Yeah, basically. The conversation surrounding EGS forks off in ways that make it easy for people to lose the forest for the trees. Epic's practices shouldn't really be celebrated. A PC gaming landscape where platform holders openly compete by way of third-party exclusivity deals and acquisitions is not what anyone should want, but Epic would have people believe that such behavior is a necessary evil, and that any competition is good, any way it comes... and that's nonsense.
To break it down:
PC gaming is in a visibly healthy state.
Epic, a company which once saw fit to to imply the imminent death of PC gaming,
became more aware of PC gaming's growth and success not too long ago,
and wished to solidify their presence in the PC marketplace as quickly as possible.
Epic is a large and very lucrative company, with vast resources at their disposal.
It is not as though Epic lacked the option to develop a platform on PC that could compete on the merit of its features, functionality, and services...
...but they saw an easier inroad, a simpler means by which to coerce consumers over to their platform
- by securing exclusivity to this generation's most anticipated games - and that option was time-sensitive.
Developing features takes time. Developing back-end features takes time. Developing dev-facing features takes time.
User facing features? That's time. A shopping cart takes time... giving people reason to choose your store or platform, that's precious time.
...but 2019's biggest games, they were still going to release day and date, whether EGS was ready, or not.
And so Epic developed and deigned to release a barebones launcher bearing no essential features for anybody
specifically to get it out in time to exploit opportunities afforded to Epic by the explosive success of Fortnite, and Epic's resultant wealth.
(Mainly, moneyhats. I'll touch on that more in a bit.)
EGS, designed to be released barebones, and to remain a feature-lite platform in perpetuity,
would inherently lack the R&D expenses inherent to more ambitious and genuinely competitive alternatives....
...as well as any salient reason for developers and publishers to want to commit to Epic's new platform.
Enter the cut. Epic's highly publicized 12/88 cut was, simply put, borne from necessity. Epic could not openly justify anything higher, not to consumers or to developers, not so long as their platform was to be so anemic.
The low cut served valuable purpose as a PR tool, however. Epic chose to publicize their cut as the defining feature of EGS, its raison d'etre. They positioned the cut as a decision borne from Epic's collective sense of altruism and unity with the development community. That cut, in reality, was never more than a concession to the fact that EGS doesn't match up to its competition. In leveraging the cut as a PR tool, Epic succeeded in taking attention off of EGS's weak innate value proposition, and in manipulating gaming communities into pressuring Valve to compete with Epic - on Epic's terms.
Epic knows that Valve can't drop their cut to equal Epic's, when Valve maintains a feature-rich platform, have historically contributed to the health of PC gaming in important consumer- and developer-facing ways, and continue to do so. In addition, Valve acquiescing to Epic's bizarro request wouldn't actually shift the needle in Valve's favor, anyway. Not when Epic's actual means of competition has been to silently secure exclusivity to proven PC and Steam successes, as well as highly-anticipated late-gen titles.
Epic purchases exclusivity rights to such games in order to force proven payers - generally Steam users, specifically - to jump ship. Not that those users would want to, or ever would, if given actual choice (considering there's just about nothing in it for them, the users), but they must, if they want to continue enjoying the same franchises they've come to enjoy on PC.
Epic knows that they can't expect Valve to reciprocate this behavior, either. That's because Valve understands that, if it were to become accepted for any old megacorporation to drop superfluous, featureless launchers, and purchase exclusivity as their means to compete, then that will significantly devalue the PC gaming experience over time for users, and jeopardize the healthy and open ecosystem that Valve played a large part in cultivating. PC gaming will become a worse place when platform holders aren't expected to work toward improving the experience for users, and can simply say, "you have to use our platform, and deal with the limited experience that it provides, and pay us for the privilege, or you won't get to play your most anticipated games on your hardware of choice".
PC gamers largely understand that, too. That's why there was so much resistance to early efforts by EA, Ubisoft, et al. when they tried to pull similar shit. And those were corporations that created the games that they were attempting to control the distribution of! Much less a question of 'fairness', PC gamers immediately recognized that these corporations had little intention to EARN their support, and in fact, would make the experience of owning a PC and gaming on it markedly worse for them - so they fought back.
And you know what, the platforms that survived were the ones that evolved in acquiescence to this fact. These days, uPlay and Origin largely avoid the kind of scrutiny they used to receive, because as platforms, they've got reasonably compelling features and conveniences to their names. They've still got a handful of exclusives, but they're few and far between, owned by the company that owns the launcher, and it turns out that PC gamers can put up with some degree of profit-minded fragmentation if the launcher can merely near the established standards for PC gaming features and functionality.
Now, look at Epic, and EGS. Epic released a launcher that does very little. Epic purchases exclusivity to third-party games, specifically so that you can't play them there, only here. Epic leveraged their necessary 12/88 cut as a PR move to generate goodwill in the short term, and to obfuscate their methods. Epic dishonestly posed the market leader a challenge to meet this revenue split, with the intention that they wouldn't, and the knowledge that they couldn't. Epic has poured fuel on every nearby fire to distract from their own billowing smoke. Epic, when faced with backlash, continuously told skeptics what they wanted to hear, in the hopes that each discussion would blow over before Epic could publically backpedal and return to practices that they had never halted in private.
In engaging in this kind of behavior and convincing gamers to accept it for 'competition's sake', Epic risks opening pandora's box. If Epic helps to make PC gaming an industry where consumers accept paid exclusivity and brash corporate dishonesty as acceptable practices, all in the name of taking down a market leader devoted to facilitating genuine growth and a diverse market, then Epic thereby opens the door for other corporations to do the same.
So henever I read about how Valve should compete against whatever Epic did this week, and the suggestion turns out to be, "moneyhat!" or "make Half-Life 3", or even "improve curation and make Steam a more inclusive and welcoming environment for a diverse userbase", or whatever, I'm left baffled. Not by the notion that Steam wouldn't become a more traditionally competitive platform than it already is as a result, but by the notion that any of those moves would actually function as competition against Epic's meritless incursion into the PC space to begin with.
Epic doesn't compete on a level playing ground, they compete by engaging in practices which the PC gaming community has always fervently opposed and rejected, while slandering their competition with intentional fud to provide cover for themselves. None of those things would do anything to prevent Epic from continuing to operate as they have. None of those things would prevent Epic from sniping upcoming Steam titles and poaching as many of Steam's users as Epic can pay for.
I don't want Valve to moneyhat exclusives or to purchase developers anyway, especially not with the specific purpose to remove them from competing platforms. In a reasonable climate, nobody would... but Epic, they've managed to lower the conversational bar to such an extent that their recent practices are ALWAYS seen by some as an inexplicable net-good for gaming, and it's poison to reason. Epic wants to proliferate that poison, so that they can freely run roughshod on PC gaming with their Fortnite money, and some people don't seem to give a damn what that entails, because any competition is good competition, right...?
If you're someone who believes that Valve is stagnant, or that they're keeping the industry stagnant, or if you just desire Steam to improve as a user, then you may feel inclined to frame Valve's shortcomings as evidence that Valve needs a strong competitor, and that Epic just might be the kick in the pants that Valve needed. If you really see Epic as that competitor, however - as a presence whose mode of competition may force change and improvement within the industry, as other platform holders attempt to meet Epic's match - then you've got more trust for them, that they've earned from me. As far as I'm concerned, if you expect Valve to compete with what Epic is doing, then Valve had better be developing a game that will literally kill Fortnite, because anything short of that woudn't do a whole lot to stop Epic from moneyhatting while the moneyhatting is good.
