Nowadays, it’s common to buy Steam keys outside Steam to use them in Valve’s system. Epic Games Store will go against the trends on this front, too.

Epic Games Store isn’t getting a lot of praise recently (especially how even Valve is investigating why the EGS launcher is analyzing the Steam files…), but what can we do? We don’t work for Tim Sweeney… but what about this key sales approach?

The Division 2 – outside Ubisoft’s uPlay – is exclusive to Epic Games Store on PC, and the pre-ordering worked just as fine until March 15, the game’s release date. Why? Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, has explained the situation on Twitter: „[…] We wholeheartedly support key sales for non-exclusive games.” The key term here is „non-exclusive!”

Epic Games Store-exclusive games cannot be bought via say, Green Man Gaming or GamersGate (two of many third-party examples of legitimate Steam key resellers – G2A has been called a „grey market” for a good reason…). Instead, you have to either use Epic’s website or the Epic Games Store launcher. It splits the customers (us…), as the exclusivity splits the PC community up. You need more than one launcher to access everything. Even Sweeney understands the issue…

„I understand. I’d rather have one single game library and movie library too. Hopefully someday all of these stores, including ours, will be replaced with a 100% open digital commerce ecosystem giving developers an even better deal than 88%. Till then, we need competition!”, Sweeney added.

Still, Epic is still looking suspicious…

Source: DualShockers