[Lev1a]

That's not so simple with the hypocrite named Epic who preach about competition being better for all while buying exclusive distribution rights from devs/publishers on PC, sometimes even for games that had been long announced to be coming out on Steam and/or were crowdfunded on that and other premises.

Case in point: "Satisfactory". I was pretty excited about the game when it was first shown, then found later

* it would be removed from Steam,

* I'd have to get an account for another store,

* use a store made by some incompetents who couldn't implement basic functionality like a "shopping cart" even months after release (does it have one by now?)

* give part of my money through Epic to fucking Tencent and install a piece of Chinese spyware on my PC in order to run it. Also no implicit Linux support because no Proton and because Sweeney loves to bend over for Microsoft exclusively.

[jfim]

You can buy it on Steam now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/

[Fnoord]

Sure, years later.

Compare to Iron Harvest, for example.

You could invest in the development via Kickstarter. Which boils down to making the project happen (due to lack of otherwise investors aka due to crowdfunding). Now, basically right after release, you can buy the game from Steam, too, but you pay full price for it (in contrast to the crowdfunders).

Contrast this to EGS. Stuff gets released on Steam many months later, say 6 months or a year, due to EGS getting the sack of money for being the sole distributor. Then, they release for full price on Steam. Why would I pay full price for a 6-12 month old game? I won't.

[colejohnson66]

A recent example of Epic exclusives was Borderlands 3. It was highly anticipated, and then it came out that it would be exclusive to EGS for 6 months. I refuse to use EGS (for my own reasons), so when the hype died down after a few months and it arrived on Steam, I forgot to buy it. In fact, I still keep forgetting.

[Fnoord]

I get free games every month with Amazon Prime. I can only use this via the Twitch launcher (doesn't even work on Linux AFAIK).

Borderlands 3 I bought when it came out on Steam, I believe in start of Steam release it was on sale. Else I wouldn't have picked it up, simple as that. They release DLCs for the game, so that's nice, and keeps it a little bit alive I suppose.

Guild Wars 2 recently launched on Steam (like 8 years after release). I cannot merge my Guild Wars 2 account to Steam though, so its useless to me.

Humblebundle, in contrast to platforms like EGS, yields you serials you can apply to a launcher, usually Steam. That's convenient, but I suppose it isn't for people who don't want to use Steam.

Though I'm a heavy Steam user, so Steam being the defacto standard is fine with me.

I don't want another launcher, therefore I either use Steam or use Lutris to abstract all other launchers (and emulators and such).

[Lev1a]

After they had held the game hostage for a year my excitement for the game was very much gone and I didn't buy it in the end.