The game has completed its year-long Epic Games Store exclusivity period and migrated to Valve’s digital platform, but the Steam version of Dead Island 2 (currently available for €/$30; the sale runs until April 29) has not been received with great enthusiasm.

Dead Island 2 was a game that for a long time was considered vaporware, a product that would never be released. It was finally pushed to the finish line by the Embracer Group (which recently announced that it would be split into three parts, and there was talk of this in the news). Critically, it didn’t get huge scores, but it was well received by gamers, as Deep Silver produced its “biggest release” with over 1 million sales the weekend after launch, even for the Epic Games Store exclusivity.

On Steam, however, the overall picture is not very positive. The reason is strange: it’s because of Epic Online Services. This is a free SDK (software development kit) that provides several features needed for multiplayer gameplay. Matchmaking, voice communication, friend lists, leaderboards, that sort of thing, regardless of engine or platform. Since Dead Island 2 is also somewhat of a community game, it’s understandable that it would require this as well. On SteamDB, you can see that many people are playing it (PUBG, Rust, Warframe, Elden Ring, Rocket League, Palworld, TESO, Mount and Blade 2, Sea of Thieves, Payday 2, Hades…).

For Steam users, the problem is any presence of Epic Games. Of course, it would complicate matters if it were a game using the Unreal Engine… and it uses UE4. A developer at Plaion (Deep Silver’s parent company) wrote on Steam that if you were playing alone or with other Steam users, you wouldn’t need the Epic Games Launcher, but if cross-play with them was important to you, you would need it to sync your friends lists.

Sometimes users overdo the criticism.

Source: PCGamer, SteamDB, Steam