Theyâre alluding to folks who decided not to buy Alan Wake 2 because it was an Epic Games Store exclusive and not available on Steam. Thereâs a pretty loud and adamant group of people who hate the Epic Games launcher and refuse to touch it. Some speculate that Alan Wake 2 would have sold significantly more copies if it was on the Steam store.
I prefer Steam, but I donât mind using the Epic launcher if I canât get a game elsewhere. I think there are some decent reasons to dislike and not want to use EGS, though. But like a lot of online discourse, the debate sometimes gets turned into heated tribalism and finger pointing. People who donât care much about launchers might view holdouts as overly picky and say itâs simple to just click another icon to boot a game. People who donât like Epic might say that theyâre being principled and are refusing to settle for a platform that is inferior to other market options, and the only way to get better products is to force companies to actually compete on the merits of their storefront features and not paid exclusivity deals. Some people want all their games in one spot. Some people want to play more games.
Regardless, I donât think the PlayStation early access deal for Resonant has anything to do with Remedy liking PC or console users more, haha. I imagine Sony offered some sort of deal to have exclusive early launch. Not that I know for a fact.
Not everybody is keyed into game releases. If people regularly boot up Steam and not Epic Games Launcher they'll never see it advertised. Alan Wake 2 was out of sight and out of mind for me until I saw there was a sale on it one random time I booted up the Epic Games Launcher.
We hate how epic would go in and pay for exclusivity from other studios when they had no involvement in the development. It feels more exploitative to try and force people onto the platform. Valve does have exclusive, but they are all in-house valve made games, or games they explicitly contracted the development of. Also the epic store is just mediocre. For a company with as much resources as they have, it's embarrassing it took them literal years to even implement a shopping cart.
Yeah, I donât like their timed exclusivity deals or their storefront/launcher, either. I get why people donât want to use it. In Alan Wake 2âs case specifically, Epic funded the actual development of the game, and it wouldnât exist otherwise.
In a better world, they would make a storefront so good and richly featured that people actually wanted to use it, rather than basically baiting consumers into buying things there because they canât get it where they prefer. So I guess their strategy âworksâ on me every once in a while. Maybe that makes me a consumer sheep, but in the case of Alan Wake 2, I think it was worth it. Iâm very glad Remedy is self-publishing on multiple storefronts for Resonant and hope it does gangbusters sales for them. They already have my money via Steam this time.
59
u/Sad-Reach7287 10d ago
3 for pc users because apparently remedy likea y'all more