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User:Dribbleondo

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games

About

Serial Wiki Editor (h...hhheeeelllppp!) and somewhat technology-focused Youtube Person that may or may not have an unhealthy Hitman obsession.

On this wiki, you might know me from adding various DRM Free additions to the EGS DRM-Free list. Hey, someone has to do it!

An Investigation into Epic Games Store Authentication

Since 2023, I have been cataloguing the DRM status of games on the Epic Games Store. This is something I take pride in doing, in part because it's interesting to see how many games are actually DRM-Free on the platform (Which is to say, almost 1/4 of the catalogue, not including games not listed here on PCGW), and also in part because Epic's DRM/ SDK systems fascinates me.

The Epic Games store encourages the use of EOS; Epic Online Services for games, an SDK which handles achievements, friends lists, crossplay/ progression, Easy Anti-Cheat support, and game authentication. Interestingly, unlike Steamworks (which developers frequently enable Steamworks being required for games to run by default), developers who use EOS seem to take the opposite approach; They don't seem to enable anything more than the basic authentication procedure; -EpicPortal, which almost all games execute on the command line when a game launches from EGS.

Since EOS seems to be more separated up into modules, it may be reasonable to assume that such authentication is the default "required" setting, though the presence of several games on the store that outright do not use EOS (Love has a DRM-Free classic port which is completely untied from EOS, New Super Lucky's Tale, Invincible Presents: Atom Eve, Batman: Arkham Knight and Cyberpunk 2077 among several others), it may be possible that authentication can be disabled more easily when compared to Steamworks.

Some games require online approval and linking, which can also frequently be ignored when checking for DRM as the prompt can either be denied or exited without issue, and sometimes won't even pop-up if the person playing is offline (Train Valley 2, for example, requires online approval if the user is online, but offline, all prompts are disabled.

An interesting occurrence for EGS games is the uncommon, but still notable enough to mention, functionality of standalone modes. Hitman 3 can be made to ignore all offline mode prompts and enter into a standalone mode, while Saints Row (2022), can also be launched by pointing to a different startup script that is included in the games' files to bypass the THQ launcher middleware.

NOTE: This is far from complete. See the EOS Auth Interface documentation for more details.

Caption text
Epic Games Auth Code Description
-EpicPortal This is usually enough for games to run offline. Almost all games run this at the command line level when a game is launched from EGS.
-AUTH_PASSWORD=0 For our purposes, it tells the game to ignore the use of an online-obtained exchange code as a token to verify the legitimacy of the game. 0 in this context seems to depend per-game, but usually used to override the need for a token.