The short answer is no. You bought the licence from Epic and that is where you must play it from. The main reason is that Epic and Steam and many other platforms use DRM that is specific to their stores so if you try and play the game without their store you can’t.
You Are Just Renting Your Game
The terms of service for most digital products are very shady. Most of them state that they can pull you liscence to any given product you paid for at any time and they do not owe you a refund or an explanation.
Whats worse is you can lose your entire library as well if you break their terms of service or if they just one day go under. I covered this in detail in my article “What Happens To My Games If Steam Shuts Down?” With Epic it gets worse, they are not as long established as Steam and may not be able to win the war they are waging. That and they are spending money to see little returns on their investment just to get exclusive titles. So if they go under your games may go with it.
This is why I am against digital licenses mainly because I don’t own games at all. I have an entire library of games that I spent hard earned money on and one day it could all just disappear. That disturbs me especially since I have tons of games that I have yet to play.
What Can Be Done
Well there is one service out there that is very pro consumer and I love them for it. They are GOG (Good Old Games) they started out as a business that was dedicated to bringing back old titles. Then they got into the new games business as well and started producing their own games. They are responsible for the Witcher series and they are making Cyber Punk 2077 as well.
Now Why do I love them so well they are DRM free Completely. Any game you buy from them is DRM free you don’t have to worry about logging into GOG Galaxy 2.0 or anything to play the game you own. Whats more is you can transfer a game from them you bought to any other computer.
Now because they are DRM free this means their storefront is smaller than their competition because not all software developers want their code out in the open like that, but I like this standard since it means I own my game and can never have it taken away from me.
GOG also just implemented an unheard of refund policy as well in the form of a 30 day money back guarantee. This is unheard of Steam the leader of the gaming industry only offers 2 weeks and with the caveat that you only have played 2 hours.
If You Must Play Epic Games Through Steam
Now Steam offers integration for most games but this just means you get your library under one roof not that you can ditch the Epic Game Launcher. You can find any game on your computer and have Steam recognize it and launch it through their launcher which then launches the Epic Game Launcher as well.
This feature has been around for years now and they always make sure you know that they do not offer support for the game if you need it since you did not buy it through them.
GOG also offers this feature in their GOG Galaxy 2.0 Their GOG Galaxy 2.0 is far more robust than even Steam. It can search out all your game libraries and pull them in under one software. Also it has the feature of only launching other game launchers once you have selected a game to play. Then once the game is closed so is the launcher all in the back end without you knowing. Unless there is an update to the game then you know.
In Conclusion
Be wary of who you give your money to for digital products. You do not own them for the most part. Sadly they are the future, but know that you are only renting your product and one day you may loose that product.
If you have any comments I would love to hear what you have to say so leave a comment.
This was helpful thanks, with the free games Epic is giving out, was curious if there is a way to put them on steam
Yes and no Steam allows you to put any game onto their app, but they are not supported by Steam so they will not be updated by Steam but the original seller of the game. On a related note GOG offers a very good app themselves that integrates all game launchers in to one and also updates the games in the app. Using the other apps as Updaters then closing the app when done with it. When opening up a game it will open up the associated app then close it when you are done with the game.
Some of this information is incorrect. Like GOG, many Epic games are DRM free. You can transfer them to another computer. Steam has terrible library requirements where you cannot play the game (family sharing) at the same time. GOG and Epic, you can install the game on two computers and play at the same time.
Also, many Epic games launch directly with the executable even when Epic is logged off. I believe some games ‘dial’ in, but most do not. So, you can save a copy of your games, and play them later or if ever Epic stops their storefront. You cannot do that with Steam.
so recently battlefront 2 went on sale, and my d*mbass didn’t remember to download after emptying my storage until the sale was done, but my brother did on his pc. Is there a way for me to also be able to play it on my computer? (we don’t necessarily need to be able to play at the same time.)
It depends on what service you are on but from what I have learned about Steam and most others it is OK to have the same account on different computers so long as you are not using the same account at the same time. They do allow you to have the same steam account on many different computers so you could just log in to your brothers account when he is not using it and you are off to the races. I assume most other services are like this. Good Old Games isn’t like this and they don’t care how many other people play a game since they do not have DRM just so you know. If you do want to play it legit like there will probably be a sale soon god knows these services have sales more often now days so just wait a month or two and it should go back on sale.
Also your question implies you may have bought it and failed to download it. If this is correct then you can download any time even after a sale as long as you purchased the game, you shouldn’t have to download a game just during a sale or right after purchase.