As expected, the only “counter argument” is “but *I* don’t care about those things!”

What would Valve do to make things better for consumers? They already have more features. They already have more games. They already have better prices. The only thing could be locking exclusives of their own to Steam - something which don’t yet explicitly do - and preventing 3rd party authorizes resellers from…

Because it’s not about just “having exclusives”. It’s about giving consumers price competition and a full feature set. Is Epic competing in that? No. 

I’m not at all surprised to see pubs and devs go there. That doesn’t make it good for the consumer, or something the consumer should be happy to support because they’re told to.

The answer to that one is easy: Epic is giving the publisher money upfront and underselling protection. This winds up as being bad for consumers.

Really? They have mods? Forums? Cloud saves? Achievements? Cross-play with my steam friends? Items? Guides? Wish lists? Account sharing? In home streaming? Last I heard that wasn’t the case. Cheaper games is how they should be doing this, not forcing people to use less competent software to play something.

For one, I’d say they’re pretty on top of stuff like features. They have mods. Epic doesn’t. They have cloud saves. Epic doesn’t. They have forums. Epic doesn’t. Etc etc. Could they stand to be better? I suppose so. What does Epic offer better here? Nothing. People compare things in the present, not an undefined…

Whereas I see the problem as people refusing to actually look at what is actually happening, and just dismissing concerns as coming from Steam fanboys with no backing reasons. Not saying you’re doing that, but it does happen a lot. 

Because that platform, which they’re being forced to use should they want to play certain games, is less capable than another platform. In getting the exclusive, Epic forces consumers to use a less feature rich service. This is not a good thing. 

First off, no, customers shouldn’t be expected to wait around as a competitor gets up to speed. They’re comparing platforms now. This isn’t how comparisons are made, in any market, and it’s silly to compare the future.

I’ve broken it out repeatedly in this thread. You not finding value in some features - which is being compared to now, as opposed to the nebulous future, as customers should expect to be able to do - doesn’t mean that no one can or does. I for one like mods. Other people like other stuff, like cloud saves.

Oh, a ton. But in doing so, they offer people a lot of value for their money with an expansive feature set, unified friend groups to play with, and allow third party resellers to compete to offer the lowest price to consumers (on top of smaller QoL stuff other people care about more than I, like keeping it all in 1…

All good points, but without a more explicit breakdown I’m hesitant to point to something and say “hey, this is bad!”  Epic is giving me plenty of current, specific issues to be opposed to them in the present without my speculation about their corporate financing agreements and how generalized those are. 

Also - and I can’t edit my post about this, thanks Kinja - but because of that cut, processing fees that get incurred from the transaction gets pushed onto consumers, sometimes up to 25%.

True, but absent anything being made explicit, I’m not going to give them benefits of the doubt here, and especially not when games are already announced - from large, established publishers - and then become exclusive. What’s more, the way that EGS does curation means that the sort of devs who could really use that…

It’s the present. No one should be forced to use what they find to be a less competent process to play a game, and no consumer should have to wait for parity before comparing between competitors. 

I’ve broken it out repeatedly elsewhere in this thread. Try there first. 

Features can be worked on, but they’re missing now, and there is no reason why someone should be happy to be forced to use a less competent process if they want to play a game at the moment. It’s the present, not the future. 

It is a problem, because it makes it harder to play games with friends when you split the…

Less features, leaving existing friend networks behind, less price competition from authorized key resellers. You might not care about these things, but many people do, and again - no benefit to the consumer, trickle down economics aside.

That sounds like trickle down economics stuff, which has historically be pretty useless.