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Epic Games logo behind the Epic Games Store
Gaming Gear

Holy cow, the Epic Games Store supports preloading now

by admin October 2, 2025



It’s hard to believe I’m writing this in the year 2025 CE, but I’ve double-checked and it sure seems to be right so here we go: The Epic Games Store now supports preloading.

“Preloading is now available for PC pre-purchase products on the Epic Games Store!” developer Local Bald wrote in the Epic Games Store forums (via Reddit). “This new feature allows players to download titles they have pre-purchased up to five days (120 hours) prior to release via an encrypted build. Preloading ensures that players can jump into the game quickly on day one, which is especially beneficial for titles with large downloads.”

Preloading is a practical feature but not very glamorous as these things go; what makes it notable here is that it’s been available for years on Steam. Yet Epic, despite being hell-bent on breaking Steam’s nigh-monopoly on the PC digital market, hasn’t seen fit to add it until now.


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And it’s not as though Epic isn’t aware that the absence of preloading, and other such mundane but useful features, is a problem. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and EGS general manager Steve Allison both acknowledged in May of this year that the Epic Store sucks—or, as Allison put it more politically, that “there’s still a ton of work to be done to deliver a world-class experience.”

He’s not wrong, but as PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens noted at the time, the Epic Store went live in December 2018, which means it’s almost seven years old now, yet it still lacks a lot of functionality that we take for granted on Steam. And that doesn’t get into issues with the Epic launcher, which Sweeney said is “clunky,” a characterization I would describe as a tremendous understatement.

Epic has built a user base for its store primarily through its extremely generous weekly game giveaways, which has cost the company untold truckloads of cash, but I can’t help thinking that by now, the thrill has worn off and it’s time to start pouring some of those resources into the store itself. It’s a little weird to be thinking of preloading functionality as a significant improvement, but for the Epic Store it is—and hopefully we’ll be seeing more such baseline functionality following soon.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.



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October 2, 2025 0 comments
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Coffee convos, demonic detectives, and cow life simming are part of a pro-Palestine charity bundle coming to Itch.io
Game Updates

Coffee convos, demonic detectives, and cow life simming are part of a pro-Palestine charity bundle coming to Itch.io

by admin August 28, 2025


A bundle of games aiming to raise money to aid the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in their efforts to help Palestinian refugees is set to go on sale via Itch.io next week. Just over 380 games are part of it, including the likes of Coffee Talk, Lucifer Within Us, and a cow life simulator that features an alligator who’s really into arson.

Organised by Junch and the South East Asian Games for Good initiative, the bundle’s dubbed Play for Peace – Games for Palestine. It’s taken over 10 months to come together. The result’s a 382-game strong bundle that includes a huge variety of creations that contain not a whiff of AI or NFTs.

“The people of Palestine continue to be subjected to hostility, destruction of homes, critical infrastructure, and devastasting loss of lives,” reads the Play for Peace bundle’s freshly-published Itch listing. “We, as a games community, will bring together our incredible games from across the world, for a charity bundle with proceeds that go directly to Palestine aid and relief.

“We are partnering with UNRWA USA, who will receive the funds and grant them to UNRWA (UN agency) in support of direct humanitarian aid in Palestine. Together, the game dev community and UNRWA USA will raise awareness on the situation in Gaza, spotlight our communities, and the devs participating in this charity drive.”

In addition to the games I mentioned in the intro – the cow life sim’s definitely worth checking out – the bundle includes everything from lesbian devil-hunting action, courtesy of fittingly-named boss rusher Bossgame, to tabletop adventures like Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya. A couple of others that’ve caught me eye are Street Cleaning Day: Rat’s Revenge, a wave-shooter about a rodent fending off soapy bubbles, and I Get This Call Every Day.

The latter’s a point-and-click simulation of its creator’s experience working in a call centre, featuring “terrible art [which] conveys a terrible work environment” and the choice of whether to “lose politely or lose spectacularly”.

We’re excited to announce the Games for Palestine charity page is now LIVE on Itch.

Over 300+ games with proceeds going to UNRWA USA in support of Gaza relief. Thank you to everyone for your support. The bundle launches on Sept 2nd 9am PST.

Link: https://t.co/QfK0ekUjAd pic.twitter.com/KIaZNj2f1P

— SE Asian Games for Good (@seagamesforgood) August 27, 2025

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If that brutal reality isn’t for you, there’s also Fit For a King, a Henry VIII simulator that offers the chance to marry everything, execute everything, and/or spend it all. “While Fit For A King could have been full of lazy, bargain bin Blackadder jokes, it’s got a wonderfully dadaist edge to its humour instead, and an indefinable atmosphere I could only call early 2000s web game energy,” former RPSer Nate Crowley wrote of that one. Or, there’s Virtua Blinds, which looks like it could be the greatest thing I’ve never played.

As the bundle’s curators wrote: “All of it represents the creative expression of artists and developers who want to help raise money through their art for one of the most important causes of our time – freedom and the ending of genocide in Palestine.” The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine bundle will be on sale from 5PM BST/12PM ET/9AMPT/6PM CEST on September 2nd, and will cost $8.





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August 28, 2025 0 comments
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A basketball with the EA logo on it appears in a court.
Game Reviews

EA And 2K Games Are Beefing Over The Next College Sports Cash Cow

by admin August 28, 2025


Electronic Arts revealed earlier this year that it’s planning to add a college basketball game to its ever-expanding roster of sports franchises. Then 2K Games came out hours later and indicated it was doing the same. Now new reporting suggests both publishers have been at war behind the scenes trying to lock up the deals needed to make an NCAA basketball game a reality.

Sports Business Journal reports that while EA won a bidding round earlier this year with the Collegiate Licensing Company for the rights to the NCAA brand, 2K Games has moved forward with its own college basketball game by trying to negotiate brand partnerships with individual colleges like UCLA.

“UCLA Athletics and UCLA Trademarks & Licensing, an enterprise of the Associated Students UCLA, have announced a long-term collaboration with 2K which will see the UCLA Men’s and Women’s Basketball programs bring the rich legacy of Bruins basketball to a future project,” the school announced on Thursday. 

Bring the Madness. Let’s run it back. #CBB #ItsInTheGame pic.twitter.com/iBNhGxn2yj

— EA SPORTS (@EASPORTS) June 30, 2025

The campus has been quiet for too long 😏 https://t.co/AuqoX5u5Qr

— NBA 2K (@NBA2K) June 30, 2025

EA is apparently very unhappy about this. According to Sports Business Journal, it wanted the rights to everything in NCAA divisional basketball on both men’s and women’s leagues, which would give it the sort of exclusivity stranglehold it long had with the NFL in its Madden series. And if EA doesn’t get its way, sources told Sports Business Journal the publisher might abandon the upcoming game altogether.

“The opportunity that’s excited us in college basketball is to deliver a full, standalone experience that captures everything that makes the sport so special,” EA Sports VP Sean O’Brien told SBJ in a statement. “The approach we’ve proposed is to create a game that includes all 350-plus NCAA Division I schools—both men’s and women’s teams included—with name, image and likeness compensation for all athletes, 32 conferences, the NCAA and all things that make ‘March Madness’ the most exciting month of sports and all the traditions and pageantry fans love.”

Basically, 2K Games, which was reportedly part of the NCAA bidding war but lost to EA, has decided to move ahead with a college basketball game regardless. While it abandoned its Hoops franchise over a decade ago, it’s been releasing NBA2K every year and could quickly spin off a new version of it for college teams or, as SBJ reports, possibly position it as an add-on or expansion for the existing franchise.

EA, which also abandoned its basketball franchise over a decade ago, will have to start from scratch. Recent reporting suggests a new game would be years away at best and possibly not arrive until 2028 or later. Unless it can get the NCAA and its member schools to pull the plug on 2K’s game, it’ll be coming in late. A big part of what helped EA Sports College Football explode in popularity last year was years of pent-up demand. Now both publishers are in a race to see who can cash in on the latest untapped market for annual sports games.





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August 28, 2025 0 comments
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