The Epic Games Store is making more moves to becoming a powerful competitor to Steam and Valve’s dominance on the digital distribution market in games. The company has revamped parts of their policies to appeal to a larger audience for their digital platforms. The new refund policy is a two week long no-questions-asked policy that allow gamers to refund any games they purchase. You are limited by the amount of playtime you can have in a game to be eligible for a refund, two hours specifically, but inside those periods you can get your money back really easily.
This policy change was clearly inspired by the backlash against the policy currently at work in Fortnite, which is built around a yearly budget of having 3 refund tokens that last you a lifetime and then you cannot refund an item ever again. Needless to say, but gamers didn’t like that very much, and it would never work on a storefront. It looks like Epic wants gamers to have more piece of mind when it comes to purchases on their digital storefront.
In other news, the company announced that they’re working to implement support for regional pricing, making the storefront more accessible to millions of gamers across the globe. Epic plans to add support for a total of 30 different regions / 130 countries along with all of the regional currencies for pricing, which will likely increase their market share a bit. This all means that gamers will be much less likely to overpay for a game due to currency conversion shenanigans.
SteamSpy creator and Epic employee Sergey Galyonkin posted some details about new policies, and to promise that more changes and adjustments would come in the future. So if you’re hoping for Epic to implement some new feature that hasn’t been discussed yet, just hang on.
So all in all, the future is looking a bit brighter for Epic and their attempts to challenge Steam. Only time will tell how this all pans out though.
