I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.
A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.
Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.
Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.
Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.
Their launcher is perfectly fine.
Fine? Yes. It does the bare minimum of being able to buy a game and start it. Does it do everything I expect a modern game launcher to do after existing for almost 6 years? Nope.
But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.
They are “not losing much money” while providing a fraction of the services Steam does. They say 30% is too much, we can do it in 12% and yet they severely lack in social features, have no modding support, no VR support, no in-home streaming, no Remote Play Together, no Big Picture, no Family Sharing, a barely functioning Steamworks alternative, no Steam Deck support, no Linux support and absolutely zero open source contributions. That’s just the obvious stuff I can think of right now, every single menu you open in Steam you find a barebones menu in the EGS.
They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.
They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.
Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.
So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.
It’s a hard game to get into. Played for 2 hours on my first run and didn’t know where to go.
After 2 weeks or so I tried again because everyone was recommending it to me. Now it’s one of my favorites, even though it took another 2 hours before I had any idea what I was doing.
I bought the game on release purely to support the studio and I would definitely recommend waiting.
It’s an excellent game being made but you can really tell that they didn’t quite know where to go with this game. They pulled together mechanics from various genres that don’t fit together that well.
The waiting mechanics are a non-issue since you are usually playing “the real game” while side stuff is happening in your town.
Graphics, art and music are all fantastic, as expected from a game by Moon studios, but performance is an issue. Greatly improved since launch but still not where it should be.
They are listening to feedback though and I’m sure they can get everything in proper order in a year or so.
Yeah, I’m also on my third controller RMA. First the stick on the left controller started drifting, then the right controller’s plastic started peeling off and finally the right controller stopped working altogether.
At least they did the third RMA for free way out of warranty.
Had to buy a new headset cable on my own though when the display started flickering after 2 years. They also sent me a new plastic clip for the cable on the back when the old one broke and a new left speaker when it started crackling instead of requiring me to send in the full headset so that’s pretty cool.
It’s twice as funny in this game because they added Denuvo a year after release. Meaning all pirates got the game DRM free on day one while paying customers got Denuvo patched in.