Absolutely, this is still much better than Google winning. Here’s to hoping it gives third-party app stores the power to be more than glorified APK downloaders.

anti competitive practices should be stamped out

This is why Epic shouldn’t give a win. They’re just trying to get competition out of the way so they can do all their own anti competitive practices.

good luck with that angle, practically “all” creative industry software have a free learning or community edition until you cross certain threshold and they are also all very dominant software, not because there are no competition, but more like existing market share friction. Like asking Maya artist to transition to Blender.

There are also plenty of game engine out there that are free or cheaper, UE4 or UE5 aren’t exactly click 2 buttons and you have a game. (in fact, people spend decent amount of time to trim features/plugins they don’t use/need from the source to cut build time and memory cost for the shipping build.

• buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.

In the case of studios or intellectual property owned by a publisher, you can (unfortunately) expect that to be exclusive to the publisher. When games don’t have the funding to make it past development, taking publishing deals are a necessary evil that often come with similar provisions.

Epic has a habit with inserting itself in projects that don’t need its funding, however. They have a track record of finding indie games that were funded by Kickstarter and offer up a loan in exchange for timed exclusivity to their storefront—backers who already paid for GOG or Steam keys be damned. They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.

I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive, but I can absolutely criticize them for being anticompetitive and consumer-unfriendly. Their publishing deals aren’t made in good faith as an investment in the game or future profits, but as a means to remove the consumer’s choice and funnel prospective consumers into their own storefront.

• give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.

This is the one thing I will give them credit for, actually. It is an excellent business model for creating growth and getting users invested in their ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually hurt the consumer.

• drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol

That would be the goal of a monopoly, yes.

• make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold.

Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?

anything I missed?

• Bought and subsequently gutted Bandcamp.
• Used dark patterns to trick consumers into making in-game purchases in Fortnight, getting nailed for a sum of $250M as a result.
• Is 40% owned by Tencent. [Source]
• Is run by a CEO who sees astroturfing as a legitimate form of speech, and not manipulative marketing. [Source]
• Attempts to gain market share by subverting competitors rather than offering a better product. [Source p. 151]

I’m not saying Steam should be the only platform; competition benefits us as consumers. But Epic is shady, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they aren’t doing what they are doing for the good of anybody but themselves. Any action they take needs to be looked at critically and analyzed for long-term consequences.

With their win against Google, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they create an Epic Mobile Games Store to siphon a large chunk of the massive and extremely profitable mobile gaming market. It’s better than Google having 100% of it, but you can be pretty sure that they would try everything in their power to pull the ladder up after they climb it.

I would use EGS, but they don’t support Linux. Additionally they are deliberately building a walled-garden version of NFTs where you exchange “Vbucks” for emotes and skins that can work across UE games, thereby encouraging more devs to use their engine, and more customers to play games on their engine. That feels gross, centralized, and anti-consumer.

Steam lets devs use any engine, and enables players to use any OS via proton. Any DRM or anticheat present is up to the devs. Yeah, I have a library that is centralized on steam, and that’s not ideal, but it doesn’t feel like they’re exploiting that…yet. Epic doesn’t even have market share yet and it already feels like they’re exploiting everything they can.

Valve’s push on Linux is THE reason that Microsoft isn’t forcing Steam, EGS, EA Play, etc, to go through the Windows Store, which would allow msft to take 30% of all their sales. Both Valve and Epic are fighting the same battle, just valve is fighting with innovation and pro consumer options, and epic is fighting in court against the same kinds of walled gardens they’re building.