It's ironic to watch non-technical gamers hoot and holler about how evil Epic is while they pour millions into a world class engine for devs, and build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam (meaning they include free unlimited backend services in addition to the store front)
> pour millions into a world class engine for devs
That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
> build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam
So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam, a superior platform that has (a) an instant return policy [1], (b) the ability to emulate input for any game for the disabled[2], and (c) the ability to share your entire game library with family without having to share accounts and save files.
[1]: Obviously hasn't always been the case.
[2]: Via Big Picture Mode, which allows you to use any controller for any game and remap inputs for games that have no such settings. A total blessing for anyone disabled or with a preference for different controls.
> That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
They retroactively waived licensing fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars in revenue going back years!
But, ah yes, you got them! They're a company in a capitalist society trying to make money, what crooks!
>So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam
I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. By that logic anyone who makes any store that isn't Steam is just trying to control the market.
Anyone who makes anything that isn't the current incumbent in a monopolized industry is just trying to become the new monopoly!
And the rest of your points are in the worst faith.
Epic games is how old? You're complaining that a new player hasn't matched every feature of a decades old incumbent?
Not to mention, Epic games has instant-refunds on some games (developers can disable this, also yeah, bringing up Steam in a conversation about refunds is a joke, you knew that enough that you had to pre-emptively footnote it)
And Steam was an accessibility NIGHTMARE until very recently, to the point that I had seen petitions come out against it! Not to mention accessibility in games is largely on a game-by-game basis, acting like Big Picture was made to improve accessibility is laughable when it launched without the ability to even change text sizes for years.
As I understand it, people were mad at Epic when many game projects on Kickstarter, formerly announced and crowd-sponsored as multi-platform, were suddenly funded by Epic and changed to be exclusives on Epic. Many people viewed this as a breach of trust by the projects, and as even worse done by Epic, by prompting and encouraging this.
I think more competition in this space is great, and overall we'll all benefit. However, notice that when you open up Steam, the default view is your library of games, whereas when you open the Epic Games Launcher, your default view is the store. This suggests to me that BD folks are running the show, rather than folks who are interested in games. Valve has spent the better part of the last 20 years proving that they generally make decisions for Steam that put gamers first- enough so to convince me, a dedicated FOSS and free culture supporter to pay for DRMed games. I've also purchased a game from the Epic Game Store, and while the experience wasn't as good (the Epic Games Launcher is pretty half-baked software), I expect them to iterate and improve it, unlike EA's Origin software which is almost comically broken.
There has been controversy around them paying third party developers to release their game exclusively through Epic Games Store. From what I recall these are timed exclusives so the games do eventually end up on other store fronts but people seem to be really up in arms about it.
Some of the complaints are about Epic's lack of any interest in the minefields of Linux and macOS support. It's not a PC gaming store, it's emphatically a Windows gaming store. (Some of those complainants seem to overlook how long Steam was Windows-only or how much of the Steam catalog will likely remain Windows-only.)
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
