I guess, yeah. I will say, though: it feels morally wrong to acknowledge their existence as anything other than a anti-consumer cashgrab, and thus give them legitimacy as a competitor to Steam, GOG, and Itch.
The approved competitor to a monopoly is… checks notes a wannabe monopoly that’s trying to buy their way into the position by providing less for the customer and instead bribing the publishers for exclusivity?
No, thanks. I would rather stick with the existing monopoly than reward Epic’s anticompetitive and anti-consumer bullshit.
Fair point with neither being publicly traded. I should have been more clear on that.
Unreal the engine, or the game series? From the perspective of a consumer, I don’t think either of them seem to be in good shape these days, unfortunately.
Er… Carmarck is in Id. Epic’s founder and CEO is Tim Sweeney.
It goes against every fiber of my being to not utterly despise a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I just don’t have the energy that I used to. I have to pick the battles I want to fight, and they haven’t done enough to make it worth it for me to do that.
Some perspective from someone vocally against Epic:
They entered the market and tried to get their foot in the door not by providing a better service or experience to the consumers, but by being underhanded and anticompetitive while accusing their competition of being underhanded and anticompetitive. Add on that with the fact that their CEO lacks any sort of humility and integrity, and I simply do not trust them to give a single shit about me as a customer. If they achieved their goals, I’m confident that they would leverage their position to extract value out of me immediately—be it through ads, increased prices, or selling my data to third parties. I don’t want to support that by giving them any of money.
While I don’t think Valve is my friend either, they at least:
Have a history of doing things that provide some benefit to their users, even if its clearly out of self-interest.
Everything goes to shit eventually, but pre-emptively making yourself suffer is just silly. Enjoy the time you have, and vote with your wallet once they start doing anticompetitive crap like paid exclusivity deals. Until then, we might as well enjoy the fact that Valve isn’t a public company obligated to chase short term profits for shareholders.
The cosmetics are all unique and non-fungible, and can be resold to other X premium users for real-world money in the form of credit that can be used to buy different tokens cosmetics.
They might actually get along. The CEOs of both happen to be hypocritical asswipes who think providing a worse product and complaining about competition will give them the monopoly they’re pretending to not want.