Epic Games Store adds newfangled ‘shopping cart,’ gets swamped by holiday sale

The Epic Games Store’s annual holiday sale kickoff, leavened with an offer of free Shenmue 3, has sent a ton of traffic into the marketplace and advisories that users may face delays or checkout errors.

Possibly aggravating the situation is the fact that the Epic Games Store — which is still just 3 years old — only added a shopping cart feature last week. That’s right: You can now buy multiple things with one click. (“We know, we know,” Epic said in a tweet Dec. 9.)

But the multi-item cart is key to extracting the most value out of a repeating $10 off coupon for every game priced $14.99 or more. That means folks buying three $14.99 games would get a combined $30 off — in such a case, that’s buy one, get two free.

Many games are priced higher (and some others don’t meet the threshold), but still, so many are taking the deal that Epic had to place a 50-game limit on checkouts for the sale, which runs until Jan. 6.

This filter shows everything that’s $14.99 and up, but if you’re looking for three good ones that are within range of that figure, Death’s Door is $14.99, The Forgotten City is $18.74, and Hitman 3, stretching things just a bit, is $23.99. But all three are among Polygon’s 50 best games of 2021.

If Hitman 3’s price is too much, there’s always Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 at $14.99, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 for $19.99, or Hades at $16.24.

The holiday sale has also lopped 30% or more off current releases Battlefield 2042, Far Cry 6, Jurassic World Evolution 2, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and Back 4 Blood, putting them all in the $35 to $42 range.

All this assumes you can get your cart picked and packed and checked out. Epic Games Store’s official Twitter account said support staff are “actively investigating and working to scale.”