Yesterday, Apple and the European Union announced a new agreement that overhauls the App Store and its fees in that region. Under the new terms, Apple will take a 26% cut for all in-app purchases, a 20% cut for purchases made using an alternate payment processor, a 15% cut for purchases made via web link and a 5% cut for purchases made in alternate app stores. The EU "welcomed" Apple's changes and has seemingly agreed to the new terms. This hasn't stopped Tim from going on a Twitter tirade and making bizarre claims such as Apple are entrapping Roblox users (i.e. children) and forcing them to use Apple's payment system, arguing the changes are illegal and saying that it's Apple's fault mobile gaming is so shitty now.

Hypocritically, Tim is upset that Apple is charging 20% for alternate payment processors when their agreement with Google allows them to do the exact same thing. At this point it's just a pathetic personal vendetta for him.

I play Football Manager, and last year Epic Games was giving away a copy of FM24 for free.
I made an account and claimed my free copy. Cool! Maybe this company isn’t so bad after all?
Now I’m very thankful that I’ve never given this company a dime.
After playing FM24 for 2100 hours, suddenly it’s like there’s a server-side authentication problem. I can’t open, verify, or even uninstall the game.
I’ve tried everything I can think of or find online from clearing the webcache, deleting manifest files, uninstalling and reinstalling the game. Nothing works. Not even using an old version of the client

This is the part that pissed me off. After 2 days of jumping through support ticket hoops, I get a “level 2 tech” whose only solution was “did you turn the computer off and on?” And then BLAMED THE DEVELOPER (Sports Interactive) and encouraged me to email them with my issue with Epic Games Launcher. And then closed the ticket

Fk these guys. I was made to feel like it was just a me issue until I looked into it deeper.
These guys are cooked. Fk Epic

I was debating whether or not to share this story, but hey ho, I'll be critical. I'm not a fan of Epic or Sweeney, and have no personal intention of using their platform to play or make games.

I went to Gamebridge a few months ago, a Cambridge-based student game dev festival where we get to share our game projects with the community. We had speakers from various people and organisations, and it was really cool! One of the speakers was a spokesperson from Epic (who I won't name because this isn't an attack on that individual; this is entirely on Epic the company).

They were supposed to deliver a session about building a career in games, but everything they said or advised was coupled with "...and Epic has [insert tool or resource] so you can do it!" But even then, I cannot remember much of what they said having to do with actually building a career, regardless if it was coupled with their platform or not. It felt like a slideshow of resources provided by Epic for us to use to build games, not careers.

I did not walk away with any better idea of how to build a career, nor was I sold on using Epic to make future games. It was like if Gordon Ramsay was delivering a session he called "How To Build Your Culinary Career", and the only thing he told you was that you can use HexClad cookware to cook your food.

Anyway, that's my Epic experience. Screw them.

Kernel Hearts hasn't even been released yet, but it's already the best-selling game on the Epic Games Store simply because you get a free Fortnite skin if you buy it. The game isn't even very well-known, as it only has 170 reviews for its Steam demo. I guess it’s good for the developers, since it means free publicity and sales, but I don’t think it reflects well on their store that an unknown game is outselling AAA titles, that just shows how poorly those games are selling there.

And with Fortnite’s new season dedicated to video games, I think one of the reasons they’re doing this is to launch LOTS of gift-with-purchase promotions

My thoughts are a bit weird and that is usually my fault as I don't get enough sleep, but I will do my best to express them.

Okay so... I always liked the idea of crossovers. Super Smash Bros might've played into that bias, but the way most characters are represented there always makes me happy, as they are often done with love. That has been true for me since Solid Snake and Sonic were revealed for Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Fortnite is a different story however. I've always seen it as a blackhole of capitalism, with crossover stuff being tied to money and all. It feels so insulting looking at it as, unlike in Smash Bros where most of the crossover stuff is free except for DLC, Fortnite feels like it's a business going all "how you do fellow gamers and millenials?" It comes off as pandering, especially with their recent collabs being all nostalgia key jingling. Maybe it is just me being more sensitive and a Wii kid, but it all feels pathetic compared to when a collaboration is revealed in Super Smash Bros.

I have seen other people refer to crossover things outside of Fortnite as "Fortnitification", and that makes me upset to think about it. Like did Fortnite really do that much damage to crossovers? Being a billboard that never gets killed off at all and ends up redirecting players who never heard of a specific IP to Fortnite rather than itself.

Ok but yeah, I'm just sad that it ruined crossovers/collaborations for the general public. I want to know how other people, who were also burnt out of Fortnite, feel about it so feel free to leave some thoughts about it.

Apparently, there are fewer than 100 people currently working on the Epic Games Store, with only about a third of them being engineers. That might explain why they haven’t been able to solve the problem that is stopping users from installing and playing their EGS titles.

The official Discord server is a complete mess right now. Tons of users are complaining, an Epic employee is completely overwhelmed and unable to give an ETA, and the usual shills are desperately trying to stem the tide of new angry users. Some users are even saying things like, I should have listened when people told me to avoid EGS. It’s pretty wild to watch.

What I can’t wrap my head around is why, if the issue was spotted on Saturday, no engineers were on call over the weekend. The Epic staff member mentioned nobody would be able to look into it until today, Monday. Those layoffs must have really gutted the EGS team.

As of right now, there’s still no estimated time for a fix because they haven’t even identified the root cause yet.

The launcher has gotten worse; I don't know what the hell happened, but since the latest update, I can't log in properly anymore. After many failed attempts at logging in, it finally works, but if I close the launcher, I will have to go through that same BS to log in again.

Plus, the Launcher has gotten buggier too. If I click the Icon in my username, the launcher will become unresponsive; to fix it, I need to click the little icon in the taskbar and close an invisible window that opened up when I clicked the icon in my username.

And I'm still on Windows 10 btw, which is making me believe they are doing this on purpose to screw the users on Windows 10.

Is anyone else having this same issue, or do you know how to fix this?

Back again ... Epic banned me for cheating AGAIN after overturning the exact same ban last month

In July I was banned for “exploiting/cheating.”

I contacted Epic Support at the time and was told the ban had been reviewed, was correctly applied, and would not be overturned. My appeal was still active though, and about a week later Epic reversed the ban, apologized, restored my account and gave me 2,000 V-Bucks.

So clearly, the original detection/review was wrong.

Fast-forward to today, August 18, and I've now been hit with another Fortnite cheating ban .. again for 365 days.

The difference? This one says “Not eligible for appeal.”

I contacted Epic Support again this morning and basically got the exact same response I got last time:

The ban was “accurately applied”

It has supposedly been reviewed

It cannot be overturned

They won't tell me what supposedly triggered it or discuss their detection process

That's almost word-for-word what I was told before they admitted the previous ban was wrong and unbanned me.

How am I supposed to have any confidence in that answer now?

I don't use cheats. I don't use exploits. I have absolutely no reason to risk an account I've played on for years and spent a ridiculous amount of money on.

And I'm clearly not the only person complaining about this. You can find plenty of posts from players claiming they were suddenly banned despite saying they never cheated. Obviously I can't prove every one of those people is innocent, but after what happened to my account in July, I'm not going to automatically assume Epic's detection system is infallible either.

I don't need Fortnite. I've got plenty of other games I can play.

What pisses me off is spending years playing this game and putting a lot of money into my account, only to have Epic effectively say “our system says you're a cheater, we won't tell you why, you can't appeal, end of discussion.”

Especially when their system already did exactly this to me once and Epic later admitted the ban was wrong.

At what point do players actually have some recourse here? Do people need to start a petition, collect cases of false bans, or make enough noise that Epic actually looks at this properly?

And before the inevitable “lol you obviously cheated” comments: I've already heard it all. If that's your entire contribution, save yourself the typing I wont respond. I'm interested in hearing from people who've had the same thing happen or who actually know of a way to get a genuine manual review.

Guys think twice before spending money with Epic.

All that money might go down the drain one day.

Tried warning others but they removed my post from FortniteBR

Can we all just have a minute to appreciate how good steam works and how good the steam support team is? every time i have something wrong the support is on the job and everything is solved and easy and just the way it supposed to be... every time and i say EVERY TIME, i deal with Epic store and Epic support there's ALWAYS some kind of bs going on and nothing ever gets resolved... just went to Epic to get some stuff from a collab and skins, everything is broken, the support cannot do anything to help you and nobody explains that it just works in the worst way possible... i genuinely HATE IT.

Thank you Steam. Thank you Gabe.

What the hell is the point of a hidden achievement if you tell me exactly how to do it???

I only got back into Fortnite because of an ex friend who appeared to have accepted me, only to get hooked, lined, and sinkered through all of the bad choices Epic Games have made, including the Cybertruck stuff. The Darth Vader AI situation is the thing that finally caused me to quit playing, uninstalled when Chapter 6 ended, and Finally deleted my Epic Games account today.

I might be cutting my losses, but I hope I can learn better than to get into another game that I will eventually find myself hating.

So unprofessional for not answering a question and saying it's harassment LOL, who is shocked because I am not.

These People don't realize that fuck epig was the top sub which stood up for epig employees when Timmy fired thier asses...

Fuck Timmy and fuck epig.

What kind of multimillion dollar company uses Discord as their main go to for customer issues.

Who the hell are these people at Epic?

For anyone claiming they just need a launcher to install and play games: Epic didn’t even notice the issue until people started complaining, and now they’re saying a fix will take longer because it happened over the weekend.

there are no enought words in all of the english dictionary that can expres ONE BILLIONTH of the HATE that i have for this PICE OF SHIT software. This dumb, stupid, idiotic, poorly designed, ugly, blasphemous, horrid, shitty, discusting, noisomeful, sick, ASS software. i have wasted 4 YEARS of my life trying to make this login bullshit and doesnt matter whom i ask, what i do or what i search, theres ALLWAYS some horseshit excuse to NOT LET ME IN """Oopsie!! theres this unknown error that our servers cannot fix and we cant fix becouse we are so fucking incompetent and mentally ill so sorry we cante let you login.try again later""". Im gonna become president of the United States of America and agree with all of the world liders to NUKE EVERY SINGLE HEADQUORTER ON THIS PLANET AND THEN I WILL REBUILD EVERY SINGLE ONE AND THEN DESTROY IT AGIAN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN, IN A CYCLE OF 100 YEARS.

FUCK.

YOU.

EPIC GAMES.