Pardon my ignorance on this bit, but are there any of these deals that are exclusive in perpetuity and not just timed exclusive? Because I said this earlier, but where a lot of the arguments break down for me is "I'm mad I have to wait to play this on my preferred platform" which while a perfectly understandable feeling to have, doesn't come close to justifying the kind of sustained negativity we've seen.
As far as I know they are all timed.
The sustained negativity is due to the belief that Epic running what is arguably an unsustainable marketplace (by their own words) will ultimately harm both consumers and developers if (and this is only an IF) Epic decides it's no longer worth it. Mixed with people who are in fact, just petty and want it on Steam right away.
These deals require a lot of assumptions that I can freely admit I do not have the analytics to say one way or another how viable they are.
It requires enough people that are indifferent to the EGS that they will buy their games there, preferably in a quantity above the guaranteed sales # Epic offers you, as Epic may not see the next project from said dev as a worthwhile investment in the future if it's not even making that initial investment back. Who knows how willing Epic is to just throw away money (although the constant influx of "free games" is a sign that they're willing to burn a lot of cash in this endeavor).
It also requires enough people who don't want to use the EGS but are still interested in your game to still be around 1 year later when the Steam release happens to add that supplemental income, ignoring the competition from other games that will be newly releasing at that time (can your "second launch" gain the same level of mindshare as new titles?)
And if worse comes to worse, it requires enough people still interested in you as a developer in the event that Epic doesn't come back for your next project to hopefully make whatever sales target you need on whatever other platforms you hope to get on.
Tie all this in with the sentiment that EGS is meant to push Valve to "change" things, when from a consumer perspective there's nothing Valve actually needs to change (aside from curation of hateful content) that EGS is doing differently, and I take it most people see EGS as a direct attack on the health of the industry they enjoy. I don't want to see exclusivity deals permeating into the PC space. If Epic wants to fund games, it should be acquiring these studios, not just buying our the rights to their games to "starve" out their competitors when it does nothing to help consumers, without knowing how long they're willing to keep this up.
How much d'you want to bet that the mods will ignore that sort of stuff, as they do in just about every EGS thread, and instead ban someone like myself for criticising their conduct, or lack thereof?
You being meta also really isn't helping things at all. Most of the people in the Ooblets thread that were warned/banned were for trolling people with EGS criticisms.
I just think the mods aren't touching this thread right now.