this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Nah, his crime was paying studios for timed exclusives.
It's one thing to provide a viable alternative to Steam and give consumers more options. It's another to provide an inferior alternative to Steam, pay money to take away consumers' options, and act like the messiah of the gaming industry while doing so.
But developers like it, because it's a sum of cash they get as guaranteed money, and epic gets exclusives as a result.
...and in the end, it's just a launcher. At least you don't have to buy a whole other dang console.
Epic was always behind Steam, if you like it or not. That Valve tries to assure its independency from other vendors (Microsoft) by creating its own OS and hardware should not be too difficult to understand as a company decision. At the meantime Epic is trying to buy its place in the market with exclusives and free games, not respecting or trying to bend other platforms rules.
I don't care where you buy your games, but I do care, which companies try to force me to their buggy, unfinished and user-unfriendly platform, for a game I was waiting to be published.
But it's a preference thing.
It's a similar UX issue to TV/movie streaming.
Sure, it's just another one. But, it's a bad experience for the end user. You have some games exclusive to one launcher, other games exclusive to some other launcher, and so on. You have multiple different flows to achieve the same thing, and each of them are subtly different. Paradoxically, the only consistent way to launch all my games is by avoiding the launchers entirely and instead using the desktop shortcuts they create for games.
I will say that next time to a console.
Not a literal comparison but you see where I am coming from.
Make epic GS a better version of steam (technical viewpoint not community) and I could see myself building another library.