Epic Games Announces More Exclusives

#5653234 Posted on: 03/22/2019 08:58 PM

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I'd like to still add that buying a game that is available both in Steam and Epic Store at the same price is basically a choice of principle at this point. Using Steam as of now is more beneficial to the user with it's vast amount of features and tools. Epic Store doesn't deny anything from the consumer, but has not yet delivered much of these assets to the table. This is very similiar to a decision in a grocery store where you ponder if you buy organic food, fair trade food, mix of them or neither of them. The regural unorganic product might taste exactly the same (not always though), but price is lower, so you can argue you get more of that product at the same price.

I am sincerely a customer who buys by principles, but of course not 100 % of the time. If people would make morally right or otherwise concious purchase decisions more often, competition would be healthier and drive big businesses to do better when their position in the market is dangered. I partly buy AMD for this exact reason, because their products are in line what I think should be the way to go with technology inside home PCs. In recent years it often has included small compromises when buying AMD, but in the end I've been more happy with the end product since I followed my principles.

Now it's completely understandable to buy games from Steam rather than Epic Store and I actually expect majority of people to do so, but it is not that okay or is at least questionable to not buy a game at all if it's excluisve to Epic Store. As in my earlier example, if the price is the same, vast majority likely goes with Steam and it's perfectly just and right. Buyers like me are still going to support the competitor which sure sounds silly, but it has affect on the market, not by skewing it through supporting the weaker player, but giving a chance to a newcomer to create a better surpassing alternative in the future. Of course there is the other effect too that publisher and developer receives more money to produce more games in the future, most likely bigger budget games.

In the end, buy your games where you want, who really cares, but it has been really confusing to me why these launcher/store exclusive games are such an issue.