The idea that it's the only way is nothing but a fundamental belief. It's an extreme statement, and everything has to follow from there. Twisted.
If epic had a good front end that was solid and nice to use, she's out on resellers where I can shop around oh, some sort of control interface free games mama a nice fun to browse store... And crucially, stopped with the irresponsible moves...I'd shop there.
Yes. If it was a nice system, pleasant to shop and browse. Fun to organize and launch your games from it. They were getting customers. Naturally.
Now go on. Why is that not 'A Way'?
If you want to be as literal as possible, Epic could do everything in their power to be as consumer-facing as possible. It doesn't necessarily mean it would translate into a worthwhile financial venture for a company sitting on one of the biggest middleware engines and pieces of entertainment of all time.
Of course if they made a nice storefront, people would shop there, but that isn't the discussion. The discussion is if enough people will shop and grant them enough of the marketshare to make it worthwhile. Again, I shop at GoG. I know it has a small fraction of the install base something like Steam has, but I personally value the customer service. GoG is not Epic. Their priorities are not the same.
Again, I cannot emphasize this enough. Epic was a company that wasn't doing extremely well a few years ago, then literally exploded into relevance with Fortnite and adoption of Unreal Engine 4. Now they have raised capital from giant companies like Tencent who expect a return on that investment, plus I am sure a guy like Sweeney isn't aiming for small victories. Whether or not you agree with his stances, the guy clearly has ambitions.
So they are making a play for the throat of digital games distribution on PC. The overwhelming popularity and profitability of Fortnite is something far less sustainable than literally controlling a means of distribution millions of users depend on. They are going to act quickly, so it isn't a surprise they went with a really aggressive and disruptive tactics.
Steam pretty much
is the PC ecosystem at this point. Their numbers swell month after month. Millions of people use it. Thousands of people have dozens, sometimes hundreds of pieces of software tied to their accounts. In the business world, trying to fight a train traveling with this much inertia essentially requires derailing it.
It's cool you and others claim you would shop there if it was friendly, but we already have example of a store that does almost everything in it's power to be consumer-facing, and it goes almost unmentioned by comparison. That store is GoG. I struggle to think of a store offers customer service like they do. I struggle to think of a store that actually guarantees access and availability to your games through a DRM-Free, consumer-leaning principle. I also struggle to think of a store that tried as hard as GoG to achieve relative feature-parity with a bigger competitor, despite having less resources.
Origin, Uplay, and even the Bethesda launcher likely hit user numbers that compare or exceed GoG in
much smaller timetables by offering content people want, but can't get elsewhere. I am not saying it's always a good practice, but it does provide results. Unfortunately, without positive results, a lot of these companies cannot continue to do business.
There really is no perfect solution to this problem that doesn't fuck somebody now or later.