Epic Games kills and buries its legacy
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On the 14th of December 2022, without warning, Epic Games announced the immediate end of sale and online service for many of their older games.
Notable among these games is the original Unreal series, which is responsible for where they are now.
Thankfully anyone that already bought the games can still download them, and community run services exist for providing online multiplayer support.
Many people that play Unreal and UT99 use the current community patch from OldUnreal, so would not have noticed Epic switching off their masterserver anyway.Unfortunately with no clarification of the status of these games we don't even know if they are now considered to be abandonware, so sharing links to downloads is still a problem.
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Just goes to show that any idea that owning any game bought on these services is simply an illusion.
I've been on Steam since it started but certainly have no illusion that I own any of the 500+ games I have on there. If Steam goes bankrupt and disappears they will all be unplayable, or if it decides to remove a game from being playable, they can do so with the snap of a finger.
That's why I always try to buy my games on GOG when I can, and download the offline installers for those I really care about.
I rarely play online games, so losing connectivity to centralised gameservers is not really a big problem for me, but the UT community is large and dedicated and will find their ways around this I'm sure.
I have tried to avoid Epic as long as possible. I seriously disliked their practice of buying up exclusive deals when they launched and have stayed away.
I recently purchased the Sackboy game from Steam and it comes with a requirement to install the Epic Launcher. Ugh what a complete buggy mess that thing is...
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The European union is currently working on a "Digital Markets Act".
I was really hoping that part of this act would involve banning the sale of individual digital goods under "licenses" that let companies weasel their way around the "you bought it, you own it" idea that, until the internet came along, was the way things worked.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, the DMA is only considering gatekeepers, unfair competition, and isn't adding many new consumer facing rights. Which is a bit of a disappointment.
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Thankfully if you bought it already you still get to reinstall it, and keys can still be found on sites that resell, which as far as we know they will have to honour.
I have always promoted GOG as first choice for the same reason. You get to keep a local installer if you want it.
Some theories have been going round, and it seems very possible that their lack of willing or ability to refactor those old games to work with their current network is why they chose to switch off the support.
UT3 is to be put back out once they move it to their current system.Some of the old Unreal games don't need a centralised server system because they are able to use multiple masterservers, which can be changed in the config file.
Up to date Unreal and UT99 users are commonly connecting to 5 or more masterservers, so they will only notice the lack of servers that only uplinked to Epic.There are several options for replacement of the old GameSpy network because of the broader implications when GS went offline.
A few companies and communities adopted 333networks as their replacement, and have so far had a reliable service with more uptime than before.
OpenSpy has also taken great strides in adding support for many abandoned games and is another drop-in replacement for the old GS networks.
(both are open source projects).For many games that are hard-coded, or even for console games if you use a drop-in replacement (meaning you don't use an extra client), all you need to do is edit HOSTS or your router to redirect from the old domain used by your game to the IP address of the replacement.
If Epic have truly abandoned these games then maybe they will get community re-releases with all the modern fixes and updates.
Duke Nukem has never seen so much love as this year. -
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