Well, I was looking for this game, so this is a bummer. But, since I ver rarely buy games at launch, I can easily wait yet another year after it comes to Steam to play it.

It's not like I don't have other games to play while I wait.

Sure I can, watch me. I mean consoles are one of the most consumer hating devices that exist and people love them, and people love to champion one consumer hating device over the other. Since we can't police companies themselves what we gotta do is pit them against each other, which is the only thing we can do. Last thing I checked competition is a good thing, even, or especially, if both competitors are big piles of shit.

Or do you have a better solution to reduce the amount of shit both companies spew?

It's what ignorant folk do these days. They don't know better, don't want to educate themselves on markets, business decisions and looking up practices, so they just read what someone tells them to and they chirp it. 

If one does not want to support one console brand, you can go to another. If one does not want to support consoles, you can go to PC or mobile or retro. Console wars on PC is awful due to keeping the platform that's, by definition, the most open and flexible of all, and impose artificial limits. The only thing PC-wars is going to cause is an increase in (justified) piracy.

Hell, if one really wants to put the pressure on a business, public boycotts usually work wonders. You'd have to convince people to follow it through, but once done that, it puts juggernauts against the ropes fast. I'm sure we all have dozens of games unplayed and/or unbeaten to keep us busy without buying any new one for years.

I'm not saying that other platforms aren't doing things even better, but this is just a reality of the situation. Epic is likely just offering the overall best deal to the publishers/developers, not just with taking a smaller portion of the profits, but also likely by offering these publishers/developers a lot of money for these exclusivity deals. At the end of the day all video game companies are in this business to make money, and if it makes commercial sense to take Epic's deal, then they are going to do it. 

And smaller shops like GOG, itch.io or the Humble store will pay for this with annihilation because the other 2 start buying exclusivoty out of everything if this turns into a lensman arms race.

Awesome! Valve getting some competition! About time!

Whoa whoa whoa.  We don't need any of that kind of logic in here.  Evil companies must be punished.

See, the problem is, when you don't care, you become a part of that problem. if you don't care, you wouldn't really put anything forward to say, just like someone says "I have no problems" not saying anything tom someone who has said issues. 

I don't mind both stores existing, but I absolutely loathe what EG is doing to PC gaming, twisting it into a "we're the heroes" and getting people defending them, while they build up their own monopoly and turn PC gaming into console gaming for their own benefit and the benefit of the few greedy devs/pubs. 

But that's the thing, we've clearly got other engines out there. Plenty of devs using other engines at that, so it's not all down to that measly 5% for using UE, but even then, Discord does the cut better. It really is just down to EG throwing around FN money and saying "if your game sells like shit, we'll cover you, despite it being our own fault", and I know they cannot keep that gig up indefinitely, let alone the 12%. 

Yeah, business is business, that goes without saying, but that's a half arsed excuse to excuse bad practices, bad timing and just generally being greedy and non caring.