Epic Games Store seemingly removing free games from user libraries

[AnotherGills 25]

One of the few positively received features of the Epic Games Store is the offering of free games (in the vein of Origin’s “On The House” feature). It seems the free games are not being bound to a user’s account according to some users. Once a user uninstalls a free game from the Epic Games Store, they have no option to re-install it, leading to users losing access to the game.

The latest title impacted by this “practice” is Slime Rancher, which seems to have been removed from a user's account when 'uninstalled'.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, has since responded to the backlash on Twitter, blaming user error:

Quote

“The cases we’ve investigated so far all turned out to be a result of the customer having multiple Epic associated with different email addresses, often due to not realizing that Fortnite, UT, Paragon, and Unreal Engine share the same account system.”

One problem is that it has been difficult to check whether free games were ever redeemed as the Epic Games Store website only ever showed 90 days of purchase history. Tim Sweeney responded:

Part of the issue is that when a user claims the 'free' games. Epic Games Store did not send out email notification confirmations. Tim Sweeney has responded:

The current free Epic game is Torchlight. Torchlight will be replaced with Limbo on July 18, 2019. Once Torchlight is cycled out, we will be able to confirm whether this was simply an isolated issue.

[ZLoth 10]

I checked my library, and both Torchlight and Slime Rancher are there. 

[AnotherGills 25]

On 7/18/2019 at 8:09 PM, ZLoth said:

I checked my library, and both Torchlight and Slime Rancher are there. 

Great. Glad to see this situation was simply an error.