I would say that their big, hastily thrown together mess of sale event was an indication that the store as a whole wasn't doing great.
The majority of their exclusive deals that had already been announced weren't even out by then and a non-trivial number of the developers who signed exclusive deals raised the prices of their games during that sale. Fact one outlines that if Epic was reacting to poor sales they'd likely have waited a while longer and factor two points out that the developers of those games felt good enough about total sales to actually want to raise the price during an epic funded sales event. If sales numbers were that bad you'd think they'd keep the price low knowing Epic was going to subsidize an even deeper discount to move more units.
Epic's $10 off sales event was pretty obviously an early attempt by them to buy some good will more than anything else. If it was to pad sales numbers they'd have come up with some kind of post-sale PR spin to make it sound like a roaring sales success. Instead it was coupled with Sweeney still peddling his "doing it for the gamers and devs" shtick.
Again, the data you are presenting can be interpreted very differently if you take into account various relevant factors. I'll answer the above one by one because I've been a PC gamer for decades and I remember all of these situations.
EGS game sales: Satisfactory and WWZ were sales successes, period. Metro, the CEO straight up declined to give more information. Ubi games, the only reference was that EGS exclusivity pushed people towards uPlay. Nothing else is known. I don't think that the available data paints a picture of sales success for EGS.
Call of Duty: A prime example of consequences taking time to materialize. The Call of Duty franchise experienced a massive decline on PC over the years.
HL2: People forget or don't know what the DRM situation was on PC at the time. Steam had issues but online authentication was already a standard, often accompanied by various dumb shit like install limits.
uPlay: Nobody minds uPlay because it works ok, it has some useful features (like the uplay points to unlock extra stuff) and it's a first-party service.
As for customers not sticking to the rhetoric of online resistance, PC gamers have very much proven otherwise. Games for Windows Live, Starforce, Ubisoft's always-on DRM, Microsoft trying to make paying for online a thing, the Windows Store are some noteworthy examples of PC gamers forcing change through their protest and boycott.
Everything can be interpreted in different ways, sure, and we can dive into the concept of subjectivity if you really want to, but...
EGS game sales: again, all digital storefronts limit available data. So if the data we are being given is comparable to and indicates similar success as other digital storefronts why should we specifically question this data? If this data is as valid as all other anecdotal sales data for other digital storefronts then where is the basis for the EGS being a negative on game sales? It requires being specifically distrustful of both Epic and their partners when given the same data in the same format and frequency of all other digital store front operators, publishers, and developers.
Call of Duty: So the no private servers thing is why CoD has tailed off, despite that specific iteration and its immediate successors being the high point in franchise sales, and not the stagnation of the franchise as a whole that has weakened its base on literally every platform its on? So the only way your interpretation holds up here is if PC gamers as a collective agreed to keep buying CoD for another ~5 years, then at the same time it was waning on consoles said "yeah, lets stop with CoD 'cause of that one time with the servers."
HL2: Some publishers had online DRM, sure. Most were still in the CD key world. Most people shit on those other publishers for their online DRM too. Suddenly everyone put up with it to play HL2, just like they'd been putting up with it to play Warcraft and Diablo from Blizzard via Battle.net. Kind of seems like a clear case of fans in this industry always caving in for the next great game to me.
uPlay: So Anno beat sales expectations, more sales were made through the royalty free uPlay store (where Ubisoft would prefer people buy their games) than projected, and the sales made through Epic's store were at a higher profit margin. And this is an example you're trying to present as a case that Epic Game Store is a negative for publishers. Ubisoft is getting free money from Epic to accelerate their departure from Steam while Epic takes all the flack for it whereas if Ubi just left Steam exclusively for uPlay they'd get similar shit to EA when they left for Origin. Kind of sounds like a gigantic fucking win for Ubi, one I'm kind of surprised Bethesda isn't happily copying to be honest.
Better yet, Ubi now has people framing uPlay as a GOOD THING. Its fucking DRM embedded within DRM when you buy Ubi games off Steam and suddenly "well they give you these points that get you some micro-transaction nicknackery, so that's totally valid".
And yet people wonder why these publishers keep working with Epic. EGS is a basically an a sacrificial medium to accelerate marketwide fragmentation of PC games distribution. Ubi will probably stop selling games on Steam or Epic within the next 5 years, maybe sooner if uPlay+ takes off. EA isn't coming back. Bethesda is doing their own thing. Activision Blizzard has already been on their own island. GoG is still trying to play nice but then CDPR doesn't have the pipeline to support an exclusive path. Microsoft is moving the other way, but at the same time trying to push GamePass to basically devalue discrete game purchases in favor of service/subscription based content.
But yeah, fuck that Sweeney guy.
Now don't mistake my argument as saying he doesn't come across like an asshole. He totally does. But if the problem here is fragmentation/exclusivity taking hold within the PC gaming space EGS isn't the only antagonist in your narrative. In fact they're just the newest, the loudest, and so far the least aggressive.
Why least aggressive? Because all they really care about is keeping games off Steam. EA took their games off everything. Activision Blizzard play with no one else. Bethesda is likely moving in that direction as well. Ubisoft requires their own DRM via Steam. Meanwhile Epic is ok with Ubi selling their "EGS exclusives" on uPlay, Metro Exodus and other EGS "PC exclusives" are on Microsoft's storefront including as part of GamePass, inherently devaluing EGS exclusivity even further. They're basically attacking Steam as a way to seem like an outsider/underdog while in most cases leaving consumers with other ways to play these games on PC without having to touch EGS.
Don't mistake Epic's general incompetence as malevolence.
