[olliej]

That's nice of them (esp given their track record of shittiness). It's always seemed absurd to me how companies refuse to just make old games that they no longer sell available for free, or just leave them available for cheap purchase. I just don't understand "we refuse to make this available, even for money" just because something is old.

I can kind of understand the behavior in the case of non-game software, e.g if a company makes a tool to do X, and someone wants to do X, you want them to buy the new profitable version not the old one for cheap/free. But I just don't think that applies to games - even a "remake" that is literally just a graphics update (no gameplay, UI, or anything changes, just increased asset resolution) people prefer the updated graphics so will generally buy that when it becomes available, but in the absence of such an update the old game is not competing for new ones.

[TravisPeacock]

I think part of the problem is if they provide a game, even for free, then they are responsible for the security of that game. Even if not legally, they don't want an article saying "unreal hacked by Ransomware people infecting anyone who joined a public server, people could download the game on the Epic store for free"

At least if a third party provides it then it's not really an official copy of the game.