The Unreal series may have been shelved years ago, but Epic is letting its first two installments live on through the Internet Archive.
Excellent that they don’t engage in Nintendo level community hostility and at least let people who care about old games preserve them.
Stream goes one step further and actively maintains their legacy games playable. That is commitment.
Gog goes another step and provides a guarantee on stuff they’ve modified to ensure it works, and provide an offline installer that’s entirely self-contained for archviing purposes.
I prefer to buy GOG when possible, Steam second. I even have some duplicated titles across vendors.
Every 10,000 cycles Epic has a small w. I’ll take it.
Sussy, but i’m glad
While I don’t approve of Epic’s stabs at exclusivity, Steam needs a competitor to keep it in check, and one that is making some efforts to support the preservation of art is a welcome choice.
But GOG is alresdy the Steam with Principles…
As much as I like them I don’t think you can call them a competitor.
I’ve seen games that are available on both platforms that sell hundreds of times more copies on Steam simply because of steam’s reputation.
A competitor actually has to be able to compete.
Im pretty sure gog is more popular than epic games . Alghtough i might be biased due to my country of origin.
My experience with GOG is that it is a fringe option, at least in the combined North American (USA+Canada) culture. Plus, the unfortunate reality is that in many cases GOG’s principles preclude it from being a genuine competitor to Steam. Insisting on being DRM free means half of released games never go to the platform, so it will always be the secondary “better if” option.
I worry about Steam’s functional monopoly on PC game access. It hasn’t been an issue so far, because it has remembered that it is, first and foremost, a service, providing consumer protection through a generous refund policy and supporting devs with easy access to simple matchmaking and anti-cheat systems. But without a healthy competitor, it would be easy for Steam to start milking it’s users and developers alike.
Winning move from Epic. Showing what should be done for abandoned games. Give it back to the people so it can continued to be enjoyed by the community that will continue to care for it.
There’s literally no reason not to do that. The game has long since made money and keeping it out of public ownership is now not doing anyone any favors.
Some studios are just intransigent.
Oh man, UT2004 was my fave arena death match back in the day, so much fun. Hope they release more!
