I might be a little bit late on this one but just in case you also missed this news, the Epic Games Store (EGS) is having a Mega Sale which will end on June 15. As always, you can expect plenty of great deals and not to mention a chance to redeem free games throughout the sales period. This week’s free game is Death Stranding.
Now on to the other interesting announcement made by Epic at the very start of the sales. On May 18, Epic introduced the Epic Rewards Program that lets you earn 5% back on all eligible store purchases of games, apps, add-ons and even virtual currency such as V-Bucks for Fortnite. You will automatically earn your rewards, which will then be added to your Rewards Balance two weeks (14 days) after the purchase. After that, you can then apply said rewards during your next checkout for an even bigger discount and this even works hand-in-hand with the coupons Epic tends to give out during sales.
Overall, this is very similar to Nintendo’s Gold Points system which lets you get a better deal on games you want. However, Epic’s endeavour has a much longer expiration date which is 25 months from the date on which you received your reward compared to just 12 months for Nintendo.
This is definitely a more rewarding experience compared to Steam’s version of its rewards program that only lets you spend on things to ‘bling’ up your profile such as profile backgrounds, stickers, emoticons and etc or used to gift awards to other Steam users.
However, as someone who primarily purchases and plays games on the PC, especially via Steam, I am not sure if this will actually make me buy more games from the EGS. As it stands, I mainly use the EGS to redeem its weekly free games and so far, my library has just sat there gathering virtual dust. If I remember correctly, I have only downloaded and played no more than five games from the EGS but this was also because they were exclusives.
At the end of the day, while this is a solid effort on Epic’s part, the EGS is still very barebones compared to Steam as it lacks the bells and whistles such as user reviews, easy mod downloads via the Steam Workshop, community pages and so on. Plus, I am not sure how other gamers feel but having to manage yet another game library can be quite a headache. As it is I already have duplicates of multiple titles in my libraries across EGS, GOG and Steam.