this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Privacy

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Like what the title says. There's always a catch unless it's FOSS. So, what is the catch with them giving games for free that you can keep forever? What will the developers of the games get as a thank you?

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[–] glitching@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

it's not "forever". it's however long they don't have any ideas to the contrary.

why it was implemented - so that executive #279 can show executive #114 that number go up. look how our engagement is rising! look at all them people downloading our app! when I took over from exec #317, number was this big, lookie now!

same way google made their search worse, so you have to search multiple times, thus upping the engagment, page views, etc. and then exec X goes to exec Y and say "look there's a huge rise in searches where my bonus at!"

[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

It's not about engagement. As the court documents have shown, they want to increase the number of users and then see how many of those convert to paying customers.

[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

it’s not “forever”.

So true. Today it is known that you only buy a license of the games from Steam. And since Epic Games works in the same way as Steam, this also applies to them. They can delete any games from your library whenever they want - just like that *click*. I stopped buying games on Steam when that came out publicly and moved to GOG instead.

[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

At least in the first years, most of the games released on the Epic Games Store were DRM-free, in the strictest sense in that you could move the folder from PC to PC without needing the launcher, like on GOG. You can see the data as of today here.

[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Still below 600 (if the numbers are dead-exact) which makes me glad. GOG should be the only place for DRM free games. But that's my opinion. What I know of, GOG is today the only place for downloadable installation files of games.

[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 1 points 17 hours ago

The numbers represent confirmed cases, so there could be more. There used to be a GOG thread dedicated to testing games for DRM on Epic, but then it was locked and its main contributors have switched to adding the information to the wiki.