Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: The Epic Games Store’s First Big Sale Ran into Predictable Hitches

It was inevitable that the first big sale on the Epic Games Store (EGS for short) was going to be messy, given how it’s developed over a short time.

It’s only been a little over five months since the EGS launched, and there have been far more stories about the PC gaming audience being annoyed at owner Epic Games’ business approach than anything else about it. This is far from the first PC gaming storefront alternative to the behemoth that’s Vale’s Steam to launch in the last few years, some of which have only been controversial due to publishers themselves making their games exclusive to their own stores, with EA’s Origin being the most notorious one. The EGS started a new trend when Epic began making deals with other publishers to sell their games on a temporarily-exclusive basis, which has kept them off other stores like Steam entirely. To say it’s upset ardent Steam users would be putting it lightly.

The EGS still has several interface and performance issues with its store, including the continued baffling lack of a shopping cart. In addition to the timed-exclusive games (which have mostly been scheduled to last one year), a top concern from those who purchase games on Steam was whether the EGS’ discounted offerings would be as good. Valve holds big sales around the summer and winter seasons, and though they’ve recently scaled back the overall number of discounts contained in them due to presumed publisher complaints, they still beat the pants off every other store. If the EGS wanted to truly be competitive, they’d have to show how they were capable of providing something at least nearly on par. Now, they’re really showing something.

Epic’s idea of fighting Valve has come in the form of the Epic Mega Sale, where every game priced at $14.99 or more is being offered with a $10 discount. This means some games are going for up to 75 percent off, as $14.99 games can be purchased for a mere $4.99. It’s a good sale for lower-priced games, and they’re giving everyone plenty of time to purchase what they want by keeping it around until June 13. Outside the continued criticism of platform exclusivity and the aforementioned interface issues (adding a bunch of $5-$10 charges to your card in lieu of a single larger charge thanks to the lack of a shopping cart is no fun), there haven’t been many serious complaints from users.

Instead, they’re coming from publishers. This isn’t a surprise since, again, Valve had to scale back their discounts due to them. Here, the issues come from not only the sale itself, but also (and perhaps especially) how Epic didn’t inform most of them that their games would be discounted.

Supergiant Games, for instance, raised the price of early access game Hades just after the sale started. The typically-$19.99 Early Access game was mispriced at $6.99, but it increased to $14.99 when the publisher raised the base price by $5 to $24.99. Supergiant claimed the price adjustment had nothing to do with the sale, but because of improvements made to the game. It just happened to coincide with the start of the sale. Hmm. They suffered blowback after breaking their promise to inform consumers of price increases in advance mere hours after making it. They knocked the price back down to $9.99, but said they’ll raise it to $24.99 when the sale ends on June 14th.

The sale applies to every game available on the store, including preorders for several indie and AAA games. Those tend to be off limits for sales like this in other stores, and publishers responded in a way you might expect. Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 was briefly available at the sale price, only for the game’s page to disappear hours later. Publisher Paradox Interactive chose not to be part of the sale, according to an Epic representative, but those who preordered it with the discount will have their orders honored. This also happened with Oxygen Not Included from Klei Entertainment, though the question of whether it will return before the May 29th release date — before the sale ends — remains to be seen.

The most notable game this occurred with was Borderlands 3, which also took a turn for the hilarious. Gearbox Software founder and COO Randy Pitchford (who’s been in the news a lot lately) initially promoted the sale in a since-deleted tweet, only for the game to disappear from the store entirely. This appears to have stemmed from a disagreement between Gearbox/Pitchford and publisher 2K Games, the latter of which made the decision to temporarily remove it. This was a funny little mess, though it’s far down the list of bizarre incidents that occurred with Gearbox and Randy Pitchford since Borderlands 3’s announcement.

Publishers of AAA games are concerned that a sale like this will devalue their titles, with how a $10 discount could make the $59.99 launch price seem too high compared to a $49.99 discounted price. Whether consumers actually think like this is up in the air, as there’s no documented evidence that sales like this actually affect people’s game purchasing habits. But even if that belief is shown to be misguided, it won’t stop the gaming industry’s more paranoid publishers from believing it.

It was good for Epic to have this sweeping sale to impress their current users and, more importantly at the moment, attract more. But they should give publishers more of a heads-up whenever they hold a sale, though this is already likely to happen. Hopefully they have sales on par with Steam’s in the near future, since their trend of grabbing temporarily-exclusive games won’t be letting up anytime soon.