"I tried playing Fall Guys recently, after the Epic sellout. The game would always just stall at the loading screen and never get past it. I wasted a bunch of time troubleshooting this stupidness.

Turns out, the infinite loading screen was actually a very user-friendly way of telling me that, in order for the game to ever load or do anything, I needed to already somehow know to open up a separate browser window, go to the Epic Games website, log into my EGS account, and link it to my Steam account, and that then it would work and the loading screen would no longer be infinite.

I attempted linking accounts after wasting several hours trying to figure out what the ♥♥♥♥ was wrong with the game and trying a bunch of different troubleshooting steps, based mostly on a hunch. And then, after linking accounts, the game now helpfully informs me that this was actually what I needed to have done in the first place. How silly of me not to have realized!

Speaking as a developer: How hard is it to just make a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ message that comes up some point, any point in the game startup process, that just says "oh hey, this game's devs sold out to us since you last played it, and so now this is an Epic Games gamer gaming experience, and this means that now you need to link your Epic Gaming Game Gamer account with your Steam account in order for this game to actually load and do something other than show an infinite loading screen that doesn't do anything"? How hard could that possibly be?

Well, apparently it must be far more difficult than I ever could possibly have imagined. Prior to having correctly guessed that I needed to go to the Epic Games website and link my accounts, the game was evidently incapable of pulling up the Epic Games Gamer Game Overlay(tm), or the overlay process was stuck forever blocking on some asynchronous event, or some ♥♥♥♥ like that. And I guess the game's startup procedure has been redesigned such that it needs the Epic Games Gamer Game Overlay(tm) to work and to actually show up and, like, do literally anything, in order for the game to just tell me that I need to link my accounts. (Oh and if you kill the Epic overlay process, the game does show an error code... which is literally just the number INT_MIN and gives no useful information, lol.)

Judging by the log files, for any of this to work, it likely requires collaboration between the game, the game overlay, the game launcher, the game wrapper, the EOS service, the EOS user helper, the EAC driver, the crash handler, and probably 17 other Epic Games components and/or processes running on the system simultaneously and using famously reliable IPC methodologies to communicate with each other. And I guess all that ♥♥♥♥ just didn't work together properly. (Recall that the whole point of all this was to effectively show me one sentence of text saying "hey you need to link accounts", but the game just couldn't do it.)

Hats off to Epic Games's truly epic user-friendly migration process for Steam customers who bought games which now inexplicably no longer seem to work. I really appreciate the effort they put into making all of this so intuitive. It's a shame there are so many whiny crybaby people out there who seem to just have an irrational preexisting hatred of Epic Games for no actual reason whatsoever. (I mean, what has Epic ever done to them? Make games they already paid for stop working, in a hilariously inscrutable and overcomplicated manner that suggests that the game is broken and literally incapable of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loading itself anymore, when the actual problem is that accounts need to be linked but the software is too busted to get that information across? The nerve of those people, being pissed off at Epic for no reason!)

(I can already hear the echoes of incoming comments saying "lol you're stupid" etc; I can hear them right now in fact. Please shut up briefly, and contemplate for a moment how it is that I should have known all along that launching a Steam game that previously worked just fine, and that now presents with an infinite loading screen, is an indicator that I need to link my EGS and Steam accounts. Okay, now that you've read that and given it some deep thought, feel free to continue and leave your inane comments so that I can make fun of them. Thanks!)"