Epic Games Store’s bombshell video game leak, explained

[Pelican Press 0]

Epic Games Store’s bombshell video game *****, explained

Square Enix

In an event not seen since numerous video games leaked through Nvidia GeForce Now, a third-party tool accidentally exposed a bunch of listings on the Epic Games Store. A website called

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featured public pages for a bunch of unannounced titles from Square Enix, Sony, *****, Saber Interactive, and many other publishers.

While a lot of what people found were codenames Tuesday night, going through the metadata and looking at related files revealed a lot about what they could actually be. The story is a bit confusing, so let’s break down exactly what went down, what games leaked, and what steps Epic is already taking to prevent it from happening again.

So, what happened?

EpicDB is an Epic Games Store equivalent of

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, an unofficial database of everything on the digital games platform. Valve doesn’t publicly release sales data, but you can glean a lot from SteamDB’s charts and lists, which provide a more detailed view of how games are doing on Steam. It’s a great way to see if player count is spiking, what has been wishlisted the most, and how games do over multiple years.

SteamDB only lists games that have live store pages. That didn’t happen with EpicDB, which listed pages that were registered but hadn’t been pushed online yet. Gaming fans quickly caught on, leading to a wave of unintentional leaks.

What leaked?

Quite a bit actually. A number of unannounced AAA projects were listed.

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posted a number of screenshots, noting that if you search through publishers on the database, you’ll see every release registered through the Epic Games Store. Some are more obvious than others; there appears to be a Turok remake coming from Saber Interactive, with a listing that was created just last month called simply “Turok.”

Many of them are listed under codenames. On the Sony Interactive Entertainment page, there are listings with the codenames “Utah” and “RhodeIsland.” Many have speculated that RhodeIsland refers to a The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered PC port. Meanwhile, over on Square Enix Japan’s page, you have games with the codenames “Skobeloff” and “Momo.”

EpicDB (a SteamDB equivalent) launched and appears to be leaking many unannounced projects under codenames

Some of the listings include
-FFXVI (Skobeloff)
-FFIX Remake (Momo) with a Tetra Master Starter Pack & Thief’s Knives bonus
-Turok from Saber
-The…

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— Wario64 (@Wario64)

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Releases beyond just the games themselves were also listed. For example, Momo has multiple extras listed, including preorder items, a digital soundtrack, and a deluxe upgrade. These specifically help determine that Momo is likely a Final Fantasy 9 remake, since the names make multiple references to the game (the Thief’s Knives preorder bonus refers to a Final Fantasy ******* that appears in Final Fantasy 9, for example). Skobeloff was listed with three pieces of DLC, which led to theories that it’s a PC port of Final Fantasy 16.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Codenames can be rather random, so they might not connect so obviously to projects. Anything pulled from the leaks should be taken as rumor for now.

Has Epic responded?

Epic got to work, and within a few hours, released a patch to its platform. That likely means that it won’t happen again anytime soon — at least not on Epic’s watch.

“We released an update tonight so third-party tools can’t surface any new unpublished product titles from the Epic Games Store catalogue,” a spokesperson from the company

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.

What happens to EpicDB now?

The future of the database is unclear. At the time of this writing, heading to the URL shows the server is down. It’ll need some work before it can come back online. It shouldn’t stop publishers from using Epic’s platform, but it could always lead to heightened security and even vaguer codenames for added secrecy.

Editors’ Recommendations

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