• EOS malware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+malware&t=ffab&ia=web
• EOS spyware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+spyware&t=ffab&ia=web
• Single player games wont launch unless EOS has access to the internet - duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Single+player+games+wont+launch+unless+EOS+has+access+to+the+internet&ia=web
• Tencent - www.visiontimes.com/2021/07/30/how-the-chinese-government-controls-tencent-the-seventh-largest-company-in-the-world.html

b1k3rdudeI did recently, for a few seconds consider getting an Epic account. But then the plague of "Epic Online Services" became apparent and this killed the idea stone dead. All but one of the games are low-end on the qaulity scale, so no great loss there.

• EOS malware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+malware&t=ffab&ia=web
• EOS spyware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+spyware&t=ffab&ia=web
• Single player games wont launch unless EOS has access to the internet - duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Single+player+games+wont+launch+unless+EOS+has+access+to+the+internet&ia=web
• Tencent - www.visiontimes.com/2021/07/30/how-the-chinese-government-controls-tencent-the-seventh-largest-company-in-the-world.html

Its one thing to create a competing gaming platform, but another to plague other platforms with whats basically spyware & telemetrics. Epic's crusade is a sham and its ethics and treatment of customers laid bare.

Dont forget that Epic is part owned by a Tencent, who also has stakes in Ubisoft & Riot. Said chinese company is controled by the CCP, so its not a case of if, but how much telemetry from the aformentioned companies is being funneled to an entity with multiple documented cases of humans rights abuse.

Chrispy_I work with corporate firewalls and when I looked at the logs attempting to setup security rules for Epic (we use UnrealEngine and Twinmotion, so getting the full EGS client working securely would be useful) I noped out of there harder than I've done in years.

I don't run Epic at home, and I cannot permit Epic to run at work without setting myself up for a gross negligence tribunal.

b1k3rdudeI did recently, for a few seconds consider getting an Epic account. But then the plague of "Epic Online Services" became apparent and this killed the idea stone dead. All but one of the games are low-end on the qaulity scale, so no great loss there.

• EOS malware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+malware&t=ffab&ia=web
• EOS spyware - duckduckgo.com/?q=epic+online+services+spyware&t=ffab&ia=web
• Single player games wont launch unless EOS has access to the internet - duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Single+player+games+wont+launch+unless+EOS+has+access+to+the+internet&ia=web
• Tencent - www.visiontimes.com/2021/07/30/how-the-chinese-government-controls-tencent-the-seventh-largest-company-in-the-world.html

Its one thing to create a competing gaming platform, but another to plague other platforms with whats basically spyware & telemetrics. Epic's crusade is a sham and its ethics and treatment of customers laid bare.

Dont forget that Epic is part owned by a Tencent, who also has stakes in Ubisoft & Riot. Said chinese company is controled by the CCP, so its not a case of if, but how much telemetry from the aformentioned companies is being funneled to an entity with multiple documented cases of humans rights abuse.

Chrispy_I work with corporate firewalls and when I looked at the logs attempting to setup security rules for Epic (we use UnrealEngine and Twinmotion, so getting the full EGS client working securely would be useful) I noped out of there harder than I've done in years.

I don't run Epic at home, and I cannot permit Epic to run at work without setting myself up for a gross negligence tribunal.

FrickCan you elaborate on this?

LazyGamerI have 230 games on Epic that I paid total of $0. How many free games does Valve give away? Aside from taking incredible 30% cut from developers just for listing a game on their store.

DragokarThey only take 30% up to a certain limit. Tell me, if you have an answer, how does epic exclusive titles helped the game industry and us players? Besides, you shared your data with more than one party.

LazyGamerList of those exclusives is very small and most are timed. It helps developers. UE is free and idk if Epic changed anything, but if your game makes less than 1 million, Epic takes nothing. And when they do, they take 12%. Thank God there is competition to Steam monopoly. Valve is incredibly greedy company.

Chrispy_For me it was about 3 years ago when we first started using Unrealengine and Twinmotion. I run NG firewalls so it's not the useless old practice of opening ports - I have to create application profiles and services, then whitelist specific domains. I spent the best part of a day going through Epic's full domain whitelist, checking if stuff worked, monitoring packet logs, adding more (undocumented) URLs and IP ranges, rinse-repeat. The sheer amount of undocumented outgoing data to IP ranges that matched CDNs that I didn't recognise (in other words, not AWS, Cloudflare, Google, Azure or Epic themselves) was alarming.

By the end of the full workday, I had a whitelist that contained more rules, services, ranges, and SSL decryption exceptions than Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk combined, and Epic still didn't work smoothly 100%. I gave up in the end, removed the majority of what I'd added to try and actually isolate the EGS client and now just download updates to it from the DMZ and push those out to workstations using PDQ copy and registry scripts.

In short, there was so much undocumented, undisclosed, attempted outbound traffic to unresolved IP ranges that I simply wasn't comfortable letting it run on the production network. Things might have changed in the last year or two, but my experience wasn't dissimilar to the absolute nonsense these guys found when monitoring what the executable was doing. EGS seemingly takes massive liberties with the device you install it on and violates so many base privacy rights that I'm somewhat surprised they haven't been class-actioned yet.

Razrback16Great post, thank you. If there's a game out I want to play that's exclusive to Epic I'll just hop on a boat and add it to Steam as a non-Steam game versus ever creating an account with Epic.

Chrispy_Valve aren't exactly saints either, but at least they ask permission for things and their traffic is going out to IP ranges and domains that are registered to Valve.

As a home user with Windows on your PC I don't think there's too much you have to worry about with EGS. Yes, you're giving up privacy and personal information to Epic but simply using your Windows PC on a consumer home internet router with super basic firewall rules means you've already given up most of the privacy and personal information already - whether that's knowingly or unknowingly.

Yes, Epic are shady and anticompetitive in how they gather data they shouldn't be gathering from places they shouldn't be looking at, but I'm fairly certain that privacy ship has already sailed for most people. If you want a free game from EGS, go get it. The needs of a multi-million-dollar corporate production network running on half a million dollars of firewall and network security are not the same as protecting your Steam library contents from the competition.

The most nefarious thing Epic are likely to do with that information is aggressively-targeted advertising.

DragokarIt is longer than it should be if a company claims to be good for the players, and the companies that take EGS money only enslave themselves imo. Steam also provides a way better platform, especially compared to the early days of EGS.

Also, the 30% is more or less the common ground, even Humble Bundles takes that (more or less). For me, it is also important where the money that they use to buy and enslave exclusive titles is important. That's why I also don't buy Lexar products, for example.

The giveaways are only good for two things, gather “pseudo” market share and collect personal data like cell phone numbers i.e.

I don't judge or blame you for taking the so-called free games, but you should not tell others to do it on your way, since I don't condemn you for it.

TheDeeGeeI was wondering when Anti-Epic posts would show up...

Chrispy_

• I noped out of there harder than I've done in years.
• I don't run Epic at home, and I cannot permit Epic to run at work without setting myself up for a gross negligence tribunal.

TheDeeGeeWhy are you connected to the internet btw?

LazyGamerGuys, if you're connected to internet, your data is being sold and whatnot being done with it. I don't care what kind of security experts people think they are. I don't do anything on internet that I'm worried some company or security agency will find out. And I don't care if everyone knows my porn preference. MILF. I love them MILF's.

Chrispy_If you want a free game from EGS, go get it.

b1k3rdude

• Tencent - www.visiontimes.com/2021/07/30/how-the-chinese-government-controls-tencent-the-seventh-largest-company-in-the-world.html

Dont forget that Epic is part owned by a Tencent, who also has stakes in Ubisoft & Riot. Said chinese company is controled by the CCP, so its not a case of if, but how much telemetry from the aformentioned companies is being funneled to an entity with multiple documented cases of humans rights abuse.