They offer better deals to developers for limited time exclusivity. That’s such a non issue: benefits indie studios, and makes the PC gaming fields a little bit more competitive.
And adds to the glut of storefronts and launchers PC gamers need to have installed. I don't think there's any issue with providing a competitor to steam, but in practice it's not 'oh, I can switch to epic game store', it's now 'because epic has paid these developers some money, I need to go to them if I want that game'. This, in combination with a lack of feature parity with steam, is why people resented epic. If they hadn't basically pulled several games off of steam when they launched I think they would have caught a lot less flak from the community.
(console exclusives, are of course this but much worse, but at least there's some decent amount of effort involved in a port which means it's not just exclusivity deals that make a game only available on one console, as opposed to an almost entirely artificial limitation)
I’m actually playing games from the epic game store on my steam deck. Linux support is from proton, it’s not tied to steam.
> They also pulled a few games off Steam just before launch after they'd already been advertised there.
They offered a better deal to developers for a limited-time exclusivity. It’s not like epic is pulling things out from steam, publishers and developers decided to go with the exclusivity offer.