Epic's entry into the game storefront business has been a drama filled shit-show. It has not been well received by very vocal swaths of the gaming community. In fact, their strategy of buying out developers for exclusivity rights is one of the reasons they've drawn so much ire.
See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3.
In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.
It’s a very vocal minority, but definitely a minority. And they’ve essentially rebranded terms like exclusivity agreements, an industry standard, into ‘extortion’ in their parlance.
Basically there’s a subreddit of Steam fans making an outsized amount of noise that if you look into, doesn’t make a lot of sense but has kinda turned into its own thing.
The epic approach gets a lot of hate from a vocal minority. Everyone else has had multiple storefronts for a while, and having -one- more is borderline meaningless. As long as they don’t jack up the price, how many people give a shit which executable they have to click on to launch a game?
It's a pain to not have all the games in a single library. I put off buying Overwatch for a year or so because it was in a different launcher, and did the same for Forza Horizon 4; I'd be eagerly awaiting a sequel to Child of Light if it hadn't had some awkward double-launcher thing where playing it meant waiting 10 minutes for uplay to update every time. So I do think this ultimately affects customers enough to vote with their wallets, and that means it will affect developers where it matters. (Of course, if Epic is paying enough for its exclusives then developers will correctly decide that the tradeoff is worthwhile).
I fail to see the contradiction. Per Steam’s October 2019 user survey, all Linux distros together total 0.43% of their users. I am using the notably pro-Linux Steam as a benchmark for how many gamers are affected by this.
Rocket League. The developer was acquired by Epic, and a few months later they announced that they were dropping support for Linux and OSX. Epic has previously stated that their platform will never be available on Linux.
Epic was not a shit show. The needless histrionics of the community response were a shit show. Not only unnecessary, but downright illogical for the community to throw a fit that amounted to begging for there to be no competition. Players got pissed off for having to sign up for a different free store and click a different button to launch their games.
The tragedy is that a whole generation doesn't realize you used to be able to buy and play games anonymously, offline, without going through a middleman. It would be better if you weren't forced through any launcher, but if there has to be one, more options are better.
Interestingly Metro Exodus was an Epic exclusive for a whole year before becoming available on Steam recently. It still sold 200,000 copies in a few days on Steam.
So it appears either some people are fine with waiting, unaware of the Epic store, or just needed new headlines to remind them.
See the controversy where Borderlands games were getting review bombed on Steam, because Epic secured exclusivity rights for Borderlands 3.
https://kotaku.com/borderlands-is-getting-review-bombed-on-s...
In the gaming world, you're basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. If Google had aggressively gone for exclusives, they'd be getting the same backlash that Epic has gotten/is getting. But since they didn't they might be getting an equal but opposite sort of backlash now.