Listen, exclusives and timed exclusives are a thing and have been for quite awhile now so I'm not quite sure why PC players are so upset over this. It was like when Rise of the Tomb Raider was timed Xbox One exclusive, ya people were miffed, but not that much and it still sold well when it came out for PS4. Then lets talk about just exclusives in general, look at Playstation and Nintendo, their consoles people will go out of their way to buy whether they have an Xbox or PC sometimes just to get games like Mario, Zelda, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War. While I don't think long term gain it's worth it for developers to do it, sometimes it is worth it for them.
And that's really what this comes down to. The developers and publishers. It's not out of pure greed, some PC players might look at it that way, but not only are these devs saving costs, often they recoup money so they can offer different things than they could normally do.
Here's a layout of how things work for publishers and developers to put things on the EPIC storefront instead of Steam.
Putting games using the Unity engine on Steam: 70% to devs/pubs and 30% to Steam (not counting what devs pay to Unity)
WHEREAS
Putting games on the EPIC Store that use the Unreal Engine 4: devs/pubs get 88% of the money, EPIC gets 12% (largely due to EPIC owning the Unreal engine)
Putting games on the EPIC Store that use Unity: again 88% to devs/pubs, 12% to EPIC (even if they have to pay Unity, they still make more).
So when they make more why would they not take the incentive and go to the EPIC Store ?? It makes absolutely no sense to take less money and go to Steam when EPIC offers you more money. Now let me bring back my first point about it not necessarily being all about greed. Let us take one of the stores first big exclusives: Metro Exodus. Because of this money share, the amount they saved allowed them to sell the game for $10 less than it would've cost on Steam. Yet people still complained, Deep Silver & 4A Games were selling it for $10 less than they were going to on Steam and $20 less than console and people still got mad. "How dare they make this exclusive ??" Now with Metro, I'm only using the price decrease as a point, the way they timed it was terrible; 2 weeks before launch is kind of late notice.
So what about when it's not late notice ?? What about when there is plenty of notice before a game comes out and now it's just essentially people whining. Sour grapes basically. Well that's what has occurred with Obsidian Games upcoming release Outer Worlds and 2K Games upcoming release Borderlands 3. No big deal or at least that's what it should be, absolutely no big deal. But the "glorious PC gaming master race" acts like this is the end of the universe.
"Our precious games won't all be under one launcher. We can't just fire up Steam and have everything. Boo hoo."
It is currently this chart that all of these people turn too when they say "oh Steam is better". Of course it is right now, it's been around for YEARS and people have become used to it. EPIC is trying something new, it's a new launcher and they already have a roadmap set up to make it better going forward.
It's people making a big deal out of nothing. If you want to play Borderlands 3 on PC when it comes out in September, take the 5 seconds it takes to install the EPIC launcher, download the game, play it and have fun.
Long story short. Suck it up buttercups. You all wanted Steam to have competition because they were getting lazy and complicate and now that they have that competition, "oh but I want everything in one library, why are these games not on both, etc." You got what you wanted, this what makes sense to have happen. Steam has competition and they have to step up now and offer similar pricing to EPIC or devs/pubs will stick with EPIC. Also PC players, don't forget that 2K put Borderlands 3 on there, 2K not Gearbox; 2K Games is a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive. Strauss Zelnick is their CEO, he likes money, like really likes money. He thought they were selling microtransactions in GTA for "cheap". Yes, Take-Two owns Rockstar and 2K, so expect when it gets its release that Red Dead Redemption 2 will be an EPIC Store exclusive on the PC.
The competition has begun and it's cutthroat. Let's hope we hear less complaining from people though.
BUT FOR NOW, HERE'S A MOMENT THAT WE GET TO HAVE, THEY DON'T COME AROUND OFTEN.