Epic Game Store first big sale hijinks

So the EGS has started it's first ever big discount sale on it's games. And just like everything else with the EGS (which I'll just say now I don't hate, but have yet to give money to) - it did not go without some hitches.

The jist of the sale is that all participating games with an original RRP of $15+ are $9.99 cheaper at minimum. And that Epic themselves are going to pay that $9.99 so that the developers don't lose out on it. So you can pre-order that new John Wick game for a fiver but the developers are still getting their 88% cut of the original price of $15.

But since it launched last night there have been two hiccups already.

Hades - by Supergiant - went down to around $6 in price. But after trying to buy it customers found they wanted $15 for it. Supergiant responded to say that this was an error. Then they upped the RRP to $25, so that the discount percentage was the same. Since then they've lowered it back down to it's original price

They've since put up a blog post explaining the entire thing which you can read here.

The second hiccup is that two publishers decided that they didn't want to participate in the sale, so Epic decided they'd just take their games off the store completely.

First Paradox decided they wanted no part, so EGS pulled Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 from the store temporarily. As of this post you still can't even see the game on the store, and searching for it returns a 404. Second, Klei decided not to take part, so Oxygen Not Included now is temporarily no longer available on the EGS.

When will these return? Who can say! Will it be after the sale? Probably! Is that a good way to run a store? Absolutely not!

Sometimes errors happen, as with price cuts during sales.
The second hiccup with the removed games seems very unprofessional.

As far as the Paradox thing go they really hate forced discounts steam sales etc so they tend to raise the price of there games during that period as some sort of protest, since this probably isn't possible on the epic store they then took the game offline for the duration of the sale."So what about discounts on paradox games?", Yes there are sales on Paradox game but paradox decides when they wanna go on sale not the platform provider (steam,epic,gog).

As far as the epic store go's test that shit out before you push something it's not like you got 1Billion games on your store! Now people who decided to run with the epic game store SuperGiant games etc. come off as greedy while this was a fault in the epic stores back end...

It's really hard to "love" the epic games store and it's all epics fault.

Wow. That's some shady stuff.

@rocketblast0063: The first one is kind of shady and bad because in some countries it's flat out illegal what Supergiant and/or EGS did. You cannot raise the price of an item before putting it on sale like that.

In Ireland, and probably the rest of the EU - "Businesses cannot claim that goods have been sold at a higher price and are now on sale for a lower price unless the goods were actually on sale at the higher price for a “reasonable period,” which is generally understood to be 28 days in the three months before the price reduction."

By raising the price from $20 to $25 while at the same time advertising it's on sale for $15, it's misleading and an illegal practice as it cons the consumer into thinking they're getting a better deal than they actually are. It makes it look like it's 40% off instead of the 25% that it actually is.

They adjusted and fixed the issue, but it's something that shouldn't have been done in the first place.

Embarrassing stuff for a company with such vast resources and historically great expertise.

I hope people start looking at steam this closely.

@jesus_phish: Here in the US, it's seemingly common. There's a local grocery store chain where I live that frequently does "buy one, get one" or even "buy one, get two" sales, but they often raise the price of the item when doing this. I've never thought anything of this, other than that it's silly and I should actually examine the info like price per pound of what I'm buying. To hear that this is straight up illegal in some countries is crazy to me. American consumer protections are shit compared to the EU.

Price errors happen a lot of times during sales, but removal of titles all together just seems strange.

I wonder if this is a back end issue on Epic's part, where they don't have the proper tools in place to properly manage titles during a sale.

Or just hiccups and odd bugs that haven't cropped up since this is their first big sale.

This too!

You'd think they'd try to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying a big sale like this. Errors happen but when your store doesn't even have a shopping cart and other basic features, you kinda want a sale like this to be an unqualified win for consumers.

Maybe put that Fortnite money somewhere other than exclusives for your unfinished storefront?

That first one happens on Steam all the time, so hopefully nobody taking sides on that.

The second is a little more rude. It's a real bad look and with all the scrutiny had no chance of ever going unnoticed so I'm a little surprised they did it at all.

I should've grabbed hades when I saw it for 6.99, damn

I've read that the games had to be taken off the store because this is a store wide sale and the way the EGS is set up doesn't let games be excluded without taking them off the platform entirely.

So they will be back on after the sale?

So its more a shitty UI than being petty if true. Still an odd story either way

@bradbrains: yup.

This is just a technical oddity. Just like i've heard that gamepages have to be manually set up by Epic & them prioritizing adding new games is the reason they haven't put all their older titles on the store yet. I haven't looked into that claim yet, but i can see that being another one of those weird quirks

@jesus_phish said:

I agree, it's kind of shady and bad to up the price of a product before a sale.

You should check your information before posting....EGS didn't pull Vampire, Paradox did(according to Epic and Paradox). Seemingly the same with Klei. These aren't "hiccups". If anything this is a point in FAVOR of the EGS(if you stand with developers). EGS is basically losing out on sales period by allowing devs to choose whether or not they participate in sales.

@jesus_phish: thanks for the heads up! I just bought a shitload of games for not a shitload of money.

Did I just hear something about Borderlands 3 being pulled too, or at least suspended?
Trouble in paradise it seems.

@rocketblast0063: Yep. Borderlands 3 is now MIA on the store front.

That makes sense, but if they epic store is actually paying them for the sale it seems pretty silly not to participate lol. That's basically saying "F-you" to the customer at that point.

It's important to note all games that are delisted from the store were pulled by the game publishers. Epic was paying the for the discount rate and not the publisher so it's unclear what the protest is other than miffing about enforced global sale periods they don't even have to pay for.

It's weird that any publishers would be interested in losing out on a sales push for free. It's even weirder that we have radio silence from nearly every party involved in whatever this is.

I've heard some talk from people theorycrafting that publishers think it's dicey to lower the price early in a game's lifespan no matter who pays the difference. Sites like IsThereAnyDeal & CheapShark will track that lower price and now a sizeable chunk of potential buyers check the sales history graph & sees that the game is already getting discounted. They hold off from buying the game at full price & wait for a better deal to appear, when the devs were never interested in offering that discount in the first place.

Between these sales & the mandatory streamer cuts, Epic is taking a lot of the decision space away from the devs & publishers regarding to pricing.

@onemanarmyy: That's my guess on it.

I was using psprices to track ps4vr game prices because I hadn't bothered ever looking till I got a headset end of last year. I wanted Rhombus of Ruin(just beat it, it's neat! not must play though) and it was on sale for 15$ at one point from 20 after getting my headset, BUT, it HAD been on sale for 4$ before so I waited; it hit 4$ again, I bought it.

Seems like the same deal here. They don't want to lower the price of what their game is valued at in the eyes of consumers too early or too harsh.

I was actually going to buy Anno 1800, too. Maybe I should try and strongarm dawn of discovery into working so I can get my city building fix. Damned exclusives.

pretty wild that borderlands is still MIA on the store. i understand why- they clearly want to maintain the perception of a $60 price tag- but you figure both gearbox and epic would want to take advantage of the increased digital 'foot-traffic' being generated by the sale.