Sure, I want to archive it since the topic did make me finally think to write up some points I've been meaning to for a while on this topic (this was a post I wrote up for the now closed thread and not responding to anyone here to clarify):
Okay, so a few reactionary thoughts I have reading this:
01. PC Gaming was fucking saved by Valve, like the funny thing here is that Epic left PC Gaming in the early 2000s,
calling all PC Gamers "a bunch of pirates", more than once even over the years. Valve talked about PC Gaming dying due to a lack of convenience for the end user, and made Steam as a storefront for ease of use and a collective place for gaming as they also had a position making games within the industry. Literally Valve single-handily changed and saved the PC Gaming space, this isn't anything anyone can deny, it's historically what happened.
02. 30% rev cut I know is debatable, but on two fronts
Valve has changed it at least for bigger selling developers already (which a lot of people seem to forget, though I do have a few mixed thoughts on it), but moreso literally Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Origin, Games for Windows Live, UPlay, etc., all take a 30% cut as well, so I've never understood what the fuck Valve has done to get so much slack for this particular decision when it's literally a mostly industry-wide standard. That doesn't mean Valve can't do better, and I can agree there, but I also don't understand why this is SUCH a big point in this argument, especially when frankly against other PC storefronts Valve does actually offer by far the most for their cut.
03. PC Gaming hasn't been dying on Steam at all, it's been growing more and more each year. So that's a factually incorrect statement even just going by numbers.
04. The argument for the "little guy" comes up a lot, and as a little indie developer who's made several well received but mostly unnoticed games and loves the underground indie scene, this argument is fucking bollocks. Epic's method only attributes to "proven" devs who've already had success stories, they haven't presented supporting any new developers or people who are struggling, their system literally only works by developers that find success on other platforms so they can offer more money to those people who've already found success to get more money for their next title. There is nothing about the Epic Store thinking of the "little guy", not really. It's great for some independent devs I'm sure, but only those who've already had some success.
05. Steam's "problem" that everyone talks about is just what's going to fucking happen in the future, and everyone likes to shove the blame on Valve, but show ignorance to what the actual "problem" is. There's just too many games, and this is a natural outcome. For PC Gaming one of it's greatest strengths is that is has a library that grows and grows over time, it amasses a library of games both currently coming out and that have come out in the past, it's a collective. Because it's a collective, the number of games will steadily increase. Valve opening the floodgates, "destroying visibility", is not a problem, it's an eventuality. The problem isn't even fucking "this trash game gets onto a gaming market", the actual problem is there's too many good games for a broad range of taste. The same thing will happen eventually to any store front that amasses games over time, eventually there will be just too many to pick from. The same thing has happened with films, with novels, with art, any fucking form of media, video games aren't special here. This isn't a problem so much about more games getting onto Steam and devs getting less visibility has a lot more to do with the fucking fact they don't know how to advertise and get their own visibility, and haven't adapted with the changing market, because while Valve opened the floodgates, that's honestly fine. It maybe sped up some things, but it was already happening and we were always going to end up in this position. And it's going to eventually happen to any storefront that tries to compete here including Epic, because it's not actually a problem, it's an eventuality due to the market as a whole growing and PC Gaming amassing it's game's library over time.
I won't even touch into what I think of Epic's strategies right now, but I wanted to talk these points since I think honestly a lot of people are being willfully ignorant on so many factors here.