Nah. Been on this forum, other online forums, etc. well before Origin, uPlay, etc. existed, including lots of PC only spaces.
Here's an
April 2019 Announcement Trailer for Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. I found one person asking if it might come to Steam, yet zero bitching about what was, at the time, an EA Origin exclusive.
Suddenly it gets announced for Steam two weeks before release and there was a lot of pro-Steam commentary in the
release trailer thread.
And the announcement thread had an order of magnitude more posts.
No one has given a shit about EA Origin for half a decade. The most discussion EA Origin specifically has gotten on here or in online discourse period in that time, other than mild grumbling about using it with Titanfall/Titanfall 2/Apex Legends was when EA came back to Steam.
We don't get this kind of constant noise in Windows Game Pass threads and that storefront is soft-bricking drives.
We don't get this kind of reaction in literally every Ubisoft/uPlay thread, including the ones where Ubi tries to talk up their storefront or pushes their sub service.
GOG gets treated like a welcome second son around here when it announces things despite at least its social media platform being ran by active bigots, to step a bit further from the context of exclusivity.
EGS absolutely is treated with a double standard relative to other non-Steam storefronts, and often with fewer real exclusives in its catalog than the counterparts.
I'd argue the Epic/Tim Sweeney absolutely welcomed that. It'd be entirely deserved if applied with a slight bit of restraint instead of all EGS threads going into the ditch, but it would still be a double standard relative to other store fronts.
My personal suspicion is that most of the other storefronts were just far easier to ignore. EGS has picked up meaningful exclusives across all genres of PC games while uPlay lives within a very specific genre box for most of its major titles, and Origin's non-sports and FPS offerings were irrelevant enough for them to abandon full exclusivity entirely now. EGS hits a wide enough range of titles to where they're going to antagonize most of the PC gaming audience with at least one of their pickups, drawing them a unique amount of heat that they messaged in the worst possible way. We can debate as to whether a narrative exists that would have actually worked for them, but the anti-Steam narrative is probably the single worst angle they could have intentionally chosen to go down.
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