As my kids have grown up, they’ve taken to gaming a little more seriously. Mainly, this means they’re more interested in carrying across their progress as they plays multi-platform games on different devices.
These days, such things are easy – just log into the device with the corresponding publisher account – in this case we’re talking Fortnite and therefore an epic games account – and it will bring across all of your progress and bits and bats, and everyone’s happy.
The problem is, if you took the easy approach when you first set up Fortnite on the xbox, then you can’t do this, as you never actually log in using an Epic Games account – it just automatically links it to your xbox account and logs you in automatically.
This means that when it’s time to UNLINK those accounts, which you do from the Epic Games account website, you can’t…as you don’t have an account to log into!
The good news is, you actually DO have an Epic Games account, just not one you’ve ever seen. When you choose to link your xbox account to Fortnite, it actually creates you an Epic Games account too, in the background. All you need to do to access it is go to the Epic Games website and choose ‘Login’, and then choose to login using your xbox account (from the list of platform icons above the username and password boxes).
Once you’ve logged in using your xbox details, it will automatically detect that you have one of those shadow accounts it sets up automatically, and prompt you to finish setting up the account – this will require your personal details, an email and password. The email address does need to be valid, as it will send you a verification code you’ll need to input before you can complete the account set up.
Once that’s done, you’ll have access to your hidden Epic Games account and you can remove the connection to your xbox account, which will then prompt you to log back in the next time you play Fortnite.
In my example, I already had an Epic Games account I wanted to use, so once I’d disconnected the automatically generated one, I simply logged back in with my preferred account and connected the xbox account to it, meaning that when I reloaded Fortnite it already had the connection and logged me in automatically again, just on the new account.
One thing to watch out for is if you do already have an Epic Games account, you’ll find that you can’t re-use your email address when trying to set up your shadow account. If you don’t have another address you can use, and if you’re using gmail, then you can use a nice feature that lets you set up as many unique addresses as you like without doing any sort of settings or config.
Basically, you can add any string you want to your gmail account, and it will still come through as a normal email. Let’s say your email address is ‘superemail123@gmail.com’. You could also use ‘epicgames+superemail123@gmail.com’ or ‘temporaryemail+superemail123@gmail.com’ and they’d all come through to the same inbox. Just make sure to use the + sign to separate the thing you’re adding from your actual email address, and you’re good to go.
Hope that helps, and apologies for flitting between just about every version of capitalisation for the various service and device names in this post.
