this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Holy shit I did not know that that definitely deserves some serious hate in that case.
The exclusivity stuff I get the hate for a little but PS and Xbox and Nintendo did the same thing for a couple decades but it still doesn't make it right that they did either. But I do get it a bit.
I do prefer Steam and love what they do for Linux the steam deck is one of my favorite toys. But if I see something for cheaper on Epic than on steam I'll always go for the cheaper option but some people act like epic doesn't even exist as an option which I get a little more now after seeing some of these things you mentioned the forcing devs games into sales without permission is super fucked up.
When it comes to Epic, a quote from the great Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of many beloved Nintendo icons, comes to mind: "A delayed game is eventually good. A rushed game is bad forever." First impressions are incredibly important and trust is a hell of a lot harder to gain than to lose, and Epic not only made a bad first impression but they also kept doing things that people generally disliked.
IIRC, the sale on unreleased games was only some big AAA titles, but not only was it scummy, it also was clearly a part of a larger strategy that Epic was using to try to force people to use their store rather than actively compete with Steam. They had nowhere near the number of features Steam has, the store was difficult and frustrating to use, and the launcher was performance hungry as well as acting similar to malware - it checks through your internet browser's history for one thing (or used to, I haven't touched it since it launched).
People disliked exclusives even when they were relegated only to consoles, and the lack of exclusivity was a selling point of PC gaming for a long time (until every publisher under the sun tried to wall off their titles behind their own launchers and stores, and people hated that as well). But the big sin Epic made was when they bought out devs who had plans to release on Steam and demanded that they pull their games off of Steam - sometimes for a period of a year, sometimes permanently. These were games that people had paid for, either through preorders or as backers for Kickstarter funding or something.
And then you get into some of the more...beliefs and values side of the system. Where Valve has made a stand against NFT and AI games to general applause, Epic has embraced them and the store has filled with all the things that gamers expected to see as a result of those: asset flips and scams. They're already an issue on Steam, but keeping NFTs and AI off the platform has mitigated some of it by eliminating some of the tools that make it even easier to make them than it ever was before. I believe they also got in some hot water with devs around the same time that Unity did for some policy change that negatively affected people using Unreal as their game engine (that they later backed down on).