The Epic Games Store is facing server crashes and technical issues due to the popularity of its latest holiday free game offering. EGS users across the world rushed to the storefront in an attempt to access the free game. Instead, they've been met with major technical issues as Epic Games has struggled to deal with the traffic. While many users have been able to get through, others have been forced to log in dozens of times, reload their attempted purchase, or have gotten an error saying the servers are down entirely.
Epic Games has made it an annual tradition to release free games during the holidays ever since the Epic Games Store launched. This year Epic is offering 15 days of free games, which started rolling out on December 15 and will continue daily through December 29. Games offered include Sable, Them's Fightin' Herds, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and on Christmas Eve Metro Last Light Redux. It's been a great run, but the Christmas Day free gift is popular on another level.
For Christmas Day, Epic Games partnered with Kojima Productions to offer Death Stranding for free. Death Stranding is three years old by now, so it's by no means an old game. But the excitement over Kojima's announcement of Death Stranding 2 during The Game Awards has led to an unanticipated wave of excitement. There's also the matter of Epic Games accidentally releasing the Director's Cut for free instead of the standard version of the game, which has since been corrected.
The wave of Epic Games Store users trying to get Death Stranding for free has led to some curious issues with the storefront. One user reported their client changed randomly to the Chinese language. Others claim the game was removed from their Epic Games Store library after purchase. Most, however, report that they're stuck in some quasi-logged-in state where they can't access their libraries or purchase games, though the EGS client still otherwise acts like they're logged in.
With Death Stranding now having been available for some hours, the technical issues facing the storefront are starting to clear up. The correct version of Death Stranding is now available, the servers aren't wholly crashing anymore, and signing in is sticking for more and more EGS users. While it's frustrating to deal with these technical issues at all, Epic Games has historically been quick to get things fixed.
All's well that end's well, it seems. The Epic Games Store is known to have these kinds of technical issues when a high-traffic event occurs. Fortnite updates, for example, can cause the store to crash from time to time. And for EGS users that wanted the Director's Cut of Death Stranding but missed the initial free availability, the upgrade is currently 40% off and costs just $6. As for whether some users' clients are still displaying Chinese text, that remains a mystery. Hopefully, the Epic Games Store will have that solved soon, too.
