It appears that PC gamers can take advantage of an exploit on the Epic Games Store to access and keep games to their accounts for free. Willian Worrall of CCN discovered this new vulnerability and - for anyone interested - Epic Games has not fixed it yet. If you install a game through the store by logging into someone else's account, you can continue to play the installed game even if you log back into your own account.

While logging into my account earlier today, I discovered that a game I didn't own but which was already installed from another Epic Games Store account was appearing in my library. Trying to boot the game resulted in it running fine, no error messages or stops at all. This was replicated on another machine and the result was always the same. As long as you had a game installed in the Epic Games directory, you could run the game even if you didn't own it.

The exploit was consistently replicable even when creating a completely new account that doesn't own any games. As well as making a new account we even tested the exploit on a third machine and the exploit persisted, meaning that it is almost certainly possible to do this with any account, on any machine.

The exploit was consistently replicable even when creating a completely new account that doesn't own any games. As well as making a new account we even tested the exploit on a third machine and the exploit persisted, meaning that it is almost certainly possible to do this with any account, on any machine.

I refunded Borderlands 3 and uninstalled it from the Epic Games Store but found its install directory and its executable is still there and I can unfortunately continue to play Borderlands 3 even though it's gone.

TALK ABOUT SICK DRM pic.twitter.com/nEtpke2Ckt

— Marty (@TimeCommando) September 16, 2019

This exploit seems to have something to do with a lack of DRM or license-checking on the part of the store. Back when Borderlands 3 was released, gamers on Reddit and Twitter discovered that they could still play the game after refunding it by locating the executable on their PC.