Epic Games Store Launches Its First-Ever Mega Sale, Hits A Few Speed Bumps Along The Way

epic games store mega sale may 2019The Epic Games Store has just kicked off its own version of a Steam Sale with their first-ever “Mega Sale”. Epic is offering up to 75% discounts on their catalog of games plus $10 off for every game purchased that’s worth $14.99 and up from now until June 13th. Sounds good right? Well, everything was going great until two highly-awaited games were suddenly pulled from the store.

According to Kotaku, upcoming action RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 and space survival simulator Oxygen Not Included are now both showing 404 errors after briefly being available at discounted prices. Apparently, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox chose to opt out of the sale at the last moment. Oxygen Not Included’s publisher Klei has yet to comment on the issue.

“If a developer or publisher chooses to not participate in our sales, we will honor that decision. Paradox Interactive has chosen to not participate in the Epic Mega Sale and the game has been temporarily removed from sale. If you’ve purchased Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 during the period when the discount did apply at the time of check out, Epic will honor that price.”

Aside from disappearing games, there was also confusion with the pricing of Hades. Supergiant’s early access roguelite was initially priced at $6.99 which the developer changed a couple of times during the first hours of the sale increasing both the game’s sale price and its base price up to $24.99 from the original $19.99 price tag. This, naturally, generated a lot of negative feedback prompting Supergiant to revert the game’s price back to $19.99. Epic’s $10 off offer brings the game’s price tag down to $9.99 where, the devs confirm, it will stay for the duration of the Mega Sale.

“After the sale is over, on June 14, we will be raising the game’s retail price to $24.99,” said Supergiant. “We had intended to raise the retail price of the game soon, but made the decision rashly as part of the sale—we didn’t provide advance notice to our customers, despite previously stating we would do so. That was our mistake, and we sincerely apologize. To all our players, thank you for your patience and understanding around this.”

Now it’s perfectly understandable for Epic to encounter a few hiccups here and there especially since it’s their first stab at a store-wide sale, but with the Epic Games Store already gathering negative feedback due to its lack of features, it still has a long way to go before it becomes a worthy rival for the mighty Steam monopoly.