My concern is that when people say things like "Well, this would be acceptable if it was their own IP involved" just means that they've gotten normalized to the same thing EA did with Origin -- outright buying out the companies that produced the games they wanted to have sold on there.
The idea that doing so represents a better deal for the end user in any way is absurd, since right now the Epic deals aren't exclusivity for these games in perpetuity or controlling stakes in the studios themselves. I don't expect to ever see Burnout Paradise Remastered on Steam, even if the first game was.
And don't forget about how Valve acquired the team from DigiPen that made Narbacular Drop in order to create Portal, the game that got the most critical praise out of everything on the Orange Box -- which you needed Steam to run on PC. I don't think anyone has to
like EGS (especially with their privacy-violating antics) but the fact that this sort of exclusive distribution rights matter was an important step to how all these companies have set up their distribution stores can't be ignored, and I'm tired of lazy sarcasm about competition that brushes aside this history (which isn't a criticism at you,
oni-link, to be clear, just the general shape of discourse around here).
