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The Epic Games Store gave away 89 free titles last year (down from 103 in 2020), with a combined worth of $2,120.

kingfey

Banned
(This is the important info I got from the article)


The Epic Games Store gave away 89 free titles last year (down from 103 in 2020), with a combined worth of $2,120.

According to Epic, users claimed over 765 million free games in 2021. 76 free games broke their peak concurrent user records on PC, with an average of 13 times their all-time records, it claimed in January.

The Epic Game Store’s user base reached 194 million in 2021, up from 160 million a year earlier, the company said.

CD Projekt announced a 15-year strategic partnership with Epic Games earlier this week, alongside the news that its next Witcher game will begin “a new saga” for the franchise.

The open-world title is being built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, rather than its proprietary REDengine, which powered previous Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077.

“We’re happy to announce that the next installment in The Witcher series of video games is currently in development, kicking off a new saga for the franchise,” it said.

“This is an exciting moment as we’re moving from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5, beginning a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games. It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant.

“We’ll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences.”
 

kingfey

Banned
Best deal in gaming.
I got myself some free terrific PC games. Especially GTAV. I have around 100 Epic games at this point,
DviKYTV.png

e8u6abW.png
 

Fbh

Member
As one of the few people here that doesn't hate the Epic store and has bought a bunch of stuff on it.
The free games are nice but at this point I'd much rather see some significant improvements to the launcher. Give me native controller support, improve offline mode and overall performance with bad connections, improve performance of the launcher on weaker hardware as it feels very sluggish and unresponsive, etc.

On my dated 1050ti laptop opening a game is like:
- Steam: double click the icon, a short steam pop up appears, the game starts almost instantly
- GOG: double click the icon the game starts instantly
-Epic: Double click the Icon, nothing happens for several minutes, fans start to spin like crazy as if I was running something highly demanding, wait a couple of more minutes, game finally starts.
 
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Pejo

Member
It's a shame, if it wasn't for the moneyhatting PC exclusives, I would have almost nothing against Epic. I'd have had it installed on my PC and mostly unused just like U-Play and Origin. Unfortunately, they don't seem to want to back down from doing it, so I won't back down from not supporting them by even making a free account to claim free games to pad their numbers.
 
And brought anti-consumer, money-hatted exclusives to PC.

"When the product is free, you're the product." They give those games away so they can overstate their user base and have access to your data.
Well, at least we don't pay for the benefit (this is not like paid products did not sell or use your data in nefarious ways, the latest example is the leak of context aware advertising in future version of Windows Explorer).

I got most of the games, but only played 3 or 4 over many years (only one for a significant amount of time).

Also, free as in freedom is different, I have yet to see product placement in the Linux kernel or gnome desktop 😬
 
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Shifty

Member
The slow, insidious debasement of the PC platform continues. Thanks, Big Corpo 🤷‍♂️

CDPR has already said it won't be, thankfully.
In very uncertain terms that in no way contained the word 'Steam'. It could still go either way, but it reads like they're keeping their options open.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Lmao it's almost certain next Witcher game will be egs exclusive
don't be stupid. so they'd release it exclusively on Epic and not bother releasing it on GOG which is their own store/client?

that's like Microsoft releasing Halo exclusively on Steam and not putting it on the Microsoft Store. Doesn't make any sense.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
The slow, insidious debasement of the PC platform continues. Thanks, Big Corpo 🤷‍♂️


In very uncertain terms that in no way contained the word 'Steam'. It could still go either way, but it reads like they're keeping their options open.
see above. CD Projekt have their own PC store/client. it's not going to be Epic exclusive. Maybe if GOG gets shut down...

Why would CD Projekt publish a game and not release it on their own store?
 

Shifty

Member
see above. CD Projekt have their own PC store/client. it's not going to be Epic exclusive. Maybe if GOG gets shut down...

Why would CD Projekt publish a game and not release it on their own store?
If you check my post, you'll note that I didn't imply they would go full EGS exclusive. In fact, I acknowledged their vagely-worded "we won't be making it exclusive to one store" statement - thus suggesting that I'm aware full EGS exclusivity is off the board. GOG is a shoo-in given who owns it.

The actual question left open by the vagueness of said statement is whether they'll be at liberty to release on Steam given uncle Tim's towering hate-boner for it. Could be that it happens, but could also be that they're waiting to see if Epic will offer them an extra cashbag to keep the game away from EGS' number-one rival. Until they say it in explicit terms, it's up in the air.
 
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ClosBSAS

Member
don't be stupid. so they'd release it exclusively on Epic and not bother releasing it on GOG which is their own store/client?

that's like Microsoft releasing Halo exclusively on Steam and not putting it on the Microsoft Store. Doesn't make any sense.
lol egs esclusive means no steam...i thought this was clear. gog dont count. what matters is steam....itll be egs and gog if you wanna put it that way, but no steam.
 

Sega Orphan

Banned
So how does EGS work? The free games you get will they work outside the EGS browser? If Epic closed their store, could you still play and own the games?
 

01011001

Banned
I got myself some free terrific PC games. Especially GTAV. I have around 100 Epic games at this point,
DviKYTV.png

e8u6abW.png

yeah, the best week they had was when basically all the relevant Batman games went free at once. the Arkham Trilogy and the Lego Batman Trilogy... all on the same day, that was crazy!

So how does EGS work? The free games you get will they work outside the EGS browser? If Epic closed their store, could you still play and own the games?

it works exactly like steam. you need the epic launcher to play... but I mean, there's always cracks you can use ;)
 
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ClosBSAS

Member
They already said no
again, they said they arent planning on it..its a whole different thing to say NO straight up...they arent planning for now...its years away from release. egs will offer them some shit...youll see. when companies speak so well of epic and start making deals with them, its cause they are going that way.
 
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