I will not spend a cent in their store for as long as Tencent has a stake in anything Epic. That said, the idea of exclusives doesn't bother me. Plenty of games to play out there. It's the developer's choice to make after weighing all the pros and cons. Personally, I don't think I've ever bought a game that was exclusive to the Epic store, because by the time those deals ran out, I had long lost interest.

TheDeeGee:

Half-Life is locked to Steam, there i said it Steam has exclusives.

Theres a difference between being locked to a platform and being the only platform offering/willing to offer/being able to offer a product. Also, you did pick a bad example. Most Valve games had been out on different platforms/stores through the years. EAs Origin, Uplay, PS2/3/4, Xbox/MS Store... Steam even had a PS login at some point for portal. You can blame STEAM for many things but for artificially fragmenting the gaming market? Not really.

BahamutxD:

You can blame STEAM for many things but for artificially fragmenting the gaming market? Not really.

Oh please EGS is hardly fragmenting the gaming market. All of their so-called exclusives have ended up launching on other clients after a short period of time. Fragmentation comes from people CHOOSING not to buy the games on their platform, usually for petty and utterly inconsequential reasons.

Even a day later this is still funny.

The Laughing Ma:

Oh please EGS is hardly fragmenting the gaming market. All of their so-called exclusives have ended up launching on other clients after a short period of time. Fragmentation comes from people CHOOSING not to buy the games on their platform, usually for petty and utterly inconsequential reasons.

I have yet to see valve have any kind of exclusive on their store, aside from their own products, which have been often available elsewhere, except for those who choose go to be exclusive on steam. As in, i have yet to hear any developer/publisher state that valve convinced them to only be on steam, in any way. I have seen developers/publishers choose to only offer their game on steam because of what steam offers in functionality, but none else. So if the only argument to steam having exclusives, beyond valve themselves, is that developers made that choice because steam is a desirable platform, then the argument is....exceptionally weak. Heck many developers even allow steam benefits to work outside of steam on other platforms as well.

H83:

All of them are necessary evils because we need them to play our games... But i think we can agree that Valve fits the criteria, with plenty of features and support for gaming purposes. GoG is also nice because the lack of DRM but i´m very disappointed but their lack of support for Linux, a missed opportunity for me.

I mean, I know there are things in steam that make some things better - multiplayer integration that sometimes works - but other than that, what is steam other than a bunch of bloat like trading cards and market places and weird things all designed just to make you stick with 1 platform and discourage anything else? I get it makes sense to have centralised distribution of content like this, instead of every company having to have their own fileserver and host their games for everyone to download. That would not end well, we can probably all agree on that. But the religious zeal over where you click "download" from? I just don't get it. It's not like you have to buy anything to make an Epic/EA/Ubisoft/GOG/whatever account to be able to download and use games from there. Hell, you can even use the magic of shortcuts to not even use the launchers GUI for anything but check for an update now and again.