> Steam has some competition to keep them honest.

That's straight up a line from Gabe Newell, owner of Steam: https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-epic-games-store/

Multiple stores is great but I wished there was only one launcher. I must have seven installed currently on my gaming PC, each needing updating every week.

It would be stupid to be "against" competing stores on PC. PC is an open platform anybody can write any code they want on it. It's just a fact that Steam is the only good one by a mile. As long as all the others are dogshit, games exclusive to those stores may as well not exist.

There was a world before "stores", you know...

I don't think Steam requires or even pays for platform-exclusive games. If your game doesn't need Steam-specific features, you can sell it on Steam and anywhere else you like. Even the DRM is entirely optional.

If another company wants to make a Steam competitor on PC, go for it. EGS isn't a competitor, it's an internet scam.

The way they try to push their store is annoying, so people want them to fail outright.

I think few people will disagree that letting Valve have a de facto monopoly is a bad thing. But Epic's whole strategy around EGS seems built entirely around appealing to publishers and developers at the expense of making the platform desirable for users.

Their marquee feature is that they take a smaller cut of sales on their platform (12% vs Valve's 20-30%), but this savings never gets passed down to the customer. So from a user's perspective, this isn't a feature, it's a footnote with no real bearing on their decision making.

Where Valve has invested a lot of time and money into building out platform features that add value for the customer (Steam Play, Steam Input, Workshop, Big Picture Mode, a fairly reasonable refund system), Epic uses all their money to buy exclusivity deals. The platform itself is barebones. The client takes twice as long to load as Steam despite having 1/10th the feature set.

I would have used it in its current state, even if it was worse if they did not resort to shitty business decisions. They directly stole titles away from me that I was playing on linux through steam. They can crash and burn for all I care now.