author: Bart Swiatek
Epic Games Store Launcher Sends Out Suspiciously Large Amounts of Data
Reports that have emerged online suggest that Epic Games Store's digital client is sending out very large amounts of data somewhere - even over 514 KB per hour. One user also claims that the app's behavior negatively affects his Ryzen 7 5800X.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- Epic Games Store app contacts 22 different servers and sends large amounts of data to them (fourteen times more than Steam);
- One Reddit user claims that EGS client's behavior has caused the processor to overheat in his PC.
One Reddit user discovered that a PC client app of Epic Games Store is sending very large amounts of data somewhere. According to the user, his CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X) was so burdened by the app that turning it off reduced the idle temperature from 50 to 37 degrees Celsius.
The editors of BluesNews decided to take a closer look and noted that Epic Games Launcher consists of five different processes that send information to as many as 22 different servers. It's worth noting that this is always the case when the program is running - even when we minimize it or when it runs in the background. It was also discovered that the process called EpicWebHelper sends the data to tracking-website-prod07-epic-961842049.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Within an hour, Epic Games Store client sent out over 514 KB of information. This is approximately fourteen times the amount of data sent by competing Steam or Nvidia GeForce Experience within the same period of time. The editors of the website admit that although the link between the EGS app and the processor's temperature has not been confirmed, its operation looks suspicious (history already knows cases of programs that have been used for example for espionage, although it is not known if this is the case here).
Experts even suggest that users should switch off the app until the doubts are dispelled. It is worth noting that GitHub offers an alternative EGS client, called Legendary, whose code is publicly available. Unfortunately, the app does not have a graphic interface, so it is unlikely to meet the requirements of most users.
Finally, I was unable to confirm the anomaly on my own PC. Epic Games launcher does in fact periodically sends some data somewhere, but in my case the amount is not drastically different from other programs (for example GOG Galaxy or the aforementioned GeForce Experience) - it was about 2 KB per 10 minutes.