The spirit of the holidays has infected Epic Games Store, gifting is now available
Players can now gift to their friends
Now your friends have no excuses when asked why they haven’t played Alan Wake 2. Another milestone feature is delivered to the Epic Games Store before the end of the year, just in time for their upcoming Black Friday and Holiday sales. One of the most common complaints about the store were it’s ‘anemic’ features that pale in comparison to other stores like Valve’s Steam, CDProjekt’s GOG and Microsoft’s Xbox PC. One feature that has been highly requested has been the ability to gift games to other players, which has now shown up in the storepages with a nice gift button.
There are limitations mentioned in the support pages, those limitations being:
- You and your friend are in different regions, and cross-country gifting isn’t yet supported.
- You haven’t been friends long enough to send gifts yet. Gifting requires at least 2 days of friendship.
- Your friend’s account is temporarily restricted
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The "Gift" button is placed nicely near the "Buy" button, it can also be seen on the homepage carousel -
The options you can have for sending the gift, if sending the gift later it will arrive at a set time -
There is a new option next to your "Wishlist" called "Gifts" where you can view, accept or decline your gifts
Alongside these restrictions it doesn’t seem possible to gift preorders and it’s not clear if that’s planned to be a feature. The reasons for these limitations are most likely to curb gifting abuse from cheaper regions which is an ongoing battle with digital storefronts, with Steam blocking cross region gifting if the price difference between the two regions are more than 10%.
This looks to be Epic remedying the warranted critisism’s about lack of features that have plagued the store for the years and they look to have finally gotten themselves into a nice cadence of delivering, hopefully this can continue into the coming years to make the platform feel more complete and less barren, perhaps an update to social tools i.e. chat, enhanced profiles and better reviews are on the way too.
This is adding onto a growing list of features being delivered by Epic, with their mobile app being updated to include an authenticator and pre-loading also being enabled for developers if they want it.
