For me; terrible forums and achievements no one really cares about. C'mon. Cloud saves are the only thing worth complaining about.
Cloud saves are huge, but for some of us, when a game is made EGS exclusive, we lose out on a lot more than that. This is what I stand to lose out on personally whenever an anticipated game makes the move:
- forums that have proven invaluable on dozens of occasions in quickly finding answers and solutions for esoteric issues w/games that would have otherwise required trawling google and piecing together myself
- mod support backed by a fairly comprehensive mod distribution and management platform built into Steam that has enabled hundreds of thousands of mods, many of which are games that wouldn't have seen a fraction of the mod support without such a centralized and easy-to-use resource at their disposal
- deep integrated control customization which allows me to use any input device I own to play any game I own on PC, whether that game was designed for such an input device, or anything besides kb/m for that matter, and which grants me a massive degree of control over how my controls work, for accessibility and for function
- a large network of engaged users who give the above features real worth via their contributions: forums give people a visible central place to provide support and share their own solutions, the mod distribution and management platform enables users to improve the experience of a game over time for one another, and users can upload their custom controls for any device and any game or program that they run through Steam, freely available to other users
- Steam in-home and remote streaming complete with full in-game overlays and controller customization functionality, which are things that generally support non-Steam games run through Steam, but not without frequent issues inherent to how non-Steam games handle controls and overlays. I've played a number of Steam games on my phone in bed, or on a tablet at a friend's house. It's a big feature for me that I like to play around with and as with controller customization it's complete to the extent that I can even integrate my device's motion sensors into my custom control schemes while streaming.
- regular deals facilitated through the Steam store itself and through stores which sell generated Steam keys that don't require a cut paid to Valve despite being distributed through Steam and backed by the platform's suite of tools, services, and functionality - this often enabling those stores and affiliated pubs/devs to cut the sort of deep deals that PC gaming is known for without breaking the bank
And that's just the stuff that's
really important to me. The shit I've listed above can augment the experience of playing a game in ways that make or break the entire experience. These things improve my experience, sometimes drastically. And of course I've got a laundry list of little annoyances and things I'd lose out on when one of my most anticipated upcoming games moves to Steam, but I think you'd find them largely unimportant to you personally, and thus easy for you to deem 'unworthy of complaining about'. Ultimately, though, it should be easy for you to see how EGS offers me, as a player and as a consumer, virtually nothing that isn't utterly superceded by what's available elsewhere.
All that EGS offers me as their customer is the opportunity to pay Epic a distributor cut, instead of Valve or any other entity... and Epic doesn't intend to coerce me into doing so with a merit-based approach, but by holding my favored franchises hostage under the condition that I capitulate. That's not a precedent that I'm comfortable helping to set. Epic expects me and other consumers to willingly constrain our experience as PC gamers, and to willingly give up the expectation that a platform-holder should work to appease consumers beyond leveraging warchests to secure rights to valued brands.
Epic is orders of magnitudes bigger than Valve, for what it's worth. You might argue that Steam is the defacto place to game on PC and therefore that they didn't earn my support, but I support a variety of platforms and storefronts on PC that thrive alongside Steam, and while any of them may have compelling features and solid reasons to support them, Steam comes out ahead, and that's not a sentiment borne from attachment to the Steam brand. Epic, on the other hand, was more than capable of putting together a platform meant to convince people to use it based on how it would stand to improve their experience - and they've chosen a much more unsavory approach. So who needs 'em?
in a nutshell, Epic don't intend to earn my support, and thus, they won't. They've given me and others plenty to complain about, so while it might seem like a reasonable position in the moment for you to be like, "come on, those things you value aren't
really important", try and understand that there's plenty not to like here, not just the loss of achievements, forums, and cloud saves.
