I swear, the whole outrage over EGS can only be plainly and simply explained as the stupid “no steam no buy”. When a game remains exclusive to this DRM launcher madr by an American corporation for 50 years, all is well in the world, but when the game becomes exclusives to that DRM launcher by made that other American corporation for a year, suddenly all hell breaks loose. They’re both the same toxin! Just blind devotion to a company that only did very pro-consumer things like make lootboxes really popular and making it hip and cool to give up ownership of your games.
For the record, that other American corporation’s wealthy CEO should really just shut up. Or really, any American wealthy CEO for that matter, their grand standing over freeze peach isn’t worth the oxygen required to produce it instead of just… not enabling CSAM like normal platforms do?
pivot_root@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
No entitlement necessary.
People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.
What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-unfriendly. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were games developed by the platform owners.
What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers^1^ and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers^2^. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.
The cherry on top was Tim Sweeny acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.
Frankly, Epic Games can go fuck themselves.
^1^: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.
^2^: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.
dukemirage@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
No one forced the studios to take up Epic’s offer of exclusivity. Nevertheless Sweeney is a cunt.