Axiom Verge, the 2D Metroid-like that is itself quite well liked, is free on the Epic Game Store right now. That means that you can download it and start playing it, which many people did, only to discover there was a progress-blocking bug exclusive to the Epic Games Store version. When players entered a certain room, the game would just crash without fail. It turns out the reasons why are related to Steam and a bad case of find-and-replace.
Players started noticing the issue earlier in the day and were tweeting to Epic and developer Tom Happ over the issue. Some started speculating that perhaps Epic’s launcher had something to do with it, but the answer was actually something way simpler: Happ accidentally named a sound file an inconvenient name.
For anyone missing Steam.xnb from the Epic store, please go to AV in your library, click the gear icon, Verify, then Update.
I was thinking it being Epic and all, I shouldn’t include valve’s dlls and such, so I excluded all files with “Steam” in the name… oops.
— Tom Happ (@AxiomVerge) February 7, 2019
Basically, in preparation for the Epic Games Store launch, Happ deleted every instance of the word “Steam” from the game. This meant that a sound file, of actual steam coming out of pipes, wasn’t playing and the game would crash because it could not find it.
The glitch has since been fixed, with Happ adding the file back in, and it only requires the small fix outlined in the tweet to take care of it. It does end up being a small Aeneid representaiton of the war between Steam and Epic, where a trojan horse sneaks through Epic’s gates and breaks a game. Of course, nothing all that dramatic happened, but it is a fun little story.
[Source: USG]