If you need to declare the following three weeks of freebies on the Epic Games Store, you’ll first have to allow two-factor authentication in your account to strengthen its safety. Two-factor authentication is simple to arrange and use so it’s not a hassle, although it’s curious that they’re solely requiring this till May 21st, not completely. “We are making this change in an effort to encourage our players to take steps to strengthen their Epic account security,” Epic clarify, probably not explaining.
You don’t want to present Epic your telephone quantity to make use of two-factor authentication. You can allow 2FA to run via e-mail, an authenticator app, or textual content message. I exploit e-mail myself as a result of it’s the least faff and doesn’t give Epic private data they didn’t have already got.
“We understand that this is a minor inconvenience for some, but we want to provide the best possible solutions to protect your Epic account,” Epic mentioned in last night’s announcement.
It’s no shock that Epic need folks to additional safe their accounts. When folks get hacked a technique or one other, they trigger extra work for the help staff, they make the corporate sound unhealthy once they inform their buddies, and so they is perhaps inclined to cease utilizing the shop/game/website/no matter.
It’s fairly widespread for corporations to supply perks in change for enabling 2FA. Epic’s personal Fortnite provides gamers a bonus dance emote. GTA Online provides $500,000 of virtuacash. Waframe provides a participant path beauty doodad. And different such examples. Steam’s method is extra carrot than stick, placing a maintain on promoting and buying and selling objects for folks not utilizing the cellular authenticator. Either means, they actually would love you to lock down your account.
Free games on the Epic Store are sufficient of a carrot in themselves, although the truth that that is just for a number of weeks does make me marvel if Epic is perhaps planning enormous giveaways that’ll actually make folks activate 2FA to nab them. Or perhaps they’re attempting three weeks as an experiment. Or perhaps they assume three weeks could be lengthy sufficient to get a substantial variety of accounts secured with out laying aside too new folks. Who is aware of. They’re not saying.
Ars Technica asked Epic if this was sparked by a breach of Epic’s safety, or by considerations about different breaches just like the current large Nintendo account leak, however Epic replied merely “no”.
The subsequent weekly set of free games are approaching Thursday. They’ll be Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person spooker from the studio who later made Soma, and Crashlands, a game our former John (RPS in peace) quite liked on mobile. We don’t but know what’s coming after that. And you’ve acquired till tomorrow to get For The King free – when you allow 2FA.
I do know Epic try to seize a piece of the market by throwing cash at their subpar retailer however hey, I’ll fortunately preserve claiming freebies whereas they’re paying builders for them.
