You Probably Shouldn’t Store Your Credit Card Info On The Epic Games Store

Whenever people rag on the Epic Games Store, I remind them competition is a good thing and that if they lean on one market (like Steam) for everything, Steam will eventually abuse that monopolistic power over them. This is more of an argument for the free market and not a defense of the Epic Games Store itself, which is undeniably lame. I got nothing there.

That reputation is unlikely to change anytime soon. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posted on Monday that “we have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.” In some cases AI helps you do things faster, but often it makes so many mistakes that you end up spending the same amount of time and money — or more — cleaning up the errors. Or, like Tim, you could just not care about the errors and become a slop lord.

A couple days after the “acceleration” comment, Sweeney approved a new blog post that actually led with the sentence “Programming is hard.” This is a tech company, the type of which normally vets its statements to sound strong and intelligent, telling us programming is hard. I guess if you fired everyone (or moved them around) who knows how to program, it would be a lot harder. The post continued: “So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.”

First off, out of all the complaints people have about Epic, the speed of the launcher is not one of them. But their AI-guided streamlines have resulted in half a second sharper response time, which isn’t a huge improvement. The bigger problem here is that vibe coded programs usually haven’t been inspected for safety protocols and could contain vulnerabilities the viber doesn’t know about until they happen to people. And then what do you do? YOU’RE not the one who coded it, so you don’t know what the problem is. And you can ask Claude to fix it, but it may not know either. You’re at its mercy at that point, entering token after token and running up the bill instead of getting someone to go into the code and discover the issue — still the most foolproof way to fix bugs.

We would bet good money there’s a vulnerability now in Epic’s storefront that would expose personal information if an agentic AI was ordered to find it. It’s only a matter of time until that happens, so…if you must buy a game through Epic, don’t store your credit card info with them. Or if it’s already there, you should remove it. Ignore our warning at your own peril.

If and when there’s a massive data leak at Epic, they’ll survive…they can live off of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine alone. It’s this solid foundation that allows them to have no concern for their own customers, but shopping through them is still your own choice.