Earlier this month, users began finding that their Ryzen CPUs were running much hotter when the Epic Games Launcher was running on their systems. Epic Games has since confirmed that this is indeed an unintended bug and has begun putting fixes in place.
As we have previously reported, the Epic Games Launcher had a weird CPU usage pattern which was increasing the temperature significantly, even when the application was only running in the background. Besides increasing the CPU temperatures, the application was also sending a significant amount of data to multiple servers.
Following the discovery, Sergiy Galyonkin, director of publishing strategy at Epic Games, confirmed that it's a bug and that the team would be working on it.
The hotfix is live now (11.0.2). It's not a full solution, but things should improve.
— Sergiy Galyonkin (@galyonkin) December 29, 2020
Now as of December 29th, the hotfix has begun rolling out and it appears to be fixing up the issue for many users. Unfortunately, details on exactly what was causing this issue have not been revealed yet.
While we don't know the exact details, Sergiy Galyonkin has said that one of the causes was that the browser module of the app remained active at all times, even when the Epic Games Launcher was minimised. Presumably, this is also what was causing the random data uploads too.
KitGuru says: Did many of you encounter this issue with the Epic Games Launcher? Has the latest update for the app fixed it for you?