Walled gardens and exclusives are mutually exclusive.
Perhaps you're thinking of CD Projekt Red, who have actually been fighting exclusives and walled gardens for quite some time.
Perhaps you're thinking of CD Projekt Red, who have actually been fighting exclusives and walled gardens for quite some time.
Epic has stated it will put it's games on Steam if Valve drops their cut down to 12%. Epic probably is a little more pragmatic than GOG on ensuring they operate profitably, with willingness to offer compensation for exclusive launches, allowing DRM (although not offering any of their own), etc. but if you've followed Tim Sweeney or read things he's said going back for years, it's obvious he's one of the good guys. He's a CEO of a large business and has to make moves to actually be successful and profitable, but he is strongly opinionated about what's "right" and pushes Epic in that direction where possible.
Bear in mind, even if Epic wasn't offering incentives for exclusives, it would still be silly for game developers to release on both: Sales on Steam would hurt their sales on Epic, and they profit vastly more from Epic sales.
Epic does not allow for that level of distribution. It also doesn’t seem like they will.
Your argument about walled gardens also falls apart as soon as you realize that Epic is pushing for exclusivity.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/03/20/epic-is-bringing-its...
So while it's not 100% the same, it's progression far faster than Steam did when Valve pissed the gaming community off by forcing HL2 players to install Steam.
That's clearly not the case yet, otherwise Epic wouldn't be investing so much effort into pulling exclusives, including games that already have started taking pre-orders on other platforms (to be fair, it seems like those are being honored)
Making their platform a bit less shit for users might help too. It's not like Steam is a pinnacle of good UX that's impossible to beat. Winning through quality and good support would certainly feel better than the impression of "We can burn money getting into this market, so let's buy stuff people want" they're leaving now.
I feel people often underestimate the difficulty of going against a monopoly that's been king for over a decade. Multiple avenues are the only way to succeed. I think Epic Store would be DOA without exclusives, regardless of the quality of their launcher.
I somehow doubt they're on the side of angels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Knights#Silicon_Knight...
I don't like monopolies, but I like even less having a dozen game launchers/store/accounts.
In respect to which platforms are objectively less evil, comparing features and actual interaction with community and developers...
The ONLY way I see Epic as being better is paying developers a larger cut (and as a result some titles selling for slightly less).
Steam is doing more to support /my/ platform (a competitor to Windows), and has done more to further competition in other aspects.
I don't want Discord to be the federation method either, and XMPP ended up failing due to several mistakes and not requiring full Federation and transparent (un-modified, future / client side extension enabling) message passing between end users of different platforms.
Absolutely absurd. Steam fundamentally is less of a walled garden than the EGS feature-wise. All you need to do is look at CD-key activation on the steam store. Both Steam and EGS come with the app-requirement constraint, but only one allows you to redeem games purchased offsite.
Besides "He's a good person and will do good things", what actions show this.