I decided for some reason to try to install Fortnite on my Mac. Let me walk you through all the steps I took to do so:
- Found the Epic website for Fortnite. Clicked the link to download. Takes me to a login screen.
- Oh great, I can use different accounts to login and I see Nintendo as an option. Great, I know I have a Nintendo account so I’ll just do that.
- Use my password manager to fill out the username and password field. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Mentally note all the 11 year olds I’m about to crush in Battle Royale.
- A “Select all the crosswalks from this square of 9 images” captcha window pops up. I select the crosswalks, including as images replace the images I select. I pass. Yay, I am not an emotionless robot!
- No account with that email address. record scratch Wait, what? The field clearly says I could enter either my username or my email address and I used my username. Okay. Let’s try with the email address I think I used for this account.
- Go back through selecting all the cross walks. Wait for the verdict on whether I’m a bot or not. I haven’t turned into a bot in the past 90 seconds, apparently. Yay!
- “We’ve emailed you a login code”. Ugh. Fine, I’ll open my email and find it. Wait a bit for my email to sync. Find the email.
- Enter the login code. Hit enter.
- “Incorrect code”. What??? It’s literally the code you JUST sent me. Double check the email message and see if I missed something and copied the wrong thing. Doesn’t look like it. Did selecting the code accidentally miss a character? Again, doesn’t look like it.
- Deliberately slow down a bit. Copy the code again. Paste the code. Switch back and forth and make sure it copied correctly. Looks like it did.
- Okay, I am 99% certain I entered the exact same code the second time but this time it works. Eventual consistency, man.
- “Do you want to share your name and email with Epic?” Not really but I guess I have to…
- Now the Epic screen is here. “Please enter your multi-factor code!” Wait — I just did? What the heck? Go back to my email, try to copy and paste the code into the Epic form, but it’s one letter short. Go back to my email, I see I have two new emails. Both from Nintendo, “There’s been a new login to your account.” The second one, “You’re now sharing information with Epic.” Ugh.
- Comment to myself this is literally 10 more steps than I have ever had to log in to any of my banking accounts. If anyone wants my Epic account they can have it, surely this is not worth it. Rethink for a moment if I even want Fortnite on my Mac. Press on anyway.
- Decide to search my password manager for Epic, and find that I had saved an account with a password, and MFA! Briefly think about what a massive waste of time it was to try to use my Nintendo account instead earlier. Copy/paste the MFA code and hope that it’s the right account.
- Great! I’m in! Hooray! Looks like I’m at a store front? Okay. Let’s click the download link.
- Download works fine. Oh, it’s downloading the Epic launcher and not Fortnite. Okay. Cool, I guess? I really only want Fortnite, I will literally never use it for anything else.
- Move the Fortnite Launcher into the Applications folder. Eject the DMG. Open Applications folder. Launch Epic Launcher.
- “Please login.” FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
- Well remembering what a nightmare it was to login with the Nintendo account, I go straight to the Epic account. Enter my username, my password, the MFA code when prompted. Takes me straight back to the store. Great, now we’re cooking with gas.
- Search for Fortnite. “Buy for free”. Okay, sure whatever. Click through several checkout prompts as if I am making a purchase. Get to the end of the checkout process, “You have already purchased this game, access it through the library.”
- Okay fine, whatever. Locate the library link. I only have Fortnite in my library. I click on it. I click download.
- I noticed in the left panel a “download progress” link has appeared. I click on it, curious to see how long this will take.
- I gasp when I see that Fortnite requires 93GB of storage. That seems like … quite a lot?
- “You must free 70GB of storage to download Fortnite.”
- I hurl my laptop into the sun.