smileplease

epic games doesn't know how to implement oauth (rant)

TLDR: I am tired when a big corporation like epic games is incompetent enough to not implement auth correctly on one of their sub projects where you are forced to create an account to get something meaningfull. I am probably never going to invest in Epic games / advice everyone to stay away from epic games.

It might seem that I am blowing it over , considering this can be thought of as small mistake or bug , but these small bugs are what adds friction , I consider myself smart "enough" , yet I am not able to sign up just because I used google auth . I am more than boggled on the fact that they have 8 (yes 8) methods of Auth but the most prevalently used one is broken (wow!)

(This blog post is under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

So I was watching a video by games of scratch about 17,000 free assets but only if you avail it within this specific year (which can be considered a little manipulative , for which you have to sign up / sign in , maybe epic games wants to increase their account number but okay.

So I decided to go to fab.com and avail the offer , alright , It wants me to sign up for an account , no problem So it loads me up like this (no problem)

So Although I am usually a privacy advocate , I sometimes succumb to the ease that sometimes google auth provides.

But Oh boy , this was a big mistake.

So when I entered my google auth , the first time it actually did nothing but redirect me to epic games website to create an account (alright , no worries ) but then it asked me my age / last name

(THIS IS A VERY COMMON ROOKIE MISTAKE in OAuth / google auth where google might not give the last name , because you haven't set the perms correctly so you keep it empty but epic games database requires last name so a person has to manually type it )

But this was where it became interesting , it actually gave me a email code for signing up/in after using google OAuth (wow!)

Have they forget that when we use google oauth that they are most likely signed up and that the need of asking for a email is not necessary

have they not really created a special check for implementing different ways of sign up (I understand I am maybe not able to explain myself here , let me draw a whiteboard analogy for you)

Image_1.png

expected-workflow.png

reality-workflow-enhanced.png

Here's the error for you (how meaningful error right ? (satire))

error.png

And the funny part is I am logged in on epic games but not on fab!

and I have even tried to forget the cache of fab if there was some sort of error in my cache , but nope , for some reason an account created by google just wouldn't work.

My frustration with big tech grows. I feel sad on why did I even rely on google auth in first place , or why the developers at fab couldn't handle the most baic oauth which can be implemented even by some of the most cheap freelancers (heck , you could've just used lucia , clerk , openstack or the dozen or more so options like authentic , zitadel etc.) yet these developers are probably getting 100k to deliver the end user such a bad experience.

I legit see a new option of auth drop in each day on hackernews or some other part of internet yet here is a billion dollar company suffering the whims of auth!

I am just left speechless , I am just left wondering for what did I sign the TOS for?

this zach star video sums up my experience Video link