Tim’s big issue, and it’s reflected in Epic’s entire strategy, and why Valve succeeded and will continue to assuming they stick with it.
Valve is not like innately better or more benevolent. Well, maybe a little, but at the end of the day they are a business, and out for their benefit. Which, in an ideal world, is about making the product customers want at a price they can afford. Epic is doing the same, but the issue is in who their customer is.
For Valve, players are the consumers and the product they sell is access to the developers and publishers. To that end they facilitate things via consumer facing features that better facilitate this.
For Epic, though, the publishers and developers are the customers. This is why all their strategy was targeted at them, lower cuts and all. The players are a resource they want to give access to but they fail to understand cultivating it. They tried brute forcing it with exclusives and free games but lacked even basic player friendly features and to this day are way behind. Their concern is, as demonstrated here, about how these things affect the developer.
Valve’s premise is based in the idea that customers want to know and it costs them nothing. Epic’s is that their customers want to hide it. It’s ‘unfair’ to their customers. Meanwhile, Valve goes after price parity cus it’s ‘unfair’ to THEIR customers.
Once you figure out how a company is oriented this way their behavior makes sense, stripped of moral pretenses.
Every day I ask myself how long my leadership will let me get away with wearing ranger green kit during Exercises. Perhaps it's because I actually wear everything properly compared to 90% of my colleagues.
Friendly reminder that the creators of disco Elysium cannot utilize their own IP because an investor gained 51% ownership of the company using a backend deal that the creators weren’t made aware of by selling himself a scrap of paper with a doodle on it for $1 and then selling that back to the company for 5 million euro and then systematically firing the people that created the world disco is in from 10+ years before as a modified D&D campaign. ALL of them.