Why would they?

At best, I can expect Valve to improve steam. But their days of making games seem to be far in the past. I don't even know if they even have anybody left who worked on Half-life 2.

Bait and Switch tactics I am against. Hence my disdain for the Epic store.

Competition however is a good thing... I personally refuse to have a dozen store fronts running on my PC though, but props to others who don't care.

The other issue is fragmentation of the PC market... We have already witnessed multiplayer populations fragmented because store fronts wish to run with their own technology. (I.E. Windows Store vs Steam.) That kind of thing shouldn't happen on a single platform, it would be like Xbox online populations being cut off if you were to run a game from Gamepass rather than from the Store front. It shouldn't happen.

Valve does need to get off it's laurels and start making games again, Half Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Alien Swarm... They have a ton of great franchises at their disposal... And they are simply squandering the opportunity, that's how you build good-will and a customer base, with quality content.

Thats why I said hopefully.

Basically people are upset because Steam has been good to them. They introduced the 80% discount after all. They opened up classic gaming and got devs to update a lot of these broken games for new PCs again. They opened up the indie market. People love steam and Valve. So they are kinda fine with letting them have a monopoly.

However, I think they are largely overlooking the fact that Valve has gotten lazy. They stopped releasing games from their main franchises. Their biggest accomplishment in the last couple years is updating their chat client to STILL NOT COMPETE WITH DISCORD... The few games they have released are a step above flash and Wii party games.

In short, their monopoly is unhealthy for steam. They've gotten lazy.

Valve focusing as a service provider and not as a game developer should not be considered "lazy". There is nothing wrong with being a service provider first and Valve hasn't been known for being a developer for the better part of 7 years. There is nothing wrong with wanting them to make games but it just seems odd to hold them up to the standard as a game developer when they've already made their position on that clear for the entire generation. It's a difference in goals, not "laziness". Unless people want to argue that Valve is lazy as a service provider - in which case I'd say that just isn't true, I feel as if a lot of people who don't use the service are under this impression but the amount of major changes that Steam has undergone in the last few years is extensive. 

For what it's worth Valve probably should start making games that appeal to the mainstream. You can't get upset at people for expecting it when at one time they were one of the most prolific developers out there. I just think that in a perfect world we wouldn't need to moneyhat third party games and pretend like that somehow is the antithesis of laziness  - it's pretty silly. It *should* be fine for a digital platform like Steam to compete with Epic Game Store whilst having the same games from a sales basis - it would be amazing if these games could release on all digital platforms, and the digital platform that simply tries the hardest to be a good service would win. That's simply not the case, though. 

Hopefully Epic Games starts investing in more first party like they seem to want to.

I'm not upset because Steam has been "good to me", which it never did. Steam is trash right now. Problem is, EGS managed to be even worse. Much worse.

Why would I want to accept an even worse knockoff of an already shady product? Instead of making something better, they just moneyhatted themselves into the market, and selling out the consumer data to China via TenCent. And that's not even talking about the truckload of missing features.

Had Epic delivered a good store, I wouldn't have minded it. At. All. I actually probably would have supported it very much. Like I said in a previous post, I already have 8 game stores/launchers (even 9 if you would count the windows store, and 10 with the online indie store Crytivo), so adding yet another store to the list doesn't hurt anymore. But the way the store is is just short of catastrophic, and that's why I don't like it.

You can buy a game (and only one at a time since it's lacking even such basic features like a fucking shopping cart!) and start it, and that's it. Got any problems? You're out of luck. Want to know if the game is any good? No user reviews, to not talk about curators. Forums? Nope! Things like modding or a return policy? Are you on drugs?

What I fear is that the moneyhatting works too well and the competition starts doing the same stuff. Just imagine every developer having their own storefront. Instead of a supermarket for all your games at once, you get hundreds of little market stands and zero overview. No thanks!

There is a massive lack of trust with the Epic launcher because their partly (nearly majority) owned by Tencent. Not a company to be trusted at all with my credit/debit card information. Let alone have their spyware on my computer, giving the Chinese government direct access to my entire life.

Definitely not even slightly interested in VR to be honest.

Besides, it doesn't seem like it's gaining much in the way of traction in the gaming sphere anyway?

What does the video say? I might have an opinion about it.

Because the US government is so trustworthy when it comes to personal data?