Just to be clear, this was your original comment in full:
You quoted a point about IOI wanting players to “double-dip”, describing this as “the real reason” for the progress transfer policy because IOI are “money hungry”.
Now, you say:
Increasing sales is exactly what your earlier comment was getting at.
Either you miscommunicated your position on this matter, or you have walked back on your earlier statement. Either is fine. But it seems silly to pretend your earlier comment makes sense.
Okay, I can see the confusion here.
As of now, IOI want players who don’t care about progression on EGS, to double dip. That would increase sales of the game on Steam, despite those users already having progression on EGS. The policy, as you say, would put people off double dipping, and decrease sales in the part of the userbase that cares about their saves and progression. But the people who know this information are those who have actually looked into it (which can be from both camps), but that is a niche of players (a niche that is mercifully, getting a bit bigger with the information on this being spread out a bit more), the latter camp of which IOI is ignoring because the money lost from people not rebuying it on Steam would be minimal, a calculated loss, if you will.
Steam users don’t care about this issue, as their progress and DLC’s can be transferred via Steam, so they’ll spend money anyway, and that money will greatly outweigh the need to make a transfer system for EGS to Steam as there’s very little incentive for IOI to make such a system.
My point was never “the policy will make more or less money”, it was “the policy is dickish because it excludes EGS players for flimsy reasons”. IOI’s decisions baffle me sometimes, and I was caught off guard yesterday by their decision.
I’m not sure if that has made my stance more or less complex…
IO Interactive Twitter gave the times:
20 January:
Server maintenance: 1pm CET
Year Two Patch Release: 2pm CET
Steam Release: 7pm CET
They also said full patch notes and the VR hardware requirement details will be out before the patch.
That will last until at least 8pm 
All else aside, this subset of players will indeed be rather tiny. That’s why I don’t think sales figures are relevant to that aspect of the progress transfer policy.
I will be genuinely curious to see what the Steam sales figures are. We’ll never know how many people bought both an Epic (or console/Stadia) version and then bought another copy on Steam, but I’d be curious just the same to see how many copies of the game are purchased through Steam.
Clearly there are quite a few who are planning on doing so for their own reasons. I wonder if the total sales volume of the Steam version a year after the game’s initial release will meet or exceed the sales of the Epic version during that first year.
A relevant factor to this: how much overlap is there between Steam users and people with Game Pass for PC? This will cut into sales.
Maybe in the short term, but i don’t think is a very relevant portion either. As an example , Sea of Thieves managed to sell 5 million copies in a short amount of time on Steam despite being exclusive to MS Store/Gamepass for two years. In addition, we’ve also seen games that got positive word of mouth from Gamepass players that wouldn’t otherwise have tried said games resulting in a sales boost across platforms.
Interesting you mention Microsoft Store. I’m not a console player so I don’t have Gamepass or whatever the Sony equivalent is (if there is one). When I want to find a new game to play, I typically look in the Steam, Epic and Origin (Origin/EA Play is always last though) stores. It typically never even occurs to me to look at Microsoft’s storefront, even though it’s built into the operating system (it’s probably one of the very first icons I get rid of from the taskbar too, right behind Cortana).
I hope IOI sells as many copies of Hitman 3 as possible across all of the various stores.
Excuse me for jumping in here, it seemed like the most appropriate place.
We’ve just enabled progression carryover from H2 Steam → H3 Steam and we’d love to do some stress-testing before pushing the news much wider. It’s fully tested, operational and ready to roll, you’re not beta testing. 
If you want to carryover your H2 progression on Steam into H3 before the game is released on 20 Jan (details to come), please go to the link below, sign in to your IOI Account and follow the instructions. It should look similar if you did the process last year.
Thank you!
That makes sense, as i don’t think there’s been a single game release on the Microsoft store in the last three years that wasn’t introduced as part of Gamepass. At this point it makes no sense for devs to release games there without Gamepass deals . Both because of super low sales (Rise of the Tomb Raider had less than 1% of PC sales there despite being exclusive to the store for 6 months, and one of the Call of Duty games released there and had a whooping record of exactly 2 people playing online) and because everyone who uses the store these days uses the Gamepass App, where everything that isn’t part of the subscription is literally invisible lol
It seems to have successfully carried over from Steam User to Steam User.
If you want to provide me with an early access code to the game on Steam, I would be happy to confirm that everything went smoothly.
Where is the H3 on Steam?
Wait 24 hours. Today’s only 19th
The steamh2 archive has been transferred to steamh3, like a game that doesn’t exist at present (it looks funny)
Seems to have worked without a hitch 
However, I can’t seem to find a way to check in-game to see if it worked… any ideas? 
Personally I don’t think it can be “a)”. The game saves everything server side, and it’s all tied to your IOI account, and the game still remains the same game on the same platform. Whatever the issue is, I cannot imagine it being a technical one. Certainly bring over HITMAN 2 progress to Hitman 3 is more complex and that works fine.
Building an EIffel tower that is 80% of it’s size is also easier. But just because the larger one was made doesn’t mean that it is unchallenging to build the smaller one too.
It is still a task to consider if it is worth it.
