The problem not to conflate is good for developer does not always equal good for consumer. If your making it easier on the developer for multiplayer, by putting an extra burden of a login on the user, thats still a worse consumer experience.
If a game I'm interested in does this it'd be a deal breaker. Not because of the extra login but because I absolutely hate Epic's MO in running their store. I can get behind EA, Activision & co. making their own stores and deciding to not sell the games their studios develop on Steam. Fair enough, they make it so they can choose where to distribute. But Epic forcing exclusivity through monetary payments is introducing a cancer I will never support.
Epic is paying devs to only distribute on their Store, they are not competing with a better product, they're trying to compete with deeper wallets. Because of this I try to boycot as many games as I can that have even the resemblance of a connection to their store.
Beyond that I don't trust Epic, their store practice has shown them to be plenty untrustworthy and so I see their "free" Epic Online Service and instead of being happy about a good cross-platform online service I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Epic pays producers for store exclusivity is what he has an issue with I think. I'm personally just waiting for this game to go on sale like all Sonic titles do (and most other games I buy), and the exclusivity window will also likely be closed by that time.
Yeah, so? Do you think that changes anything? "Oh yeah, wow. Nevermind if they are volunatrily doing this thing I absolutely disagree with and consider harmful to the market"? The devs accepting the money doesn't change a thing.
I've been reading a few of the negative reviews, and people often complain about the price too. They find the game too expensive for what it offers. High price + adding Denuvo last minute without warning + trying to force people to log into EOS = Sega shooting themselves on the foot stupidly, IMHO.
Well, at least they're not forcing you to install and run the Epic Games Store on top of Steam. Not like, say, fucking Star Wars Squadrons forcing Origin.
But unfortunately, this isn't a problem that Steam can address and it's fully under the responsibility of the game.
If Steam banned external launchers, a lot of games would need to retroactively fix itself. And I can also see future lawsuits as making it appear as non-competitive.
Agree that they can never fully address it, but it would be nice if they made it easier to block publishers and developers (who do not have a publisher or dev page set up, like Sega) and filter on things like "Requires 3rd-party DRM" that appear in the gold boxes in the Steam UI. Currently, I follow multiple curators who flag games for things like Denuvo. But, it would be nice to have that built into the filters and store preferences, when the info is available. If users could easily filter out bad actors, then it might discourage the bad behavior. Valve might not do any of that because it would probably strain their business relationships. So, I don't know.
Trying to play "cross launcher" games is such a mess with friends. It breaks social features, which makes joining on friends much more difficult....especially if people bought it on different launchers.
This is the devs' responsibility, not different shops. I can easily play compatible crossplay games easily with my friends as long as the devs develop it from the ground up.
OP, appreciate you using archive.org. The gamer and all their sister sites pay their writers dirt to churn out as many posts as humanly possible. There's extremely little research.
I heavily disagree. There is no "free" service, ever. Steam does not offer their Online Services for "free" they offer them with the expectation that it will bind more sales and users to steam than to other platforms. If Epic is offering their Online Service to be used for free but require a login you can do the math on how "free" that service actually is. Besides no one is guaranteeing that Epic won't turn around and monetize this service once it becomes popular, forcing a shutdown on less popular games anyway.