 Hey everyone, today we need to talk a little bit about the Epic Game Store. The Epic Game Store is essentially an alternative PC video game purchasing store to places like Steam or Origin or whatever Ubisoft you play store, whatever it is, or obviously things like Battle.net which really just applies to Blizzard games from Activision Blizzard. So it's an alternative to those stores to buy games and how Epic kind of decided to approach things is to throw out a lot of money, a lot of that Fortnite money to purchase exclusive, temporary exclusives I guess for their platform. Some of them are timed exclusives, some of them are permanent exclusives that aren't just their games but are games from other companies. They basically are brute forcing their way into mattering in the PC space. So basically if you want to play certain games you need to use the Epic Game Store app launcher on your computer. Now as much as some people are against those practices and I understand it, to me it doesn't bother me. I am a console gamer. I am so used to Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo throwing their weight around, throwing their money around, getting exclusives for their platforms that this doesn't bother me as much as it does others as long as I can still play the games on my PC I don't really care if it's from Steam, from Epic, from Battle.net or whatever. I have like all these launchers on my computer or well I did because it looks like the Epic Game Launcher might be potentially stealing data from your computer. It's at least logging data. So what happened is, and this gets really technical so I'm not going to go into all the details but I am going to show a bunch of images on screen of people that kind of explained it and all this stuff, essentially the Epic Game Launcher is well it's running processes on your computer that it does not need to be running. It is doing things like checking your local Steam profile which gives them access to not only your friends list but also gives them access to the games you own on Steam, the time you played those games and all of that jazz. It also gives them access to things on your computer like Internet Explorer which is for some reason they're loading Internet Explorer. They gave a weird explanation for that, something to do with DRM and online verification. I don't know. It's a dumb thing because Steam doesn't do that and Steam has DRM and in fact a lot of games on Steam use Danovu which again that's a whole other conversation for another day if I'm going to talk more about PC gaming but it's also like going into your registry and doing things in your registry that it doesn't need to be doing and in general it is basically gaining access to all of this private local information on your computer that it does not need to access. Origin does not access this stuff to run. Virtual games does not access this stuff. Battle.net does not access this stuff and more importantly Steam doesn't access a lot of this stuff but here we have Epic Games basically crawling your computer and finding out all the information they possibly can about you as a gamer and then claiming publicly in response that oh we're not actually using any of that data. Then why are you gathering it? I mean their argument for the Steam stuff is that oh we have a Steam friend importer right like you can import all your friends from Steam but here's the thing the way that the Steam profile system works on your local computer you don't need to access things that tell you what games I have and how long I have played those games. You do not need to access those files in order to gain access to your Steam friend list. It's an open API it's publicly available you can check it out if you want and you don't need to actually access those files in order to get the friends list support over to their client. So that explanation is already BS because you're accessing files you don't need to access to do what you say you're doing and you only do things with those files if people give you permission although nowhere in any of your end user license agreements does it actually claim that you have any reason to touch any of this information. And in the section where it talks about the information you do gather a lot of this stuff is going well beyond the information that you are saying that you're gathering. Now the explanation from Tim Sweeney and a lot of the top heads at Epic Games is that oh yeah we're accessing those files we're not going to deny that we're doing that but we're not actually making copies of it and putting it on our server they're just you know extra copies that just sit on your computer for literally no reason because none of that information has nothing to do with running video games on your computer. What it could have to do is market research and that is using information available about your users from gender to different things they like to do that maybe what's in their bookmarks or in their internet history to kind of determine how to advertise games to them on Epic Games or to figure out what games they want to spend more money on to make exclusive. In fact they released some interesting data points that talked about the difference in terms of the number of people playing a certain game on their platform versus the number of people playing it on Steam but the number of people playing it on Steam in terms of active users and time they spend playing wasn't actually publicly available information that information though could be data mined from computers profiles from profiles that people have on their computers for Steam so they're already like advertising something they know about the way players are playing with information that's only available by data mining computers but remember they claim they're not uploading any of this data to their servers they're just making copies of it to make copies of it because they're just a kind company looking out for you and in case your files get corrupting completely different systems like Steam hey look Epic Games made a copy of it for you so you're fine not looking good if you want to dig deeper into this I'll put a few more links into the description so you can actually get into the exact things you need to be looking out for if you are running the Epic Game Launcher on your PC it starts by looking at the windows processes and things that it's running but it goes so much deeper than that it's actually getting worse and worse every day people are discovering more and more things that the Epic Game Launcher is actually gaining access to and it's insane how like malware like this is acting it is crawling all over your computer when it has no business doing it so either it's a poorly coded thing or something's messed up in fact one of the people that that's kind of one of the main heads behind it you know works for 10 cent and has worked at another company that got busted for stealing data from people's computers which again does not lead to confidence in what Tim Sweeney and other people from Epic are saying however not using this information as you publish data that's only available if you are using that information so I don't know if anything's ever going to come with this I don't know if there's going to be any legal actions what I can say is I'm really disappointed in the video game industry in terms of the media especially on the website side of things it appears that a lot of traditional print media websites are kind of throwing this news under the bus in fact I've seen some positive articles put out about some of the changes come into Epic Games or like cloud saves and all that and those are positive changes and we absolutely should talk about those but you can't talk about those and ignore what's happening I mean rock paper shotgun just to call out one particular all that in particular oh my gosh are they white nighting for epic like crazy saying that well you know everyone's talking about all this stuff but epic came out and said that they're not using any of this stuff ergo it's not a big deal and people just blew it out of proportion reality is epic has no reason to access most of the stuff that they're accessing anyways even if they're not putting copies on their server then why are they accessing these files in the first place that's the entire point if they're not going to be using that the information then why are they gathering it that is the ultimate question that epic is refusing to answer so yes the epic game launcher is basically acting like malware and people are worried about the security of their systems with it on there's a lot of people that are refusing to now even use epic games anymore I I'm not sure where I stand on this I think a lot of this because of the public backlash is going to be addressed but then again if the media keeps sweeping it under the rug maybe the hope is that it'll go away and why are they doing it maybe they're getting some fat advertising checks from from epic I don't know epic doesn't pay me so I really don't care what I say well then even if they did if I found out they were doing this I would call it out and I would probably end my partnership with them because this is not good again there's no evidence to suggest that epic is actually using the data necessarily on your computer I keep we can't 100 prove that that's the case but what we do know is it is gathering data they claim they are not using so why are they gathering the data that's the root that's the million dollar question that no one's really answering and again epic's acting like it's not a big deal and I know for a lot of people out there you don't care about security when you use a computer all your information is already out there I mean even for me if you really want to find my address or my phone number or whatever anything about me it's out there on the internet you'll be able to find it somewhere but in terms of some of my private passwords and all that stuff like that's only on my computer and in my brain and if you gain access to that hmm I mean those passwords I literally don't even use online that are only for certain files on my computer I have passworded that this launcher could potentially be telling them I mean it's giving people hash IDs for their their steam IDs hash IDs for their games hash IDs for their play statistics I mean it's really targeting steam a lot but it's going well beyond that and I just I honestly think that this is not good this is not the direction we should want to see competition come in I am all for having heavy competition against steam I don't even care that they're throwing money around and getting exclusive games what I do care about though is when they are being shady behind the scenes and then acting like it's not a big deal and we're not actually doing anything with the data even if you're not update your thing so it's not collecting that data in the first place and once you have a breach like this it's pretty hard to gain consumer trust back so good luck with that epic that being said I end with an overdence from Nintendo Prime I hope you or at least we're informed a little bit about this situation I know it's not 100 Nintendo related but can you imagine if the Nintendo switch online service was data mining your computer like when you log in on their service on your computer it started data mining what that just being saying what if the Nintendo switch online app on your phone is data mining all your apps and providing all the data to Nintendo to try to figure out what sort of apps they should be making even though there is some public available information it it's just it's mind-blowing to me what is happening with this client and how the media is treating it again I don't know enough about all of the particulars and understand everything 100% outside of the fact that it's confirmed and I checked it on my computer that epic is crawling things on your computer that it has no business touching for what their client is supposed to be doing anyways you know what you think about this story down in the comments below otherwise I end with an overdence from Nintendo Prime and I will catch you guys in the next video which I think is Prime newsletter today actually there hasn't been a lot of news today but that's okay we'll see what happens by the time it's it's prime news time baby because it's Friday