CARY — Worried that Epic Games through its new online store could be collecting personal data on you without your knowledge?
Well, don’t rush to any conclusions just yet.
Its founder, Tim Sweeney, personally took to the popular social news aggregate website, Reddit, to quash those rumors this week.
It comes after a Reddit member under the handle, u/Amnail, started a discussion post accusing the Epic Games Store as being “literal Spyware and worse”.
They wrote:
“They’re not even trying to hide it. Their TOS states they have the right to monitor you and send the data to their parent company. And who is Epic’s parent company? The Chinese dev that’s known for spying for the Chinese government. Tencent. The same Tencent who’s working hand in hand with the Chinese Government to work on tools to spy on their own citizens. Escentially (sic) Epic Games is owned by the Chinese Government. What better way to monitor people than by videogames and a Steam like program people usually never close? The TOS somehow even manages to get worse the more you read it.”
In less than 24 hours, Sweeney posted a response in the thread, debunking the allegations:
“Re Epic Games store: Epic does not share user data with Tencent or any other company. We don’t share it, sell it, or broker access to it for advertising like so many other companies do.
I’m the founder and controlling shareholder of Epic and would never allow this to happen.
The language related to sharing data with the parent companies refers to Epic Games Inc. It’s a US-based company. This language exists because when you buy an Epic game in certain territories (like Europe), the seller of record is our local (e.g. European) subsidiary company for tax purposes, but the data is ultimately stored by Epic Games Inc.
Tencent is not a parent company of Epic. Tencent is an independent company that’s a minority investor in Epic, alongside many others. However they do not have any sort of access to our customer data.
The other language around data in the EULA generally exists to cover the cases where we use third party service providers as part of operating our online services. For example, our game servers and databases are hosted on Amazon Web Services. However these third parties do not have the right to use or access Epic customer data in any way except for providing that service.”
In the same thread, he also revealed that Epic Games store will get offline support in 2019.
It’s been quite the year for the Cary-based video game giant.
According to a recent report on TechCrunch, the company made $3 billion in profits this year on the heels of the world’s most popular game, Fortnite.
