Not the first time they lie blatantly to consumers. Here's their "justification" for going EGS only
"We've never launched a game into Early Access before, and our players have come to expect complete, self-contained games from us ever since Bastion's debut in 2011. With Hades, we knew we really wanted to create a game we could develop in partnership with the community, and from talking to the folks at Epic, we realized their store would be the perfect place to conduct our latest experiment."
Anybody with a brain knows this is a lie. There's zero community outreach or communication features on the store. In fact, the Devs are taking feedback and user outreach... Using their own Discord.
You know, the same Discord that has a store? If their dumb excuse made any sense, they would be Discord exclusive instead.
Could Discord have provided a comparable platform? I don't see how.
Both of these are addressed. It is entirely possible that Epic was the best all around mix of platform, update support, and community engagement options. That's an internal thing and if Supergiant saw value there that is entirely up to them to decide.
The problem shouldn't be "this developer partnered with Epic because it was in their best interests, depriving us of a game for a few extra months". The problem is when there is a misrepresentation of the business dynamics at play here.
I think a lot of companies partnering with Epic, and Epic's launcher, would be taking far less flak if they were just open with what they were doing.
For Supergiant the message should be - we're a small studio, Pyre didn't sell as well as he'd hoped, with Hades on Epic we have financial security. While the userbase is smaller we also are being given a larger podium to show the game off to that reduced audience through early access and will bring the full game to everyone we can when it is complete.
For Epic the message should be - we're looking to aggressively compete with Steam but without the defacto monopoly Steam has enjoyed for the last decade. That requires us to pursue differentiation, i.e. exclusives. Our intent is to offer a store front for those who don't care about or actively don't want the community elements of Steam but do want a more curated content experience. Yes, we're trying to buy our way into the market. This is how a new entry into an established market gets started.