@ quijote3000

That feeling when someone "gets it."

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I'm going to point you to my reply to Tzaar below since it responds to most in here and it would be a giant bloat of this topic to retype it.

They are. While you're stating there's just one option you overlook providing the game on the disk, a method used for decades. You only look at online stores, but if you buy a physical copy, why would they need that. A CD-check is an additional option. Hence not using that and going Steam-only is forcing exclusivity.
Is Microsoft Windows not a monopoly because 100s of millions of stores sell it? That in itself does not a monopoly-breaker make.

Steam offered savings by doing functions as updates, DRM. In short saving money. Epic just offers cold hard cash per sold copy. It's pretty much the same thing in my eyes, and all publishers will care for. In the EA/Fallout 76 this isn't a newsflash anymore, but publishers really aren't your friend, they're out to make money, any way they can. They won't care about your Steam functions, centrilised libraries or anything but the amount of money they can make off you.

That's why it was funny to see you comment "It's not Valve, it's publishers!" but when it was time for Epic it somehow was Epic rather than those same publishers. Clicking in with the general consensus I see around of Valve can do nothing wrong, even if they do the worst possible anti-consumer things possible and all the good stuff (refunds) literally got forced down their throats by the EU yet they get credit. It's not really fair, and I rather want to look at things objective than a Valve-rosed glass most people seem to have to Valve.

I'm going to check the video you linked in another post now, but far I know most publishers do it for the 18% additional moneyz. It's the sole reason Valve went 30/25/20 in the first place to try and combat that. We all know publishers LOVE money and 18% per copy is a big number. Each sale on Steam would be 18% less so making it exclusive on Epic to rake in a +18% per sale is big. Will it lose sales? Yes. Will it offset the extra income... that's the question is it. Many old Steam bonusses like free PR aren't even in effect anymore. In the past just being there helped out. Now Steam's store is so bloated and infamous you need to do PR the old fashioned way anyways, so there goes that additional benefit. What exactly does Steam offers developers to offset that very large amount of additional loss per copy? That's why I find it hard to believe Epic even needs to pay publishers to make that jump, but I'll watch that vid now.

(And yes, I do hate the console wars exclusivity. Fortunately it seems most seem to realise PC is another option, and with releases like Yakuza or Bayonette we may have a bright future against console-exclusives. Still waiting for RDR1 Rockstar. I'm not going to buy a console, ever.)

Console exclusivity is not the same thing. A game that's only on Epic is still available to you as a PC gamer. You simply have to use another store/launcher. But nothing prevents you from doing that. Not the same thing as God of War being PS exclusive, which means no XBox or PC player has access to it.

Exclusivity is bad. But the kind of exclusivity we are talking about here is not nearly as bad as console exclusivity. It boggles my mind that people keep comparing the two. You are not robbed of the eperience. You simply need another launcher, just as is already the case with other games on the platform PC.

Well, as bad as EGL and the store page is, to be absolutely frank, it is magnitudes better than how usable Steam was half a year after its conception. And Steam did not have the "but we are the first" excuse either, it was over half a decade after similar (mostly now-defunct) distribution platforms emerged on PC, but they never even attempted to learn from them. Back then, a simple Steam update could have meant anything from a 3-hour installation to something that borked up so much, you had to reinstall the entire thing from scratch.

I've seen plenty of people say "It's bad for Epic to force users to use it. Valve never did it!" and I'm like "yeeeeeeeah, yes, they did."
The SOLE reason I started using Steam was because games I wanted where solely on Steam. Because damn games I bought in the store were just installers and I needed to play the game I just BOUGHT. I never EVER started using Steam because I WANTED it, it was because I had to.
That seems to me the very definition of Forced. But apparently it's different? Enlighten me.

As Talgaby also points out how is "we will save you on DRM and updates and server costs" is not a financial boon offered. Tzaar said Steam was used to save the overhead of shipping physical copies but that makes little sense... in a physical copy!
You even say yourself "You were forced into the Steam DRM". Yet somehow the conclusion is "You were NOT forced in Steam". Even if Steam DRM and Steam is the exact same thing. Once again, I need some explenation on that.

Yes, but this is what Epic is offering now as well. It is just more in the limelight since the entire internet is more like a giant gossip agora in the post-facebook years.
This is why I don't get why people condemn only Epic for doing the exact same shit Valve did. Either put both of them on the cross or accept that neither of them played exactly fair and consumer-friendly.

It doesn't. But the thing is epic is paying the developers/publishers for that exclusivity, instead of offering good service and allowing the developers to sell on multiple storefronts. That's something Steam has never done. And if you think that's alright, then you're deluded.