It's also a very good thing for game devs who aren't at the mercy of the whims of a single company. Steam no longer wants to work with you? Go to GOG, Epic or even self-publish.
This is demonstrably not true. Epic's launcher has been a laughing stock since it was announced.
* It only recently got any form of Achievements (that are completely undiscoverable)
* It has no way to join a party with your friends. I think it has Friends support but am not sure because you can't do anything at all with your Friends so I never even look.
* It has no way to get support (their "troubleshoot" guide amounts to 'clear your cache, run as Admin, then try reinstalling: https://www.epicgames.com/help/en-US/epic-games-store-c73/la...)
* Half the time their UI elements don't work (I just went into the "Troubleshoot" section and the back button doesn't work, so I had to close the whole window and start over)
* There are no user reviews of games
* Their store and library sorting is a mess that makes it difficult to find anything
* They launched without even having cloud save support
Epic's game store is underpowered, buggy, and miserable to use - and plenty of companies still do exclusive deals with them because Epic holds a bag of gold in front of their face. They even do it when it breaks their own promises, like when IOI decided to launch Hitman 3 after promising they'd import Hitman 2 purchases - and then apparently totally forgot that Hitman 1 and 2 were on Steam and Hitman 3 was on Epic, so while XBox and Playstation users got their levels migrated on day one PC users are still out of luck a month later.
Paying for exclusives is a bit of a bummer but game development is pretty damn competitive as it is, Epic injecting a lot of money to secure exclusives might actually do some good for indie devs.
In my experience most of these exclusivity deals are temporary anyway, so you just have to wait 6 months to a year to get it on your store of choice. That's a fair compromise IMO, especially since nobody bothers to release finished games anymore anyway, so you might as well get the finished version on Steam on sale a year later.
No user reviews, no easy help button for noobs, no cloud save, only recently got achievements, can't crush a friends party. all sound like little nice to haves that don't add much value. Does it allow me to find/play the game? Everything else takes time away from playing.
This would be like shipping an OS without internet access to end-users.
Nobody cares about centralised achievements any more, and most people don’t particularly like having different friends lists for each service.
People would rather organise a game through something like Discord that is entirely seperate to the store ecosystem.
I'm not saying you need a full social network on every platform, either.
Nintendo must have missed this.
I'm not sure you understand the market. If saving to the cloud is a must have feature your game will provide it. Ditto for multiplayer. No one is refusing to play a game because the platform you purchased the game on doesn't have an easy help button.
And I also should note, half of those items don't need to implemented in a store. People ask for them because they are implemented as extras in other stores, but strictly speaking the distribution and support are the only things the store needs to have to be called a store. Achievements, friend lists, user reviews, and cloud saves can be provided by separate services and work just as well, and could result in a higher cut for the vendors if the store doesn't have to shelter the cost for that.
Also, I doubt you would criticize an embedded OS for only having process scheduling and hardware access, because that's probably all it was designed to do. Similarly, a low-cost store may want to skip on providing all those extra features so they can keep prices down.
The only way to truly improve it for consumer is to require that all platform's be open source. That I could get behind but it will never happen.