Epic?

[steve58]

Today's freebies are:  Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration

...also Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition and Tomb Raider GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION

fyi: apparently everyone wants all 3 so the site is slow; it may take a while to grab all three.

[al_infierno]

I had a really bad taste in my mouth after a byproduct of the Steam-Epic schism.  I bought the new Hitman title, Hitman 3, on the Epic store because it's not available on Steam yet.  The new Hitman trilogy lets you play the levels from the older games, but only if you own them on the same platform, which I only found out after I bought the game - wrongly assuming that my linked IOI account with my Hitman 1 & 2 progress would also detect that I *own* those games.  Not so.  To be fair, I'm not sure if this is more IOI's poor programming or Epic being greedy.

Anyways, this was all assuaged when I requested a refund for Hitman 3 after finding out that it will come to Steam this month.  I got my refund processed to my PayPal within seconds of requesting it, including all the DLC that I bought.  Don't know how often this will work, but for a one-off refund this is a thousand times better than the clunky-as-hell Steam refund system that only gives you Steam credit dollars.

[Grim.Reaper]

Steam doesn't just give refund credit, for all my returns including recent one I got refunded the same way I paid, which was PayPal credit card.

[al_infierno]

^ Oh nice, I didn't know that.  In any case, it was much faster and the UI was more intuitive.

[Gusington]

Was just gonna say, I too have been refunded from Steam in the way I paid as well.

[W8taminute]

I also got credit restored to my method of payment as well for returns on Steam.   :)

[al_infierno]

How long did it take y'all?  For me the UI was a pain to wrangle with to properly put in the refund request, and once I did it took 12-24 hours for the refund to go through.  On Epic it was seconds.  It's still the inferior platform to Steam overall, but I was impressed with how quickly I went from "bad taste in my mouth" to "oh that wasn't so bad I guess."

[Grim.Reaper]

How long did it take y'all?  For me the UI was a pain to wrangle with to properly put in the refund request, and once I did it took 12-24 hours for the refund to go through.  On Epic it was seconds.  It's still the inferior platform to Steam overall, but I was impressed with how quickly I went from "bad taste in my mouth" to "oh that wasn't so bad I guess."

Just returned a game a couple of days ago.  I thought the UI/interface was pretty easy.  Selected the game, choose a reason, and think answered another question.  Took less than a minute and received confirmation about my refund within about an hour or less.  I don't have any issue with EPIC, I have used it from the start...but haven't had any bad experiences with Steam and the refund process but I also don't return a ton.  I suspect if people do it frequently, they might go through additional checks, not sure.

[Gusington]

^Yeah me too on Steam, almost instant.

[W8taminute]

I remembered on the two times I returned games on Steam it took no longer than 1 business day to see the fund return to my Steam wallet.  [That's how I usually buy most of my games on Steam.  I use Steam cards]

[Pete Dero]

https://www.bluesnews.com/s/244694/epic-games-store-year-in-review

A post on the Epic Games Website discusses how the Epic Games Store performed in 2021. Epic continued to give away free games throughout the year as a way of building an audience. The post puts that program into some very large numbers, even co-opting the term "snag" from our forums as the appropriate term to describe collecting a freebie:

Players bought more games and played them for longer in 2021. We now have 917 titles for sale on the Epic Games Store, nearly doubling what we had available to customers in 2020. About $840M was spent through the store in 2021, up 20% from 2020. Third-party games represented 36% of all sales with more than $300M in player spending, a 12% increase from 2020.

We continued to give away free games each week. Many developers and publishers collaborated with us over the year to give away 89 free games worth $2,120. Over 765 million free games were claimed by players, bringing those titles to a new audience. 76 free games broke their peak concurrent user records on PC, with an average of 13 times their all-time records! That's incredible engagement.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2021-year-in-review

$840 million spent in the store in 2021  <->  765 million games claimed for free  #:-) :pullhair:

[Jarhead0331]

Speaking of, Daemon X Machina is presently available for free...it's a surprisingly cool game.

[Gusington]

Goddammit that is tempting.

[al_infierno]

Lol Gus, this must be the dozenth or so time you've said "that's so tempting" in this thread.  At a certain point I'd think you would just spring and download the freakin' launcher and be done with it. 

Think of all the free games you'd have accumulated by now.  :P

[steve58]

^this.

Also, just got yet another $10 off coupon.  Expires 2/27.  I think you need to subscribe to the Epic emails to get the coupon(s).