Epic Games Apologizes For The Death Stranding Freebie Fiasco

When we talk about companies outside the gaming big 3, Epic Games is one name that we can’t leave out. Everyone knows about its most popular product, Fortnite, but it has also made the PC market more competitive via its Epic Games Store. Add the Unreal Engine to Epic Games’ impressive portfolio, and the praise the company gets seems low.

But even the biggest make mistakes sometimes, and that’s what Epic did on Christmas Day. Epic Games Store accidentally made the Death Stranding Director’s Cut a freebie but took it back after a short while. Now, the company has apologized for this and said only the base game should have been made free originally.

Major Takeaways

• Epic Games has apologized for the Death Stranding confusion on Christmas.
• The base version of the game was the one going to be free, not the Director’s Cut, according to the agreement with 505 Games.
• An intern made the mistake of swapping the two, and the company is sorry for the inconvenience.

A user on NeoGaf shared this news with the masses. They put up a screenshot of the company apologizing on the Chinese social media website Weibo. Epic Games has given us some info on why this happened, and it’s kind of hilarious.

In the translation of the apology, which is originally in Chinese, the company blames an employee for the fiasco. Basically, the employee in question mistakenly set up the Director’s Cut as the free game. Currently, an intern, according to the apology, the employee did this by mistake.

The Standard edition of Death Stranding was the original free game. Based on the agreement with the publishers, Epic Games couldn’t legally give away the Director’s Cut. Quote unquote, the statement goes on to read,

An Epic employee (currently an Intern) mistakenly set up the free game as Death Stranding Director’s Cut instead of the Standard Edition last night. Our agreement with the publisher was that only the standard version would be released for free, and our team made a mistake. We are currently in discussions with the publisher about this issue.”

So, Epic Games only agreed on a deal for the base Death Stranding with publisher 505 Games. Now, it seems like they are also in a bit of trouble due to this mistake. The company again apologized and said it was truly sorry for the inconvenience:

We apologize to those who were unable to obtain the Director’s Cut and are truly sorry.”

According to Techarp, the players who contacted the support staff of Epic Games got a similar message. The staff’s reply went on to say, “It seems like the director’s cut version was offered by mistake and has been replaced with the standard version as the Free game offer for today.” 

Hence, all we can do is feel sorry for the intern who made this mistake.  

No one knows why Epic Games choose Weibo to apologize for the Death Stranding fiasco. The website is for people in China only, so not using something like Twitter is weird. Maybe the country has more rigid protection laws or just a bigger consumer base.

At the end of the day, a lucky few got the version of Death Stranding with more features. However, everyone does get to play one of the best-selling games of the past few years for free, so that’s something. Hopefully, Epic Games will check up on its interns a little bit more from now on, that’s for sure.