How did multiple unannounced games leak through the Epic Games Store?

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 EpicDB featured public pages for a bunch of unannounced titles from Square Enix, Sony, Sega, 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 SteamDB, 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.

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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. A user on ResetEra 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