The latest offering from Epic Games is free voice chat along with anti-cheat services for developers to
implement in their games.  The company made this announcement in a press briefing last Tuesday. You
will recollect that last year Epic had promised a lot including a cross-platform multiplayer system it
developed for Fortnite to be free for all developers. The voice chat and anti-cheat service launch is a part
of that promise, which they had made. 
The focus of all will surely be on anti-cheat and the offering is Easy Anti-Cheat, which had been acquired
by Epic way back in 2018. The Easy Anti-Cheat is popular software and one could guess from the fact
that it is already being used by plenty of major games. The list of popular games using the Easy Anti-
Cheat is big and the list includes Apex Legends, Dead by Daylight, Halo: The Master Chief Collection,
Rust, the just-released Chivalry 2, Alongside all these names, we have Fortnite too and the key
announcement is that it is now free. 
The Easy Anti-Cheat has a purpose and it intends to root out boot out cheaters from online games. Since
it has gone free as a part of Epic Online Services, more developers can now make use of it. Epic believes
that anti-cheat software plays a crucial role in the modern gaming industry.  They feel it is important
because more games offer cross-play between PCs and other platforms. 
The voice chat is another offering and Epic refers to it as simply voice. The system works similarly to
Fortnite and it should operate across cross-platform. The connections made with EOS voice are unique
and the Epic team at work behind this offering explained to us the details. They had to say the voice helps
to establish connections only between authenticated users and go through Voice servers without exposing
personal information about the users. They go on to say that EOS handles all the necessary scaling,
quality of services, and also maintenance-related issues. The EOS is also capable to handle other
machinery of voice servers. 
These are two packages on offer from Epic and it could cost a million dollars. There is talk as to why Epic
is offering for free. The Epic CEO Tim Sweeney summed it up in one word and that is "Metaverse" It is
the next offering from Epic, and gaming fans must watch out for this one