So Kotaku recently wrote an article about all of this. Most of the content has already been discussed at length in this thread, but it included one concept, slightly buried, that I have been thinking a lot about myself.
Relevant citation:
Meanwhile, other major players like Discord have launched stores with their own, lower-profile exclusive programs. With these things in mind, you can see why some Steam users might have a dystopian vision of the future. Some imagine a world in which the Epic Games Store kills Steam and replaces it as the biggest PC gaming mega-mart in town, forcing people to re-buy games they’d previously owned on Steam. There’s no evidence this will actually happen, given that Steam is still doing just fine and Valve has more money than several real-world nations, but that hasn’t stopped people from extrapolating what’s happening right now into a potent worst-case scenario.
I bolded the really pertinent part.
I think that concept, real or perceived, underlies a lot of the anxiety and anger in this space. Now clearly, it would be take some time and a monumental amount of effort to topple Steam in a way that would force gamers to re-buy all of their games, but we already see some effects adjacent to that. GOG posted a razor-thin profit margin for the last fiscal year and has already had to roll-back a customer-facing fair pricing program due in part to some of the pressure the Epic Games Store is putting on the market. So Epic’s main target, Steam, may not feel too much heat this year, but smaller players like GOG might be severely harmed by Epic’s ‘competition’ in the digital distribution space. And game consumers really need GOG as they are rather unique in their features and philosophy (a store that competes on features and less so on exclusives).
I really don’t want to lose my large GOG library of games. I’m sure a similar sentiment is shared by a lot of critics of the EGS even if others feel it is a distant or remote issue.
There has been a lot of talk about how great the positives of competition are now that Epic has entered the market and there certainly are some positives such as perhaps forcing Valve to be more agile and responsive. However, game prices might be at an all time low with bundles, subscription services, rapid price drops, fierce competition between key sellers, and so on (this was true before Epic). If at some point Epic drops the anti-competitive practices and a fairer competition occurs I hope to see innovation and a better suite of services and features for the gaming consumer from all parties.
The problems Epic is trying to solve are not gaming consumer problems. They are focused on the wrong areas as far as I am concerned.
The real problem I would like to see a solution to is I want guaranteed, permanent, perpetual access to all of my purchased games regardless of platform. By implication that might include a mandate to have the key/license transferable between services/platforms. I don’t want my game library dependent upon the profitable existence of a company.
So to me, the Epic Game Store isn’t tackling or solving any real problems I have as a consumer (devs might have a different take). The EGS is just duplicating and repeating the problem I already have. They have just created yet one more platform with a fractured part of the market and another platform to worry about continuity of access long term.
So I think a fear of losing access to purchased games, which are quite large in number for most people, is one of the psychological underpinnings of the anxiety and anger around Epic. Steam will be fine for a while, but smaller players like GOG, itch, etc. have a realistic chance of being detrimentally impacted by this marketplace disruption and ‘competition’.
