Epic quickly plugged the leak, but not before a whole lot of titles spilled out.
For a brief, shining moment, the Epic Games Store had its very own SteamDB website called, appropriately enough, EpicDB. It's gone now, but not before leaking what appears to be a database containing numerous unreleased games including Final Fantasy 9 and The Last of Us 2.
First spotted by the Famiboards forum (via TheGamer), the fun began when people realized EpicDB's publisher search results were including unreleased titles along with games that are already live. Many of them were listed under codenames, but online sleuths were able to puzzle them out based on related listings, like the names of associated DLC.
Gematsu has a good breakdown: The links are all dead now, but Momo, for instance, is presumed to be Final Fantasy 9 Remake because of the presence of the Thief's Knives preorder bonus and Tetra Master Starter Pack early-purchase bonus, while Skobeloff appears to be Final Fantasy 16 because the cloud save folder is "{UserDir}/My Games/FINAL FANTASY XVI/EOS/{EpicID}/." Hey, not all of them are deep-and-dark brainteasers.
We're pretty sure that at least some of the games leaked out of EpicDB are fakes, enabled by Epic's self-publishing tools. One "unknown organization" called out on Resetera is reportedly the publisher of games including Helldivers 2, Elden Ring, Starfield, Grand Theft Auto 2, Bloodborne Remake, and Elden Ring 2, which I'm pretty sure is not accurate.
But enough of it looks sufficiently legit to get people talking, and adding to that maybe-legitimacy is the fact that the apparent EpicDB creator—or at least the person claiming to be on Discord—is ximton, who until a couple years ago was a fairly prolific Fortnite dataminer and leaker. If they are one and the same, it lends credence to the idea that he knows how to tiptoe through Epic's tulips.
It's all entirely speculative at this point, but it also brings to mind the great Nvidia leak of 2021. That too was "speculative," in the words of Nvidia not long after the leak began to spread, and yet two years later it was all coming true, and we expect to see it continue banging through 2024. Some of the titles in the EpicDB leak are obvious bullshit, yes, but for the majority of it, the closer I look, the more I think, well, maybe.
Epic isn't doing much to quell that speculation. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, the company said, "We released an update so third-party tools can’t surface any new unpublished product titles from the Epic Games Store catalog." That's probably wise, but I'm not seeing a denial in there. Take it for what it's worth.
