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>Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks.

It's baffling to me that they took this angle. Hardware exclusivity I think in general is regarded as a negative (aside from weird tribalism/fanboyism among the more hardcore crowd) - but seeing that and thinking you can do the same thing with a software platform is just ludicrous.

Yes, you can buy exclusivity deals and force users onto your platform - but only for those games. It's trivial for players to bounce back and forth between different platforms when it's just software - you can't trap them just because they had to use it for one game they wanted. I'd be more forgiving if they were using exclusivity as a marketing tool alongside an actual attempt at a competitive platform - but as you've outlined and from what I've seen for myself, the experience is hot garbage.

I'm guessing for most users, the Epic store is just a glorified launcher for a bunch of games they got for free, and one or two exclusive games they couldn't get elsewhere.