The really interesting thing for me is that this seems to have been a dramatically dumb move of the part of Double Damage from a business perspective. They’ve blown any customer good will they generated on their first game, and to all intents and purposes have to jumpstart their marketing from scratch for this. Games, as with all entertainment content, wants to be as horizontal as possible- reaching as many people as they can. Sure there are porting costs and so on that might limit the ability to do this, but platform exclusivity is a pretty bad thing to do in the long-run, and that’s even before you factor consumer reaction.

What gets me is they obviously knew there’d be backlash to this (hence the carefully worded FAQ), but went ahead anyway. I can see there’s an aspect where a storefront with very little competition seems like it harkens back to the glory days of Steam, but the cost of _opting out of the biggest PC store on the planet_ seems very shortsighted. I would hope that they at least publish some retrospective in the future that shows the financial impact of this decision.

Not to say that someone should not be looking for less crowded markets with higher payouts, I just do not think Epic is that store front. Epic has always drawn a line in the sand of “Unreal Engine Devs….come here, we got nice deals for ye.” while anyone else in other engines are not as inclined to join the Epic store.

It has became a faction war before it was a store war in my opinion.

I’d love to see Epic / Tencent get in trouble with the CMA for this. It’s essentially bribery that’ll force smaller companies out of the market, as they won’t be able to compete with Epic & Valve (should they retaliate) for exclusivity rights.

It’s basically the same situation as if Samsung paid Disney so that only their Blu-Ray players could play Disney films. It’s just absurd! I should be able to buy my game at any store I want, unless the publisher has made an independent decision (ie not being paid for it) to release it exclusively on one store or if the game’s developer has independently chosen (again, not being paid for) to use an API that requires the game to be directly integrated into a specific client. As it stands I am being locked into using a client that is objectively worse in every way (when compared to Steam) despite the fact that the game could be made available on Steam without any additional development costs!