I want competing Steam-clones. I want them to compete in a fair marketplace where they follow the rules.
Epic isn't doing that. In fact, just like China, they're trying to buy out the competition and force licenses to move over to their store. They buy exclusivity/timed exclusivity deals to rob the Steam and other stores of sales.
Epic is like the epitome of "crony capitalism" as a corporation. Everything they do is legal, but it's incredibly underhanded and disingenuous, and it makes 100% sense considering Tencent has a huge minority stake in the company. It is the same kind of shit tactics the CCP uses.
I have options to play other games without using EGS. It's not like electronics where no matter how much I try to buy Western/US-made goods I am still having some of that money funneled to China because of the raw materials required.
As long as Steam remains a viable option, which it is, I will continue playing on it and I also send messages to developers that take that Chinese bag of money from Epic for exclusivity deals to express my anger and my intent to boycott their product if they do it with future games.
Epic isn't doing that. In fact, just like China, they're trying to buy out the competition and force licenses to move over to their store. They buy exclusivity/timed exclusivity deals to rob the Steam and other stores of sales.
Really, this is the biggest issue for me. I'd love to see more competitors (and, in fact, will preferentially purchase most things on GoG over steam, simply because you can get the backup files for them). But, when Epic started doing the "buy out the devs to lock the game to just Epic for a year" - especially when nearly all of the games (if not all) they did that on had said they were doing a Steam release before Epic came along with a Scrooge McDuck bag - then it's time to nope out.
I want competing Steam-clones. I want them to compete in a fair marketplace where they follow the rules.
Epic isn't doing that. In fact, just like China, they're trying to buy out the competition and force licenses to move over to their store. They buy exclusivity/timed exclusivity deals to rob the Steam and other stores of sales.
Epic is like the epitome of "crony capitalism" as a corporation. Everything they do is legal, but it's incredibly underhanded and disingenuous, and it makes 100% sense considering Tencent has a huge minority stake in the company. It is the same kind of shit tactics the CCP uses.
I have options to play other games without using EGS. It's not like electronics where no matter how much I try to buy Western/US-made goods I am still having some of that money funneled to China because of the raw materials required.
As long as Steam remains a viable option, which it is, I will continue playing on it and I also send messages to developers that take that Chinese bag of money from Epic for exclusivity deals to express my anger and my intent to boycott their product if they do it with future games.
Really, this is the biggest issue for me. I'd love to see more competitors (and, in fact, will preferentially purchase most things on GoG over steam, simply because you can get the backup files for them). But, when Epic started doing the "buy out the devs to lock the game to just Epic for a year" - especially when nearly all of the games (if not all) they did that on had said they were doing a Steam release before Epic came along with a Scrooge McDuck bag - then it's time to nope out.