I don't really game regularly on PC beyond exclusives, so I have no real skin in the game, but this should be considered fairly unsurprising and standard business practice:
- Company strikes a proverbial gold mine (Fortnite)
- Company starts to think about how to invest that gold into an ecosystem which will continue to pay out after the gold mine dries up (Epic Game Store)
- Company uses its war chest to brute force adoption, so by the time they need to rely on it theres a stable userbase in place (exclusives, "free" games, etc)
I know it sucks for people who want to stay on one platform but competition is ultimately a good thing.
"competition is good" is such a trite thing to post. epic has demonstrated that they want to replace steam as the dominant vendor on windows, which would come with any number of problems for the end user.
1. they're not as open as steam so smaller devs would have a harder time accessing the market
2. they're not on linux so those users get shafted entirely
3. they have seemingly no interest in the kinds of features steam provides like the controller API and cloud storage for saves and screenshots
4. epic generally and sweeney in particular seem to be doing this in a rushed and slapdash fashion which is leading to weird compromises and backtracks all over the place, not making me feel comfortable trusting them with a big library of games and lots of my money the way steam has proven trustworthy
and probably more i can't think of off the top of my head. steam has plenty of problems and i've sure as hell had my complaints with them but i honestly think replacing steam with EGS would make things worse for most people, including a lot of devs.