Epic Games Store Will Require Two-Factor Authentication for Free Games

It's been a long time since people directed their anger at the Epic Games Store. In the past, people rallied against it for lacking some fairly important features, and more damningly, for stealing quite a few games from Steam and making them Epic Games Store exclusives. But like literally every controversy that rocks the gaming world, people soon lost steam (pun intended) and stopped caring, allowing the Epic Games store to exist quietly alongside Steam. These days, you could argue it's probably Steam's biggest competitor, but all that early aggression apparently did little to rattle Steam's insurmountable lead as the game store of choice for millions around the globe.

The Epic Games Store has tried to close that gap since with the occasional free game, but starting from today for about a month, they'll also be using the free game in a secondary, sneaky way. They plan to use it to encourage users to improve their account security.

From a blog post:

Beginning today and ending on May 21, we will periodically require two-factor authentication prior to claiming free games on the Epic Games Store. We are making this change in an effort to encourage our players to take steps to strengthen their Epic account security.

If you do not have two-factor authentication enabled on your account, you will see the following message when attempting to claim a free game:

Two Factor Authentication Required

Claiming this free game requires you to have Two-Factor Authentication setup on your account. Two-Factor Authentication provides an additional level of security to your Epic Games account and will help prevent unauthorized access.

All things considered, I think this is a pretty fantastic idea. Two-factor authentication is a critical extra layer of protection to keep your data safe, and by using the carrot rather than the stick to incentivize people into activating it willingly, you don't create as much resentment as, say, forcing people to turn it on if they even want to use the store at all.

Hopefully it works. I can't think of a downside to this, outside maybe needing to trust Epic with your cell phone number.