The Epic Games Store got off to a rocky start, according to recently released documents. As part of the Apple versus Epic trial that got started on Monday, we’re getting a first look into Epic’s business dealings, which didn’t start off all that well.
Giving away all those free games certainly didn’t help, but neither did this recently revealed issue with Ubisoft’s release of Division 2 on the Epic Games Store way back in March of 2019. Epic hadn’t set up enough surveillance measures to combat a massive wave of fraudulent buyers. It was so bad that as much as 70% of all copies of Division 2 purchased on Epic were done so using stolen credit cards, leading Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to personally apologize to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot.
“I’m writing to apologize for the shortcomings in our Epic Games store implementation and our Uplay integration,” wrote Sweeney. “In the past 48 hours, the rate of fraudulent transactions on Division 2 surpassed 70% and was approaching 90%. Sophisticated hackers were creating Epic accounts, buying Ubisoft games with stolen credit cards, and then selling the linked Uplay accounts faster than we were disabling linked Uplay purchases for fraud.”
The letter goes on to say that Epic’s normal fraud rate is under 2%, and Fortnite’s fraud rate is under 1%.
To stop it, Epic had to actually remove all Ubisoft games from the store temporarily and create “a real-time system for disabling refunded and fraudulent purchases on Uplay,” as well as back-end anti-fraud improvements to Epic’s servers.
“The fault in this situation is entirely Epic’s, and all of the minimum revenue guarantees remain in place to ensure our performance,” Sweeney concludes.
Epic paid out for all those fraudulent Division 2 purchases which contributed to the EGS being “hundreds of millions of dollars short of being profitable,” according to Sweeney’s testimony on Monday. He doesn’t expect the EGS to become profitable until 2024 at the absolute earliest.
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