The Epic Store has been trying to draw people to its store through its growing list of exclusives and sales, as evidenced by the current Epic Mega Sale. However, this sale has revealed an unusual flaw in its design as users are being blocked for buying too many games. While seemingly counterintuitive, it is part of the Epic Store’s “aggressive fraud rules.”
Twitch streamer Patrick Boivin recently pointed this out on Twitter, stating that his account had been blocked from making purchases. He claimed that he bought five games during the sale, which seemingly triggered the lockdown.
Nick Chester, senior PR for Epic, told us that it was part of the store’s attempts to stop fraud.
“This was a result of our aggressive fraud rules,” he said. “If players run into this issue, they should contact player support so we can investigate.”
This is seemingly also tied to the store’s lack of a shopping cart. Since people can’t stack up all the game’s they want to buy in one meaty purchase, they have to buy them all separately. Buying this many items must set off the store front’s fraud detection systems. Given that this is a sale with tons of big price drops, people are more likely to be buying more games in one visit. When combined, all of this is a prime recipe to find peculiar holes like this.
While it is noble to want to stop fraud, this points out yet another hardship for the budding storefront. Lacking a cart seems inconsequential, but can grow into a much bigger headache given the right circumstances. And, in this case, those circumstances included holding a sale where people would be buying many games separately during one visit.
But this isn’t the only oddity concerning the Epic Mega Sale. Publishers that didn’t want to opt into the sale started removing some of their games during the sale. Paradox Interactive temporarily took Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 off sale and Klei removed Oxygen Not Included. Supergiant also raised the price of Hades before lowering it again, stating that it will hike the price back up after the sale as it adds more features.
