Why would uninstalling the launcher uninstall all the downloaded engines on my machine?

My launcher crashed non stop upon spending a day and a half downloading the engine versions I need so I decided to re-install the launcher. Well lo and behold despite the prompts saying the launcher would be removed it also nuked all my stuff and now I have to spend another day and a half downloading everything again to most likely have the junk launcher bomb out on me again.

Shouldn’t the launcher warn you that it will remove all your downloaded content plus engines?

Hi Alex,

I’m sorry that you’re experiencing these issues with your launcher. It has always been intended functionality to uninstall engine downloads and downloaded content along with the launcher since users are unable to use the content without the launcher. With that said though, I have put in an issue to look at potentially changing the message during the uninstall process to be a bit more clear as to what all is exactly being uninstalled.

-Max B.

is this still the case. come on epic. we have to uninstall the launcher when things go wrong and reinstall it. for this use case it would be helpful to not have to spend hours redownloading the engines and content.

Nice work on that design epic games. I just lost over 30gb of games after uninstalling the launcher so that I could re-install it on another drive. Its just as bad a design, as the launcher not being able to scan for games after moving them or not being able set a target directory with epic games installed in it. Seeing as the O.P. is from April 2015 it is disheartening that this issue appears that it will never be addressed.

My Epic Games Launcher all of a sudden went grey and unusable this morning. I uninstalled it thinking World War Z was going to be spared. Big mistake. I lost all my progression and now I have to download again. That’s just terrible on your part.

I just finished downloading borderlands 3 only to have this buggy launcher start acting up so I uninstalled it to reinstall it but now it’s telling me to redownload borderlands 3? I really wish they would fix this launcher cause this is annoying to deal with. Just makes me wish that borderlands 3 was on steam instead of this useless launcher.

wow is there gonna be a solution for that i just lost 50GB of game from fixing the launcher

as of 2019/10/19 this IS STILLL happening, uninstalling EPIC launcher because it didnt WORK, after the last update, Re-installed, and even though I had the games physically on a sperate drive the GD ■■■■ deleted all my games 100’s of GIG are you FCKIN serious ! I will re-buy the games on Steam or GOG or even go buy the disk,. Never will I use this ■■■■ again.

“users are unable to use the content without the launcher”
How do you know? I could use it as a means to not have to download 100 gigs when i reinstall the launcher after it sperged out.
Well thanks for deciding for us anyway. Guess Ill go play another game.

So now in 2021, six years later to the day, and the launcher is still Epic in how unstable it is and still doesn’t warn you that it is going to delete 120GB of data when uninstalling and reinstalling because the “repair” function keeps crashing!