Time was that this sense of unease was mixed-up with an understandable nostalgia for physical media, that comforting sense of having the disc and always owning the game, but as the physical and retail side has become a smaller part of the picture, which is especially true on PC, our questions about the various digital storefronts and Steam's default status have become more pointed. And it feels like 2024 is the year when gamers en masse started to get serious about the erosion of their ownership of software they've paid good money for.

The arguments have been around forever, but they've been made concrete by the simple fact that, over the last decade in particular, we've seen more and more games simply disappear. And we're not talking about obscure hobbyist projects, but seriously big budget titles that companies have spent millions developing, and hundreds of devs have spent years of their careers on. 2024 even gave us the perfect poster boy: Concord, Sony's live service shooter that lasted all of 11 days before being taken out behind the sheds and unceremoniously shot in the head.

That seems incredible, doesn't it? Concord was a AAA shooter backed by PlayStation, one of the biggest and most-moneyed brands in gaming, and it didn't last two weeks. For the average punter, Concord may as well have never existed.

But Concord is just one high-profile example from dozens, and it feels like the combination of prominent games disappearing from storefronts and so many having online elements that will never work again has brought the issue to the fore of many more peoples' minds. Arguments about preservation for future generations may attract the wonks among us but, for the mainstream audience, it is now not uncommon to fork out $60 or whatever for a game that may well not be playable two years down the line, or at the very least compromised beyond the experience promised at launch. I don't envy folk trying to play Suicide Squad in a year's time (albeit in this case Rocksteady has committed to adding an offline mode).

The main way this growing concern found expression, or the most prominent at least, was the Stop Killing Games campaign. This was sparked by Ubisoft pulling the plug on The Crew in April this year, with the 10-year-old racing game now unplayable and no offline mode coming due to "server infrastructure and licensing constraints"—which upset fan and YouTuber Ross Scott enough to begin rallying support around the Stop Killing Games website.

The idea is to create a focal point for opposition to what Scott calls the industry's "assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media," and the site's purpose is to direct consumers towards other gathering points such as major online petitions and advise them on how to submit complaints to regulatory bodies like the DGCCRF, France's consumer protection agency. The legal argument is that videogames should be classed as "goods" rather than "services"—regardless of the terminology publishers use—and goods shouldn't be able to be rendered inoperable by the seller after consumers buy them.

OK: Some of the arguments seem a bit out-there. A proposed class-action lawsuit saying players of The Crew were "duped" by Ubisoft compared the situation to the publisher entering peoples' homes and stealing parts of a pinball machine. But other elements of it have the chance to enact real change by getting the regulators interested. Stop Killing Games is currently running a petition which, if it reaches a million signatures by July 2025, will oblige the EU to consider a ban on making multiplayer games unplayable (it currently has over 400,000 signatures).

This was also happening in a wider context of both publishers and regulators realising that, at the very least, there are some big questions to answer about digital ownership. Even if players might not like the answers. Steam added a new disclaimer about ownership which wasn't exactly new, but seemed forced by the rise in big publishers rendering games inoperable, and in some cases revoking their licenses. The message also followed shortly after a new Californian law that requires retailers to warn consumers that the digital games they buy can be taken away at any time—exactly what this message does.

Point with this example being that Valve appears to be looking at the California law and assuming that other states will follow suit, and dealing with it in the most simple way possible: Applying the new language to everyone, rather than responding on a state-by-state and region-by-region basis.

Never missing an opportunity to weigh in on such matters, GOG (formerly Good Old Games) took a moment to remind players that, hey, anything you buy from us is yours forever and cannot be taken away. But GOG does walk the walk, and this year committed to a new preservation program whereby it'll keep games like New Vegas running on contemporary systems in perpetuity, regardless of what publishers do.

Oh, and the final GOG hit. It'll now let you bequeath your library to someone: As long as you can prove you're actually dead.

GOG shows this is not just a matter of players versus the games industry. In fact, many industry grandees and studios think that actually the industry is doing a terrible job with this stuff, and giving players a raw deal in the process. Larian's director of publishing Michael Douse got all het up about Ubisoft's moves over the year, and flipped the tables on the publisher, saying that if players had to get used to not owning games, "developers must get used to not having jobs."

Not everything is quite so confrontational. Certain publishers are much more alive than others to the value of their back catalogues, and some like Capcom make their heritage a key part of their current strategy with rereleases and remakes. Across the industry there's more of a sense of the value of older games and, quite apart from the preservation angle, that will be what eventually inspires better practices from more publishers.

More and more, publishers are seeing the sense in partnering with companies who devote themselves to the practice of sprucing up and servicing old games. 2024 was another great year for Nightdive, for example, a studio that specialises in polishing up and remastering old classics, from System Shock to Dark Forces to The Thing.

"I was doing remasters even before I joined Nightdive," says Larry Kuperman. "One of the earliest ones was Total Annihilation, that I was involved in when I was at Stardock. We had a lot of resistance from people. I mean, it was taken as an art project, not a commercial project, because the thought was, well, who would ever buy these old games?

"They were great then and they're great now, and companies have begun to realize that and certainly we've had a leadership role in that. But we're not the only company doing that these days. Everybody is."

There are a lot of different issues smooshed together under the idea of ownership and preservation, and 2024 feels like the year that many came to much greater prominence for players and rule-makers alike. The question of whether you own your Steam games, for example, can fairly simply be answered right now: No, you don't. Valve can take them from you at a moment's notice and there's nothing you can do about it.

Many of us have known that for a long time, and traded it for convenience. But it feels like we're reaching a point where these platforms are so core to our lives in videogames, and the personal investment in them is getting so high, that the wider audience is no longer happy with that. More and more of us are realizing that, even if it feels otherwise, we don't own our games. And that there's no good reason to just accept that when there are alternatives.

I can't knock Epic's annual tradition of giving away a ton of games every holiday season. The Epic Games Store free games list always contains a few big name surprises like Death Stranding or Vampire Survivors that I expect a lot of PC gamers already own, and for those who don't it's mighty nice to be able to pick them up for nothing. In between the big drops are obviously smaller games, like today's—but I'd encourage everyone to grab Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles while the grabbing's good. If you've exhausted Balatro already, this underplayed deckbuilder could sneak up on you and swallow your whole holiday break.

"Deckbuilder" is actually a misnomer there, because although Astrea follows in the footsteps of Slay the Spire, it trades out cards for dice, a simple but novel enough swap to really change up how the game plays. It's also really pretty, and made by a tiny indie team in São Paulo, Brazil punching way above its weight.

In his 80% review for PC Gamer, Dominic Tarason praised how dramatic a turn in Astrea can be, which might be just the kind of thing you're craving coming off Balatro runs where you're scoring billions of points or whatever:

"Astrea hinges on an ingenious system called Virtues, abilities intrinsic to each character that become usable as you take Corruption damage. These abilities can sometimes drag you out of trouble (most characters have a ‘reroll’ virtue usable on any dice, including enemies), but they’re a reliable way of dealing damage, meaning that you’ll be whalloping yourself with a nasty die, firing off your Virtues, and healing back before the opponent has time to act. If you planned right. If not, you can end up being knocked over by a small breeze, or just plain blowing yourself up.

"It’s always a tense tightrope walk, and it creates a thrillingly ‘swingy’ game where things can go wrong almost instantaneously if you don’t plan two moves ahead. The saving grace is that most characters have three lives (restored when beating a region’s end boss), preventing a single miscalculation from spoiling a whole run. But those lives can be wagered for permanent upgrades, another temptation I found turning me into a gambler. The result is a deckbuilder where almost every single turn is engaging and often butt-clenching."

Astrea came out on PC in September 2023 (it just hit consoles a couple months ago), and since launch it's gotten a healthy list of updates including some rebalancing, official mod support, a daily run feature, and "custom runs" where you can pick and choose from a bunch of modifiers to change up how the game plays. With those additions it has the flexibility that true roguelike fiends long for.

Considering Astrea is currently $18.74 in the Steam sale, this giveaway's absolutely worth grabbing and actually playing, rather than left to rot in your cellar of neglected Epic Store freebies. Give it a shot—it's absolutely a hidden gem.

Epic's rolling out the holidays a bit early this year with Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga as a free game this week. The mammoth capstone to nearly 20 years of the Lego Star Wars series has a sprawling campaign that covers nine movies' worth of story. It's a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and action platforming game to get for free.

Like, a lot—probably 20 hours or so if all you want to do is beat the missions. A whole lot more if you're into collectathon gameplay. It's also couch co-oppable in the best, drop-in drop-out way.

If that's not your speed, well, there's always Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop, which is also free from Epic this week. I'm told that buses can go several speeds, so I'm sure one of them will fit you.

It's certainly, at least to me, a comedically all-ages and family-friendly duo of games. I can already imagine a parent parking their kid in front of the TV with Lego Star Wars while they sit back and brew a fresh, hot cup of tea to play Bus Simulator 21. Preferably after having come home from their day job of driving a bus.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga earned a 77% PC Gamer review back in 2022.

"Lego Star Wars has been working its strange magic ever since 2005, and the series' keen jokes have often been able to elevate what might otherwise just be a soulless melding of two brands. The Skywalker Saga seeks to be the definitive entry, covering all the ground of previous games in the series, as well as including The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker in Lego form for the first time. The result is a grab-bag of different gameplay styles all lent just enough depth to make them work, held together by that through-line of humor and charm," said reviewer Ted Litchfield.

"The Skywalker Saga's competent design is elevated by its infectious, charming sense of humor," he concluded.

You can find them both for free and add them to an Epic account on the Epic Game Store's free games page.

Section 9 Interactive, the studio founded in 2020 by veterans of Little Nightmares developer Tarsier Studios, has announced a publishing partnership with Epic Games that will see Epic fund the development and promotion of its in-development sci-fi action game.

The deal with Epic will leave ownership and full creative control over the new game with Section 9. Once the game is released and costs are recovered, the studio will earn at least 50% revenue share on sales.

"Working with the Epic Games Publishing team has been an amazing experience for us," Section 9 Interactive co-founder Gustaf Heinerwall said. "Ever since our first meeting with the team at EGP [Epic Games Publishing] we felt that this partnership was a perfect fit for our studio. They’ve given us incredible support and the freedom to fully explore our creative vision, which is all we can ask for in a publisher. We are thankful for this opportunity, and excited for what comes next."

"What comes next" will hopefully be a proper look at the new game. It was revealed nearly four years ago, in January 2021, and we've seen nothing of it since aside from a "we are hiring" message posted last year. Today's post about the Epic publishing partnership is the first activity on Section 9's X account since August 2021, when the studio announced that it was an Epic MegaGrants recipient. Epic hinted at more to come in the hopefully-not-too-distant future in its own post on X: "They’re DEEP in development… stay tuned for updates."

Like so many tech companies, Epic Games grew aggressively at the start of the 2020s and then suddenly declared that it had made a mistake. The Fortnite and Unreal Engine maker cut over 800 jobs last year and maimed and sold off Bandcamp, a website it had purchased just a year earlier.

"For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said at the time. "I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic."

At an event for Unreal Engine developers today, however, Sweeney declared that the ship has been righted.

"We spent the last year rebuilding and really executing solidly on all fronts," said the CEO. "I'm happy to tell you now that the company is financially sound, and that Fortnite and the Epic Games Store have hit new records in concurrency and success."

Fortnite's new peak, achieved over the holidays, was 110 million monthly active users, Sweeney said. The Epic Games Store also reached a new peak with 70 million monthly active users in September, according to store GM Steve Allison.

Also during today's Unreal Fest presentation, Epic announced a new incentive to get game developers onto the Epic Games Store, but it's one gamers should have less of a problem with than the usual timed exclusivity deals. 

Epic already takes no Unreal Engine royalty fees on Unreal Engine games purchased through the Epic Games Store (when using Epic's payment processing). But even for sales made off EGS, such as on Steam, it will now reduce the Unreal Engine royalty fee from 5% to 3.5% so long as the developer also released the game on EGS on day one. That applies to any platform where both the game and EGS exist: For lots of games that'll just be PC, but Epic now also has mobile versions of EGS in certain regions, and continues to fight with Apple and Google over its desire to sell mobile games without paying their fees.

The PC exclusivity deals aren't completely over: Epic still offers 100% revenue share for six months when games launch exclusively on EGS. But with even Ubisoft finally giving up on exclusivity and going back to day one Steam releases, it does feel like the Epic exclusive era of PC gaming is fading into the past.

Having pulled out an unexpected win in its years-long courtroom with tech colossus Google, Epic Games has decided it wants another go-around, and this time it's dragging Samsung into the fight for good measure.

As amusing as it is to imagine Epic CEO Tim Sweeney telling Tim Cook to "get more guys to make it a fair fight," Samsung is actually at the core of this particular lawsuit. The issue turns on Epic's plan to launch its own store on Android devices, which will enable it to distribute its own games, and eventually others, without having to pay a huge cut in revenues. Epic is legally allowed to do so after its courtroom victory—and it has—but Google and Samsung, so Epic alleges, are making the process as difficult as possible in order to dissuade users from actually using it.

"We are filing a court case against Google and Samsung over coordinated efforts to block competition in app distribution on Samsung devices with Samsung’s default-on Auto Blocker feature," Epic wrote in its lawsuit announcement. "Auto Blocker is the latest in a long series of dealings in which Google and Samsung have agreed not to compete to protect Google’s monopoly power. Auto Blocker cements the Google Play Store as the only viable way to get apps on Samsung devices, blocking every other store from competing on a level playing field.

"Our litigation alleges that Samsung’s recent implementation of the Auto Blocker feature was intentionally crafted in coordination with Google to preemptively undermine the U.S. District Court's remedy following the jury’s verdict in Epic’s case against Google. The jury found that Google’s app store practices are illegal, including the unlawful agreements Google enters into with phone manufacturers such as Samsung."

Samsung's Auto Blocker prevents users from installing software from unapproved sources, ostensibly a security feature to ensure Android owners don't end up with malicious software on their phones. That in itself isn't terribly uncommon. Epic's issue stems from the fact that, according to the lawsuit, Auto Blocker was originally an opt-in feature when it launched in October 2023, but in July 2024—shortly before the launch of the Epic Games Store on mobile—Samsung changed it to be on by default.

Making matters worse, the process for switching it off is a real pain in the ass: "An exceptionally onerous 21 step process," as Epic put it. Reinforcing the point, Epic included images of all 21 steps involved; not an insurmountable task, but it sure does look like a headache. 

Epic alleges in the lawsuit that having Auto Blocker enabled by default "was a coordinated decision by Google and Samsung," saying that throughout its roughly 15 years as an Android device manufacturer, Samsung has never imposed "additional frictions" or blocks on direct downloading or third-party stores on its devices. The suit claims Google and Samsung have engaged in "a high number of atypical interfirm communications that go well beyond the 'standard fare' of business and trade-association practice," and that Samsung's move to help "entrench the Play Store monopoly" only makes sense "as part of a quid pro quo" between the companies.

The net result, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said, is to drive Android owners away from third-party stores and back to the Play Store, where Google can extract its 30% cut of revenues.

"If we attempt to compete with Google Play and Samsung Galaxy Store and their 70% revenue share by offering developers an 88% revenue share, but 50% of our users give up, then after accounting for lost users and lost revenue, that 88% is reduced to an effective 44% revenue share," Sweeney posted, hopefully while wearing a chain mail hood. "Literally no store can compete with the incumbents when disadvantaged in this way. To have true competition, all reputable stores and apps must be free to compete on a level playing field. This is what our lawsuit seeks."

As reported by The Verge, Sweeney acknowledged in an interview that Epic doesn't have proof of collusion, but he's hoping it will come out as part of the discovery process. He also said Epic didn't request approval as an "authorized source" from Samsung because the point isn't to get "special privileges" for Epic, but to make the platforms more accessible for all developers. He also said he approached Samsung privately to request that Auto Blocker be reverted to an opt-in feature, or that Samsung create "an honest whitelisting process" that would allow users to access legitimate apps, but the two companies couldn't agree on how to make it work, leading to the legal action.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it could be that you're thinking of Sweeney's August comments about Apple's "malicious compliance" in the European Union: The EU's 2022 Digital Markets Act requires Apple to allow third-party storefronts on iOS devices, but Apple hasn't been making that process easy either. That's a separate and ongoing process (further complicated by the fact that the US does not require Apple to allow third-party stores) but there's definitely a sort of thematic similarity in play: The proverbial letter of the law is followed, but its spirit—in Epic's eyes—remains elusive.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is off to a roaring start, but some players are unhappy about one particular point: The game's use of Epic Online Services, which enables cross-play and friends list synchronization between Epic and Steam. Space Marine 2 publisher Focus Entertainment clarified last week that players don't have to link their accounts to play the game, but more recently Epic told Eurogamer that crossplay support is a requirement for any multiplayer games being sold on its store.

"Cross-play across all PC storefronts is a requirement of the Epic Games Store for all multiplayer games, ensuring that players and friends can play together wherever they purchase their games," an Epic rep said. "Developers are free to choose any solutions that meet this requirement, including Epic Online Services, which may require a secondary installation to enable the Social Overlay (friends lists, cross-platform invites, etc) on PC." 

In other words, you don't necessarily have to use Epic Online Services for your multiplayer game, but you do have to do what Epic Online Services does if you want to be on Epic's store. 

So while developers are free to come up with their own solutions, an awful lot of them opt for Epic's services because it enables them to avoid reinventing the wheel: EOS meets all the requirements out of the box, and it's free to use. SteamDB lists 944 games currently making use of the client, including Satisfactory, Palworld, Elden Ring, Disco Elysium, Football Manager 2021, Jusant, Armored Core 4, Hogwarts Legacy, and Payday 2.

Epic's rule about PC storefront crossplay isn't actually new: It established the policy in 2023, when it launched self-publishing tools for the Epic Games Store. It also bears noting that Epic Online Services are completely different, and separate, from Epic's decidedly not great launcher. (If that's what you're having issues with, allow me to recommend Heroic, which is really quite good.) 

All that said, if you really want to play Space Marine 2 without Epic Online Services, you can: Responding to one negative review on Steam, a Space Marine 2 developer said EOS "is not a mandatory installation." It can be uninstalled via the Windows add/remove software menu, although be aware that ditching it will prevent you from playing with people outside of Steam, and may possibly cause other unforeseen headaches in other games.

Honestly? You'd almost feel bad for Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford. Not only has he been posting through it after the Borderlands movie crashed and burnt, now he's got everyone making fun of him for an ill-judged prediction he made five years ago: That the Epic Games Store's resources and willingness to invest them could have Steam looking like a "dying store" by now.

And then, well, Borderlands came crawlin' back to Steam. Five years after Borderlands 3 was announced as an (initial) Epic Games Store exclusive, Borderlands 4 made its debut announcement at last night's Gamescom Opening Night Live event. It's coming to Epic, sure, but it's no exclusive this time. You'll be able to pick the game up on day one on Steam if that's your store of choice.

Cue the internet digging up Pitchford's 2019 tweetstorm about the Epic Store's bright and sunny future compared to Steam. "From a track record point of view, my expectation is that Epic’s investment in technology will outpace Valve’s substantially," wrote Pitchford back in April of that year, "When we look back at Steam in five or ten years, it may look like a dying store and other, competitive stores, will be the place to be." A little later on, he wrote that "if I were to bet on this (and remember I’ve got a pretty good seat with a great view of this competition), Epic will inevitably surpass Valve on features and quality of service."

Which, ah, has not quite borne out in the last half-decade. Steam is perhaps more dominant than ever and the internet at large is—for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable—intensely hostile to the idea of switching their storefront of choice from Steam to Epic (or any other launcher). 

Onlookers have been keen to point that out in numerous posts making fun of Pitchford's prediction. "Randy 'Nostradamus' Pitchford," wrote one amused commenter on Reddit. "It can happen aaany minute now!" wrote another. "If Randy says my name is something, I [would] double check my birth certificate," said a user named ares0027, summing up the general tenor of the internet response to Pitchford's unearthed prophecy.

Others have simply made fun of the Epic Games Store's relative lack of features compared to Steam, as well as Steam's (perceived) inactivity that doesn't seem to have thwarted its dominance. "Just [interested] in what technology Epic invested [in over these] last years?" wrote one user, to which another responded "Introducing "Shopping Cart®"—now you can pay for more than one item at a time, truly revolutionary tech!" The EGS, infamously, launched without the ability to add multiple games to your basket at a time.

"It's like other stores are actively trying to be so fucking worse than Steam," wrote Extreme_Isopod_9414, to which others replied that Valve's storefront doesn't really need to do anything to beat its competition. That's a strategy a user named NJ_Legion_Iced_Tea gave the pithy name: "Sun Tsu's art of not being a fucking idiot."

You get the idea. To be judiciously fair to Pitchford, he made that prediction mere months after the EGS launched in late 2018. Innovative projects like the Steam Deck were just a glint in Valve's eye and no one yet realised that Epic's strategy would revolve more around handing out free games and buying exclusivity rights than it would around making interesting technical investments. Still, I don't think it would take a genius to predict that Steam wouldn't become a "dying store" in a mere five years after that point. At least some of the mockery does feel a little earned. 

Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy's list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic's legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic's free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it's been a "very economical" user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group it's in a game store's interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.

"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Epic's other big method for attracting new Epic Games Store users has been to strike exclusivity deals with publishers like Ubisoft. It's been an unpopular strategy, and hasn't gone as swimmingly.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Back in 2021, we learned that Epic was likely to lose over $300 million on just the exclusivity deals made up to that point. Epic seems to have slowed down on pursuing exclusivity deals, although it hasn't dropped the strategy.

Epic Games Store exclusivity now also applies to games Epic is funding through the publishing division it started in 2020. The first of those Epic-published games to release was Remedy's Alan Wake 2, which hasn't made a profit yet.

The free games, though: that's a hit. If you want to see what Epic is giving away right now, and every game it's given away in the past, we're keeping track in our Epic Games Store free games list.

Bethesda's "next gen" update for Fallout 4 continues to cause problems. Released in April, two years after it was announced, the 14GB patch was impressive due to how little it actually changed, aside from breaking everyone's precious mods. The timing couldn't have been worse, either, coinciding as it did with the planned arrival of the gargantuan Fallout: London mod. The team had to then delay the mod's launch while it figured out how to fix what the update broke. 

The good news is that the end is in sight with the team and GOG, which is helping to distribute the mod, just double-checking that everything is working as it should. But there's a catch. See, the issues created by Bethesda's update proved to be insurmountable, and even after patches things like ultrawide support and VATS are still broken. So the team abandoned the current version of Fallout 4, and to play the mod when it launches you'll need to downgrade the post-apocalyptic RPG to an earlier version.

This shouldn't be a big problem for most players. GOG is offering a rollback feature for the version sold on its store, as well as working on downgrading options on Steam—either via a dedicated tool or manually. That covers most bases. But not the version sold on the Epic Games Store. Speaking to VG247, GOG confirmed that it would not be able to offer a downgrading option for this version of the game, at least not at launch, because EGS doesn't support update rollbacks. 

While this issue really emphasises the need for players to have the ability to rollback their games, and how limited EGS is when it comes to handy features that we've become used to thanks to the like of Steam and GOG, all of this could have been avoided if Bethesda had worked with its community of diligent modders. 

These fans are a major reason why Bethesda's games continue to thrive years after they're released, and Fallout: London in particular was hotly anticipated, as well as garnering a lot of coverage, so Bethesda must have known that it was launching imminently—and that the update would mess up those plans. 

Hopefully GOG and the Fallout: London team will come up with a solution eventually, so Epic users won't be left out in the cold forever. 

The latest free game on the Epic Games Store is The Falconeer, an aerial exploration-combat sim about mounting a gun on a majestic bird of prey and going to war for control over a huge fantasy waterworld littered with islands.

Epic freebies have become a bit routine. It was a big deal when the program first started but that was way back in 2019, and in the intervening years we've all grown used to having a new game handed to us every week. Even amidst that routine, though, The Falconeer giveaway is notable for a couple reasons.

One, this is the first time it's happened: Epic has been giving games away for so long now that repeats are inevitable, but The Falconeer has never been on the block before today. And two (and more importantly), it's really quite good. Despite some difficulty spikes and other inconsistencies, it "mostly shines," we said in our 2020 review.

"It says a lot that although optional missions are hollow instructions along the lines of ‘go here’ or ‘kill that’, I still eagerly dive into them for the extra cash. Any excuse to go back out into this intriguing world, I’ll take."

And of course there have been several updates released since, so The Falconeer should be even better now than it was then. Sadly, the most important question of all remains unanswered: Are the birds really big, or are the people really small?

The Falconeer is free on the Epic Games Store until July 11. After that, it's Floppy Knights, a too-cute deckbuilder about commanding an angry army of adorable plants.

For a brief, shining moment, the Epic Games Store had its very own SteamDB website called, appropriately enough, EpicDB. It's gone now, but not before leaking what appears to be a database containing numerous unreleased games including Final Fantasy 9 and The Last of Us 2.

First spotted by the Famiboards forum (via TheGamer), the fun began when people realized EpicDB's publisher search results were including unreleased titles along with games that are already live. Many of them were listed under codenames, but online sleuths were able to puzzle them out based on related listings, like the names of associated DLC.

Gematsu has a good breakdown: The links are all dead now, but Momo, for instance, is presumed to be Final Fantasy 9 Remake because of the presence of the Thief's Knives preorder bonus and Tetra Master Starter Pack early-purchase bonus, while Skobeloff appears to be Final Fantasy 16 because the cloud save folder is "{UserDir}/My Games/FINAL FANTASY XVI/EOS/{EpicID}/." Hey, not all of them are deep-and-dark brainteasers.

We're pretty sure that at least some of the games leaked out of EpicDB are fakes, enabled by Epic's self-publishing tools. One "unknown organization" called out on Resetera is reportedly the publisher of games including Helldivers 2, Elden Ring, Starfield, Grand Theft Auto 2, Bloodborne Remake, and Elden Ring 2, which I'm pretty sure is not accurate.

But enough of it looks sufficiently legit to get people talking, and adding to that maybe-legitimacy is the fact that the apparent EpicDB creator—or at least the person claiming to be on Discord—is ximton, who until a couple years ago was a fairly prolific Fortnite dataminer and leaker. If they are one and the same, it lends credence to the idea that he knows how to tiptoe through Epic's tulips.

It's all entirely speculative at this point, but it also brings to mind the great Nvidia leak of 2021. That too was "speculative," in the words of Nvidia not long after the leak began to spread, and yet two years later it was all coming true, and we expect to see it continue banging through 2024. Some of the titles in the EpicDB leak are obvious bullshit, yes, but for the majority of it, the closer I look, the more I think, well, maybe.

Epic isn't doing much to quell that speculation. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, the company said, "We released an update so third-party tools can’t surface any new unpublished product titles from the Epic Games Store catalog." That's probably wise, but I'm not seeing a denial in there. Take it for what it's worth.

The Epic Games Store's annual Mega Sale is now underway, with discounts of up to 85% on a variety of games and a free copy of Dragon Age: Inquisition Game of the Year Edition to get things rolling.

This is the first time Dragon Age: Inquisition has gone free on the Epic Store. Along with the base game, the GOTY Edition comes with a whack of DLC, including:

• Flames of the Inquisition Arsenal, Armor, and Armored Mount
• Dragon Age multiplayer Deluxe Edition chests
• Skyhold Throne, Red Hart Halla and Bog Unicorn
• Jaws of Hakkon DLC Pack
• The Descent DLC Pack
• Trespasser DLC Pack
• Spoils of the Avvar: 5 new mounts, 2 new sets of armor, and new options to personalize your base at Skyhold.
• Spoils of the Qunari: An armored war mount, new armor sets — including 1 in the style of the Arishok — and Skyhold items.
  
  

As for the Mega Sale itself, a few highlights include EA Sports FC 24 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, both 80% off, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Far Cry 6 at 75% off, and Mortal Kombat 1, God of War, Dead Island 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and Assassin's Creed Mirage all at half price. 

The Talos Principle 2, which I loved, and Robocop: Rogue City are both 40% off, and for something a bit less mainstream allow me to suggest Amanita's Botanicula and Chuchel, each of which are down to $3. Titanfall 2 Ultimate Edition is also down to a fiver, which is a great price for a brilliant singleplayer shooter campaign.

Along with the usual weekly game giveaways, Epic is throwing out some extra freebies for the sale including a month of Discord Nitro and in-game loot for Dauntless, Fortnite, Fall Guys, Disney Speedstorm, Warframe, RPG Maker Unite, Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact, and Honkai: Star Rail. The Epic Rewards program is active through the sale as well: 5% of all eligible purchases will come back to you in the form of points that can be used for future purchases.

The 2024 Epic Games Store Mega Sale is live now and runs until June 13.

The extraction-dungeon crawler Dark and Darker still isn't available on Steam, but developer Ironmace is getting ready to bring it back into the public eye by way of a different digital storefront: The Epic Games Store.

"With increased confidence in the quality of our game, we have started preparations on introducing Dark and Darker to a wider audience," Ironmace announced on the Dark and Darker Discord. "As a first step, we are happy to announce the launch of the Dark and Darker store page on the Epic Games Store.

"This is a big preparatory step for us in our journey to deliver a polished product to our fans. If you have an Epic account, we encourage you to show your enthusiasm and wishlist the game."

The Epic page for Dark and Darker is live now, although there's no release date listed at this point.

Dark and Darker made a huge splash in February 2023, becoming one of the biggest games on Steam despite being an alpha build with some pretty rough edges. But it quickly ran into trouble with Nexon, which accused the studio of using "stolen" code and other assets to build the game: Ironmace's offices were raided by police, and the Steam delisting followed shortly after.

Ironmace earned goodwill with gamers by pressing ahead with Dark and Darker playtests via torrents, but that's not really a practical strategy in the long run: Being on an easily-accessible storefront is essential if Ironmace hopes to return to the levels of popularity Dark and Darker enjoyed a year ago. 

The way forward may have been partially cleared by a legal win for Ironmace in January: A South Korean court dismissed Nexon's preliminary injunction against the studio, saying (via Google Translate) that Dark and Darker "cannot be viewed as infringing on Nexon's copyright or trade secrets." The lawsuit itself continues.

There's no word at this point on whether Dark and Darker will also return to Steam at any point in the near future, although Ironmace said it "will continue working with various partners to give our fans the best options and properly grow the community to foster a long and healthy game." I've reached out to the studio for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

Update: Just two days after terminating Epic Games' iOS developer account, Apple has reversed course and says it will be restored.

"Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account," Epic said. 

"This sends a strong signal to developers that the European Commission will act swiftly to enforce the Digital Markets Act and hold gatekeepers accountable. We are moving forward as planned to launch the Epic Games Store and bring Fortnite back to iOS in Europe."

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the reversal represents "a big win for European rule of law, for the European Commission, and for the freedom of developers worldwide to speak up."

If you thought the legal beef between Epic and Apple was over, it's time to think again. Epic said today that less than a month after approving its App Store developer account, Apple has now terminated it, leaving the Fortnite developer unable to bring its planned Epic Games Store to iOS devices.

Epic said the termination of its developer account is a "serious violation" of the European Union's Digital Markets Act, which compels Apple and other companies to allow third-party storefronts on their devices. Enabling those storefronts is something Apple has resisted for years, and even when it announced its intention to comply with the DMA, Apple did its best to make it all a net negative, saying it "is introducing new safeguards that reduce — but don’t eliminate — new risks the DMA poses to EU users."

Still, it seemed like a done deal. "We are bringing more opportunities to developers across all platforms and we’re so excited about what’s to come.… including bringing the Epic Games Store to iOS in Europe," Epic tweeted triumphantly on February 16. "Dev account secured, let’s go!"

Ah, but no. "To our surprise, Apple has terminated that account and now we cannot develop the Epic Games Store for iOS," Epic wrote today. "This is a serious violation of the DMA and shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices.

"In terminating Epic’s developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices."

What's really interesting about all this, though, and straight-up bizarre, is Apple's justification for killing Epic's dev account. Basically, Apple doesn't trust Epic not to hose them around in the future, a position it says is justified "by a litany of public attacks on Apple's policies, compliance plan, and business model" fired off on social media by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. As "just one example" of evidence, it cited this tweet from February:

"Your colorful criticism of our DMA compliance plan, coupled with Epic's past practice of intentionally violating contractual provisions with which it disagrees, strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules," Apple's Phil Schiller wrote in a February 23 email to Tim Sweeney, shared in Epic's blog post. "Another intentional breach could threaten the security of the iOS platform, as well as the security and privacy of users."

Apple's admonishment does not appear to have convinced Sweeney to tone it down, however.

I am not a lawyer but it all seems very weird and frankly schoolyard-ish to me. Has Tim Sweeney said mean things about Apple? Yes! Did Epic strategically pick a fight with Apple because it wasn't happy with the App Store's terms? Again, yes! I don't think it's unfair to say that Sweeney's been a headache for Apple for at least a few years now. But in my eyes, all that pales next to the European Union declaring in no uncertain terms, "Hey, you gotta let 'em do this."

The only possible rationale for Apple's move that I can see—and again, not a lawyer here—is that the EU said Apple has to allow third-party storefronts on iOS devices, but it maybe didn't say it has to provide them with developer accounts. As someone with fond memories of beefing with my younger sister when I was 12, I have to admire that kind of technical end-run around the rules if that's the case. But as a grown-ass man watching billionaires sink mountains of cash into firing spitballs at each other over who gets to play in the sandbox, it all seems a bit ridiculous. And by "a bit," I mean "very." In the real world, my dad would've yelled at both of us by now and the whole thing would be settled.

Clearly that's not going to be the case in this catfight: Neither Apple nor Epic have shown even the slightest willingness to compromise in their dispute (or even to tone down the rhetoric), and insulated as they are from any real consequences thanks to their virtually limitless piles of money (although Epic has been showing signs of strain on that front), we can expect this seemingly finished fight to continue for a long time yet.

The Epic Games Store gave away more than 586 million games via its free games program in 2023, according to statistics revealed by the company as part of its year in review.

The free games program featured 86 games that were freely downloadable for Epic Games Store users in 2023, amounting to a total redeemed value of $2,055 if you claimed them all. Plenty of people took up Epic on at least some of these offers, with nearly 586 million free games being claimed across the year. 

Epic also notes that the average score across those free games was 75%, just in case you were thinking they were giving away a load of crap. The infographic doesn't specify where those scores came from, but since the storefront sources review statistics from OpenCritic on its game pages, it's logical to assume that's where the figures derive from.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a platform giving away a shedload of games, the Epic Games Store gained quite a few new users across the year, with 40 million PC gamers joining the service in 2023. This brought total PC users of the Epic Games Store to more than 270 million, though cross-platform numbers are substantially higher at 840 million. As for how many people are actually using the service, Epic reported 75 million monthly active users in December 2023.

In terms of revenue, PC players spent $950 million on the Epic games store in 2023, up 16% from the previous year. Less than a third of that was spent on third-party games (ie, not Fortnite) which represents a fall in spending in this area by 13%, despite Epic adding 1,300 new titles to the storefront across the last year. Alongside Epic's phenomenally popular battle royale game, the highest earning games on the store were GTA 5, Rocket League, Genshin Impact, and Dead Island 2, the latter of which launched exclusively on Epic in April last year.

It's difficult to know exactly how these numbers compare to Steam, although there are estimates that Valve's service had 132 million monthly active users in December 2023. What's certain is that, from a user perspective, Steam remains the far superior service. Robin reviewed every major PC game launcher at the end of January, and gave the Epic Store a score of just 41%, calling it "a rubbish, underbaked, buggy launcher."

"Countless basic features are missing, navigating the store or even your own library is a nightmare, and it's only recently that it even added a cart function," he said.

Epic has plans to improve the launcher in 2024, which include a new download manager, "significant improvements" to offline mode, pre-loading for pre-purchases and "subscription support". The latter of these will apparently let developers and publishers with their own subscription services bring them to the Epic Games Store, as Steam has with EA Play.

You can view the full infographic below, and read Epic's full outline for the storefront over the next year here. Frankly, Epic's priorities these days seem to be less on being a competitor for Steam, and more on turning Fortnite into the first viable "metaverse". We saw the launch of LEGO Fortnite in December, while earlier this month the company received a $1.5 billion investment from Disney to create a new "entertainment universe" within its hugely popular shooter.

Epic Games remains steadfast in its quest to drive down game store fees and build its "metaverse" vision, but the might of its Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and Epic Games Store operation wavered this year. Epic laid off over 800 employees in September, and pawned off beloved music marketplace Bandcamp after acquiring it only a year ago. Steam, meanwhile, kept posting wins.

Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin' back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.

That's a big deal! Blizzard's Battle.net has been its own PC gaming fiefdom since before Steam, which has always earned it a pass even among those who otherwise reject any non-Steam launcher. But here we are—never thought I'd see the day.

Steam also got 2023's award winningest game, Baldur's Gate 3, and alongside GOG had it exclusively for a month before the PS5 release (not counting its years in early access). It also housed Starfield and most other heavily marketed PC releases this year, and at the same time continues to be the primary vehicle by which relatively unknown new games become phenomena. Lethal Company was a big one this year, and we loved Battlebit Remastered and Pizza Tower. It's the best way for us to get games from small developers in China, too: The Wandering Sword earned some buzz this year, for example.

Valve's VR efforts have cooled—the all-in-one Meta Quest 3 is the headset to get right now—but the Steam Deck has been a great success by all appearances. This year saw the release of a new OLED version, and people are literally inhaling the things. (And if Valve does still see potential in VR, it could perhaps combine its Steam Deck R&D with its VR headset R&D to make its own standalone goggles one day.) The Steam Deck has even made Steam better for desktop users, with continued controller support improvements and the new overlay.

Epic had some big wins of its own: Alan Wake 2, which Epic funded and published, was a critical hit, and I'm thankful that someone's keeping Remedy making games (Epic's deal with them includes another project, too). Fortnite's throwback season was a huge success, and it just got a surprisingly big Lego survival mode, as well as a fun racing mode from the Rocket League developers. Epic also got to conclude the year with a big legal victory over Google.

But a few years after Epic posed its ultimatum to the world's digital game stores—lower your fees and allow third-party payment processing or no Fortnite for you, in short—Steam appears to be as strong as ever, while the Epic Games Store remains somewhat of a nuisance. 

I can get behind Epic's aversion to algorithmic recommendations and preference for keeping its store feature-light, but given those things, you'd hope the software would feel light, too. Instead, it takes longer to launch the Epic Games Store on my PC than Steam, and it isn't nicer to use. The library should frankly just copy Steam's format with a sidebar and categories—it's better.

After a burst of energy at the start of the decade that seemed to foretell a new era of PC game distribution, things have settled into a status quo that looks a lot like the old one. Cloud streaming hasn't taken off, GOG is still waving the DRM-free banner, and itch.io remains a valuable kitchen sink of indie and experimental games.

PC Game Pass is now the biggest wild card. For the moment, Microsoft's subscription service is an add-on to the digital distribution model we're used to, not a Netflix-like revolution. At least one big exec, Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick, hasn't been convinced that subscriptions are the future. But it is certainly notable that the proud new owner of Activision Blizzard, and many other major developers, is pushing so hard to make the subscription thing happen. 

Speaking of Rockstar parent Take-Two, another thing hasn't changed: Grand Theft Auto 6 was announced for consoles with no mention of a PC version. It will surely come to PC sometime after its 2025 console release, but which store or stores it hits first is a small question mark. Rockstar very briefly made Red Dead Redemption 2 exclusive to its store and the Epic Games Store when it came to PC, so it isn't isn't a given that one of the biggest games of the decade will come to Steam first.

That's probably a late 2025 or 2026 problem, though. For now, for better or worse, Steam remains securely at the center of PC gaming. 

After putting the Destiny 2 Legacy Collection up for grabs for a week, the Epic Games Store appears to have drifted back into a daily rhythm of free games. Today's offering is Art of Rally, a stylized top-down racing game from the maker of Absolute Drift.

Superficially, Art of Rally is an arcade racer, but it offers a surprising amount of challenge for those who want to switch off the driver assist options and give 'er. Rally fans will also dig the impressive selection of cars from the 1960s to the '80s, including the infamous Group B cars that had a brief, exciting, and incredibly dangerous run through the mid-'80s before being banned by the FIA after a series of major accidents and deaths.

It's not Project Cars, but even with driving aids enabled Art of Rally is a tricky beast to handle, and I struggle to keep even the more manageable Group 2 cars on the road. Fortunately the damage modelling can be turned off, and the in-game crowds are quick on their feet and good at getting out of the way. (In my defense, a QWERTY keyboard is not the ideal thing for heel-and-toe action.)

Art of Rally is free on the Epic Games Store until 11 am PT on December 23. You know what happens after that: Another free game! Be sure not to miss it.

The next free game in the Epic Game Store's Holiday Sale giveaway-a-thon is Melvore Idle, an "idle/incremental game" inspired by Runescape that blends casual click-here gameplay with a surprising level of complexity.

Melvor Idle mimics Runescape's skill system in many ways, and in fact it's published by Jagex, which picked up the game in 2021. But the gameplay is completely different: In this incremental idler, you're just clicking now and then to make things happen. Cut down some trees? Click. Catch some fish? Click. Smith a dagger? Click. 

It's very simple (and meant to be so: "Maxing 20+ skills has never been more zen," the Epic Store listing says) but it also promises an element of complexity that might not be immediately apparent. "Every skill in this game serves a purpose, interacting with the others in interesting ways. This means all the hard work you put into one skill will in turn benefit others. What strategy will you conjure to achieve maximum skillage?"

The game begins with a tutorial that lays out the basics and aptly demonstrates a degree of its depth. I've only been into it for a few minutes and already I'm cutting trees, mining bronze, smithing ore, and spending some time in the store, all so I can whip up a bow and arrows and do the ranged combat tutorial. Honestly, there's a lot more going on here than I expected. 

You can see that in the Melvor Idle subreddit too, where players are discussing strategies, crunching numbers, and sharing accomplishments: One player recently completed 100% achievements in the game and its expansions after 9,050 hours of game time. (As an idler, Melvor Idle runs in the background, so you can do that sort of thing without actually blowing a year of your life.)

Melvor Idle is new on the Epic Store so there's no rating yet, but it's been very well received on Steam, where it debuted in 2021. It currently carries a "very positive" rating across more than 10,000 user reviews, and an "overwhelmingly positive" rating from the past 30 days. And now it's free on the Epic Store—but only until 11 am ET on December 22, when a new giveaway game will take its place.