WTAF?! The Epic Games Store has a shopping cart!

It only took Epic three years of R&D to add the single most basic ecommerce feature of all to their digital store front. Mazel tov, Tim Sweeney! You did it!

From Rock Paper Shotgun:

This happened a couple of days ago, but we probably shouldn't let it pass unremarked. After three years of R&D, the Epic Games Store has added a shopping cart.

There's an eight second video announcing it, beacuse [sic] why not:

"If you’ve shopped online before, the cart works exactly as you’d expect," says the announcement post. You can hit an "Add to cart" button on game pages that, uh, adds it to your cart, and repeat the process until you've got all the items you want and are ready to checkout.

At the point of checking out, you can enter a creator code if you want 5% of your purchase amount to go towards a particular creator. There's also a "move to wishlist" button if you decide to save a purchase for later. 

OMG, a wishlist button? Not only a shopping cart, but a wishlist button, too? Be still, my heart! /s

Do you remember when the EGS had a roadmap? Do you remember when Epic removed all the projected deliver-by dates from that roadmap, because they weren't able to meet any of them?  

EGS Road Map as of Aug. 7th, 2019

Back then, I was roasting Epic for not planning to have a shopping cart added to their Game Store for another six months; that was two and a half years ago. 

I don't know what's more mind-blowing: 

• the fact that the EGS finally got its long-delayed shopping cart, just days after I'd finally resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't ever going to happen; 
• the fact that it look Epic Games three years to get this done; or 
• the fact that they're shouting it to the whole world on YouTube, instead of burying it in a blog post, or something. 

No, really, who at Epic thought this YouTube video was a good idea? Are really they so out of touch that they think this is some of flex? They even call this a "giant leap" for Epic Games! The shopping cart itself seems to have been a "Friday night news dump" situation, because it wasn't there on Thursday; why drop the feature in the dead of night on a weekend, only to then make a point of drawing attention to its existence?

BTW, the like:dislike ratio on that video is currently sitting at 68:400 -- that won't be visible for too much longer, though, because YouTube, so clearly what Epic should have done is hold this announcement until YouTube removed the dislike count for them, to at least avoid the public humiliation of being so brutally, publicly ratioed. Why drop the video now?

Also, the comment section of the video is amazeballs:

Seriously, though, knowing that I can finally add both free games of the week to a cart, and then "buy" them with one transaction rather than two, is one for the win column, as far as I'm concerned. All I need now is for Epic to release a Linux-native client, complete with (Valve's) Proton compatibility layer, so that I can actually run some of those free games on my Pop!_OS PC, and I'll finally be able to play some of those games that I've payed absolutely nothing for, and didn't care about enough to buy on Steam. 

I still have zero intention of paying money for anything on the EGS, incidentally. With Valve releasing their own Linux-based gaming system next year, and Epic only just having barely managed to add a feature to their store that's been standard on web stores since the 1990s (seriously, the 1990s), I somehow don't think that Valve are checking their rear view for EGS. 

Sleep easy, GabeN. You're still definitely winning this one.