That game you wishlisted has EOS? Or worse, maybe a game you have owned for months or even years suddenly has EOS installed into it? That’s pretty uncool from the devs, but in this guide you’ll find a way to play your favorite games without Epic Games harvesting and selling your data.

What is Epic Online Services (EOS)?

For those unaware, Epic is adding their own counterpart to Steamworks to more and more games, old and new, single or multiplayer and in many cases games that have been out for years have had EOS added retroactively.

While Epic markets Epic Online Services (EOS) as a “store agnostic” infrastructure for cross-platform multiplayer and achievements, games that have had EOS added retroactively like Killing Floor 2 and Remnant from the Ashes reported myriad connection issues for players after the updates in which EOS was added.

Epic also uses EOS to yet again collect telemetry on player IP addresses, hardware, gaming sessions (among others) in yet another way of involving themselves in games that, in some cases, are neither made with Unreal or even released on EGS.

How to block EOS in four easy steps

Disclaimer: this is a solution for singleplayer, blocking EOS will break multiplayer services for any game, considering the devs decided to use EOS instead of Steamworks. Any risk of using this fix on a multiplayer game is on you.

Whatever you do, do not remove the .dll files associated with EOS. For some games this may work, but for others (e.g. Ghostrunner) this will result in your game refusing to launch.

Instead follow these four steps, where we will block outgoing traffic to the Epic servers.

1) Go to the following path on the drive where you have windows installed:

\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS

For Linux users the equivalent path to the file is simply /etc/hosts. Sudo privileges needed to edit. Easiest way would be to open the terminal, and type:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

2) Open with Notepad, make sure you have unchecked “read only” in file properties and open it as an administrator. If you can’t save the file after step 4, open notepad as an administrator, and open the host file in notepad.

3) Remember the addresses: 127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0, and 255.255.255.255. All three redirect to your local system and will block outgoing. To make things easy, we’ll be using 0.0.0.0. If that doesn’t work, try one of the other two.

At the bottom of the text document you just opened, add any website you want to permanently block like this:

0.0.0.0 [url]

So to block EOS, you will need to add the following lines:

0.0.0.0 dev.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 api.epicgames.dev

0.0.0.0 et.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 et2.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 udn.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 etsource.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 metrics.ol.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

0.0.0.0 datarouter.ol.epicgames.com – [epicgames.com]

4) Save your changes, exit the document and recheck “read-only” in the file properties. EOS should be blocked now and you can launch your game.

Verified games

This is the list of EOS games that have been verified to work with the aforementioned fix and succesfully block outgoing traffic to Epics servers. If you have used the fix on a game not in the list and it works, please let us know in the comments below or by PM and we will update the list.

The list of all games that have EOS can be found here: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList%5Btechnologies%5D%5B0%5D=SDK.EpicOnlineServices – [steamdb.info]

Verified to work:

– Ghostrunner

– Mafia 2: Definitive Edition

– The Outer Worlds

– Warframe

Verified to not work:

– Killing Floor 2: multiplayer is dependent on EOS and using this fix WILL reset your classes

– Troy Total War

Hope you enjoy the Guide about Steam – Guide on How to Block Epic Online Services, if you think we should add extra information or forget something, please let us know via comment below, and we will do our best to fix or update as soon as possible!