[aeriklawson]

> Epic isn't making a marketplace where I want to spend my money by being better than Steam, they're just trying to make a place where I have to spend money if I want to play certain games. Good luck with that one.

The irony in this statement is kind of ridiculous. You can't play many games without owning a Steam account right now. How is that any different in principle?

Overall, I recognize the Epic Store has some large issues and it definitely deserves criticism, but I just don't see why this shift is such a big deal in the long run. It's a good thing that Valve is getting competition, whose customer support has been a complete joke since its inception and monopoly allowed them to take huge bites from studio profits for years.

I don't believe anyone should be tied to one company's products like we have with Steam and there should never be a monopoly over this kind of stuff; Valve's dominance of the PC gaming marketplace is plain scary. I'm fine with Valve having to prove that people should use their product over the newcomers.

Right now the most frustrating thing will definitely be the split among ecosystems (chat, etc) and feature parity for things like Steam Workshop. That will smooth out over time, but yeah for now that's definitely an annoyance. I think we'll see an intermediary app like Discord fill the social space, just like how XFire used to dominate in the 2000's.

[throwawaywhynot]

wtf. epic "buys" exclusives. This is something steam has never done. If a developer has their game on steam, they're free to release it anywhere else. Epic has exclusivity contracts

[aeriklawson]

You're phrasing this as if Epic is going around making all these poor developers do their bidding - the developer is agreeing to list their game as an exclusive.

Be mad at the dev for making the choice to host only on Epic Store if you're upset about it - they're aware of the consequences and could have easily gone with Steam instead.

[baud147258]

It's often a decision of the publishers, not the devs.

[eridius]

The monopoly store doesn't need exclusives, they're already the monopoly. And back when Steam was first starting out, there weren't competing storefronts that they could demand developers withhold their games from.