Not entirely sure what to think about this. It is far from the first fan to have a crowdfunding effort essentially as a verifiable interest gauge (money where your mouth is and all that) for a larger project, often times for good financial reason (while 1 million is something I could comfortably retire on for the next 50 years or so it is not so much in big boy game dev) this fails to sit quite right where before I saw nothing in particular worth getting upset over.
No idea what is Epic Games Store. Why are people angry about it ?
It is a thing I have been pondering for a while as well. The funny thing to write it off as is Steam fanboys or Steam Stockholm Syndrome sufferers but there is more to it, don't know how much but more.
Anyway hopefully you are familiar with the history of Steam. If not then following a source code leak of a very early Half Life 2 build Valve announced a serious (for the time) DRM system that would ultimately be called Steam. Later on Steam would also serve as an online sales platform controlled by Valve for their products and whomever else asked, naturally for a cut. There were options for this before; the original Doom/ID software stuff doing it back when they were starting out, themselves then getting in legal trouble as machines used for a business they were all involved in before and a sales model they learned from it, being a great one here. At first Steam was little more than one of those launchers people had with games to select what game in a collection, what mods and what resolution people wanted to load with, it grew into more than that though. From where I sit still just a glorified DRM system but hey.
For whatever reason though Steam was in at the right place, at the right time with a feature set that was pretty acceptable for a lot of companies big and small, and thanks to the considerable success of some of their games they were installed on a lot of machines (getting your stuff installed on a customer's machine/phone/whatever is half the challenge really). Over time their share of the PC game market increased considerably, so much so that it arguably took out physical sales of PC games (sadly this also saw people give up their ability to resell games) and today they are effectively a monopoly -- at one point having your game on Steam was a mark of quality for some, and today choosing not to have your game on Steam is considered a bold move that will likely cost you sales. In a technical sense they are not a monopoly as there are things like good old games, humble bundle, gamersgate and a bunch of others (I saw the chat program/service Discord has launched something like it recently) but in terms of raw market share... just no, you would have had a better chance of saying Windows did not utterly dominate the operating system market during the XP era.
Steam's cut is quite considerable for the service they provide (it scales with income but starts at 30% and only really drops when you get into the millions of USD) so quite a few are not entirely happy with paying considerable sums to Valve for what is essentially a download service and a payment processor.
Step in Epic (makers of the very popular decades long industry standard that is the unreal engine, and presently super popular game fortnite) who offered a smaller cut (still a fairly big one compared to some of the things I have set up for people elsewhere but hey) and also some money to offset the sales loss that not being on Steam would likely cause. Some people called that a bribe despite it being nothing of the sort by any legal definition in any country I have cared to look at the laws for, nor indeed any moral one I have ever seen. Other people noted that being on the Epic store would likely also mean no Linux nor Apple builds of games where Valve has a few things on those OSes, some people called it unfair to Valve despite them not exactly doing much for the game in question (it is not like they advertised the thing), some note that Epic's feature list is not quite as shiny as Valve's (most of what Valve has is cloud saves, as if one could not easily point a save folder into their dropbox or whatever account), some noted Valve acts as a sugar daddy for some of the Wine projects (a means of implementing Windows coding features into PC builds of Linux, BSD and such) which is true and Epic don't seem to be doing much there but such projects have long had different sugar daddies so meh, some look at Valve's API that allows some measure of easier networking and such, some look at some of Valve's other features like PC streaming and various support of controllers where basic Windows or a give game might not (because installing whatever the current take on joy2key might be is so terribly difficult), some noted Epic's involvement with the Chinese (Tencent owns a nice chunk of them), some claim Epic's security is not great (because there are not a thousand Steam exploits a year), some noted Epic's installer had a little sniff at other games installed on the system without asking (very poor taste, and not with the fig leaf excuse of DRM or anti cheat like some other tools over the years*), and some noted Epic's rough and ready approach to the world (for some reason the lack of a shopping basket on their site bothered some people, because people so frequently buy 15 games at once to save on shipping).
*still thing my favourite every anti cheat fail was it was found an anti cheat looked for a specific string a debugger would leave in memory. One group then joined the IRC chat of a rival group and said this string in harmless IRC chat. The anti cheat then detected this and banned the rival group for cheating.
So yeah in the end I am seeing Epic do fairly normal business practices, especially when going up against an effective monopoly, and ultimately something that does not cost the consumer anything -- it is not like you pay for Steam, it is not like you pay for Epic, the same game that would run on either will still run here (give or take things that no longer have Linux builds, or will no longer have Linux builds if they were never released). I don't like that both prevent me from reselling games trivially (I have ways around it, or in the case of Steam myself I have never had an account, nor purchased anything from them). If Steam goes under then after a small adjustment period then no great loss, if Epic fail to be so then no great loss, if Epic give Steam a bloody nose and force them to play nicely then so much the better, if they both take each other out then no great loss and I hope whatever replaces them does better. That is a win whatever way I slice it, some more than others but still a win.
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