Classic Unreal Games Delisted

[sirarthurhipoint]

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-is-delisting-almost-every-unreal-game-but-making-unreal-tournament-3-free/

 

The positive: Unreal Tournament 3 is getting rebranded as Unreal Tournament 3X, and will be free to play.

 

The negative:  Every Unreal and UT game has been delisted from Steam, GOG... everywhere.  If you haven't bought it, you never can again.

 

The rationale: Epic will be shutting down the online servers for the old games.

 

Wait a minute... these games are not only capable of offline play, but can be played online via LAN or IP Direct Connect.  Why did they do this?  Epic Games just gave Unreal the Games As A Service treatment, even though these games were NOT Games As A Service.

[Alyxx Thorne]

How I see it:

Every Unreal game (except UT3) is now free and community driven. As far as I'm concerned, delisting those games from every service and not providing any way to play them online is making it pretty okay in my eyes to pirate them.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Alyxx Thorne (see edit history)

[sirarthurhipoint]

Update on all of this.  I didn't catch this before but just recently came across it.  Source here: https://www.gog.com/forum/unreal_series/epic_to_turn_off_online_servers_and_services_for_games_including_ut_games/post26

 

From user EnforcerSentintel on the GOG Forums:

 

Quote

Hey,

To keep you guys in the loop, there's a bit more to this story than previously known. Epic removing the Unreal franchise from storefronts is in connection with them recently being sued half a billion by the FTC.

While Epic are totally guilty in this case of lining Fortnite with 'dark pattern' psychologies throughout the microtransaction system in Fortnite which mostly exploit (but not limited to) younger users, the FTC is also guilty too of driving the Unreal franchise off of storefronts.

As part of the FTC's punishment towards Epic, the FTC basically (in a heavy handed and non legal way) invoked COPPA, and are now claiming that "Just because a game is labelled as mature or has a mature age rating, does not prevent underage users from playing it", meaning the FTC are threatening Epic that an age rating is not enough anymore, and give or take threatened them to either add COPPA compliant overarching parental controls to these titles or remove them from being sold.

Over the past week or so, OldUnreal are trying to work something out with Epic in order to get the franchise back on storefronts in some way, Epic are on Christmas holiday for a while though and the community liaison will be back in a few days, but Epic are regardless keeping their lines of communication open with us.

 

So it looks like this might not actually be permanent.  At least, the delisting part.

Edited January 4, 2023 by sirarthurhipoint (see edit history)

[IceLizard]

Yo,

So to elaborate a bit further regarding Unreal/Unreal Tournament games (I am the user EnforcerSentinel from the GOG forums quoted above) -

This was discussed at length in the OldUnreal (fan) community, in which keeps an NDA with Epic Games so that they can continue to update the first two games (Unreal with version 227 and UT with version 469), as it's closed source.

The post I made on GOG might not entirely correct, alot of this was the reason theorized by another moderator and I assumed it was based on information which we weren't given (it still might be, honestly it's not per se confirmed ye or ne).

Regardless of whether or not it's true, Epic (or specifically some of the higher ups) seem to be keen on keeping the games buried anyway. It also should be stressed that there are still people at Epic who care about the franchise but unfortunately cannot override those higher ups. The OldUnreal patch development team still has permission to update Unreal and UT and they recently had their NDA's renewed at behest of Stacey "Flak" Conley, who has always been Unreal and UT's community manager. Flak also gave us a shoutout on the Unreal Engine birthday stream before Christmas last year.

Also regarding Unreal and UT's masterservers, Epic's masterserver shutdowns didn't really affect us, as we've relied on community masterservers since the gamespy shutdown.

Aside from 227 and 469, there is also an open source legal Unreal Engine 1 recreation effort being made named Surreal Engine, too. A user would still be required to own their specific games, all Surreal Engine does is replace the Engine and subsystems that behaves akin to the original Ue1 but not entirely identicle.

So, while I think that the delisting of the franchise is quite vile, atleast there are some positives happening. Unreal and UT are also still both played online and mapped/modded for today.

I know this thread is over a year old, sorry that it's a bit of a necropost - but as i was scrolling through this forum and found my quote here I thought i should supply more information, and it seemed to make more sense than starting a new thread.

Also was drawn to this forum in support of the valuable legal campaign currently being run by Ross which I have alot of appreciation for doing this (also I it was pleasant to see Ross still doing his thing since I last watched Freemans mind over a decade ago). As a UK citizen I also signed the petition towards parliament relevant to the situation, and even though I don't play The Crew I will absolutely help out in any way that i can. I certainly think game and cultural preservation is an entirely necessary thing and direly requires legal precedent protecting it.

Cheers!