Whats fucked up is that there's some key cases where the intent of a poster could easily be inferred as trolling when considering patterns and such.
Like we really don't know the difference between a 'toxic' someone who is threadbare with frustration making reasoned and logically consistent posts, and a 'toxic' someone who is breezily antagonizing the other?
As far as ideas on how to change things, I would only speak to whats left of the pc community here as its apparently in our hands at this point. Any effective solutions for the pc community will be necessarily met with hostility because it will result in trolling being less easy or effective.
I imagine solutions to look like better habits among pcera that could starve trolls and jam runarounds. This would involve more challenges to posts that actually fall on our side of the argument. Ask people to stop taking shitty bait. Quote and critique the best posts on your own side. Maybe if you are in the mood to quote a shitty post, maybe get one off our own side and state your dissaproval of it making us all look bad. I should stop and ask of this sounds to intuituve to anyone else...
Personally I feel like that's largely been my view regarding EGS.
I'll buy a select handful of titles on EGS to support a few key developers who's success I rank higher than restricting support to EGS, but otherwise my goal in these threads has always been to point out the logical fallacies made on both sides.
The "its just another launcher" crowd is typically not worth engaging with because it is just shitposting 90% of the time.
Those strongly opposed to EGS I go back and forth with the most because to me the logical imperatives to keep in mind here are:
1. Any independent developer taking the money is likely doing it with good reason. This shouldn't be held against them any more than signing an exclusive publishing deal with another platform holder would be. In fact at the end of the day this is a better result for both developer and consumer as the developer still owns their IP and gets their marketplace freedom in 12 months while consumers will get these games on other stores in 12 months.
2. EA Origin, uPlay, and Battle.net aren't absolved from being problematic just because they're fueled primarily by EA, Ubi or Activision Blizzard content We've seen publishing deals result in content being locked to those storefronts too and for far longer. The march towards a growing collection of walled gardens is going to be a long term concern in the PC market. Epic adding one more name to the list isn't what is problematic about EGS' approach.
3. The problems with Epic/EGS are (again, in my eyes) as follows:
- Rampant dishonesty in purpose/message. PR is PR but the entire narrative of taking down the "Steam Monopoly" at a time when most major third parties are moving into their own walled gardens is laughable to anyone actually paying attention.
- An ignorant dismissal as to what the ~30% cut charged by all other major digital distro platforms (not just Steam) gets developers.
- A likely false narrative that 12.5% is sustainable for anyone who doesn't have something like Fortnite funneling money in the back door.
- Consistent failures to deliver on launcher feature milestones they've promised, and this leading to a general regression over even other non-Steam launchers to the end user experience.
- An either willful blindness or poorly disguised antagonism in how Epic has handled multiple exclusive deals with games already Kickstarted for Steam release, listed on Steam, or even pre-sold on Steam.
- The fact that at least one major publisher (Ubisoft) is basically just taking Epic's money while accelerating their move into their own walled garden.
4. Choosing to boycott EGS or not is a personal choice based on how much this shit matters to you and how much the above offends you, not a need to avert some kind of global catastrophe to all PC gaming or to prevent EGS from taking over all PC digital distro. Valve hasn't responded to the EGS exclusive strategy because to date it probably hasn't hurt their bottom line. Even if EGS did take marketshare from Steam in a somewhat meaningful chunk it would still be a shrinking part of the PC games market as the major publishers move to their own stores. This is not a life or death thing. This is about voting with your wallet as to how storefronts should be managed publicly, which is everyone's right to decide how and when to do so.
The best outcome (again, my opinion) here is that consumers generally do just that, vote with their wallets to support/not support where they wish, but that in the end EGS finds a relatively small foothold (because they're going to carve out something) and after a few years realize that the exclusivity push is simply not worth the money they're spending on it. Then they'll settle in as basically Epic's version of Battle.net with a weird legacy catalog of games EGS sold when they were trying to be more than that.
