Looking at what the Epic company is doing now, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that they’re acting like the boss of everyone because they have a lot of money and a very popular game giving them that money. Essentially the true nature of a person or company is revealed with the more money they get because that’s effectively power under capitalism. For whatever reason it’s very often that the ones who get super rich are extreme assholes.
Going over multiple cases, and there will probably be more as long as Epic has a hold in popular games until they can get their store running properly on its own, it seems that when a game becomes exclusive to their store, it also somehow manages to involve the companies involved in that game having extra funding up front. It’s also involved suddenly going back on the word prior mentioned of being on other storefronts, before the Epic Games Store even existed. Effectively this means the responsible party was bribed to change their mind. This works for big and small parties, since big companies want money and small ones also want money, but on top of that, make a stand against Steam and other stores taking a fairly large cut from profits.
This doesn’t apply to all cases involving Epic Games Store exclusives, but enough have come to light to make me suspect any move Epic makes as a potentially hostile one. While I’m for competition and ways to entice the larger companies to give more to the smaller groups that make them the money in the first place, at least as long as capitalism is in effect, the other side of usual dealings is in play here. Instead of just having the enticing offers of bigger payouts to whoever puts a game there, they have to push their way to the top. They’re new to this whole having a universal storefront thing and already messing up their image of trust to where I don’t want to even touch Unreal Engine 4 or whatever the latest one is for making whatever games I make anymore. Plus the whole continuing to push battle royale games, a genre I’m tired of seeing everywhere all the time. To me, it’s the new MOBA. Plus there’s a major Chinese megacorp partly owning the company (and many other companies) and probably influencing things to a non-minor degree. I just have trust issues with companies past a certain size no matter where they come from.
As far as engines, I’m more familiar with Unity anyway, plus I’m looking at other engines coming up that are community-built and catching up more with at least high quality indie-level standards, and I’d like to move over to those short of making my own engine entirely. I’m typically one for open-source software, and not just for the angle of it usually being free, but that does help.