Going against the prevailing sentiment here, I think this Tweet thread actually misses the mark in a lot of ways. A lot of that is me being pedantic, but still.
The stuff about fears of devaluation and why the discounts are being pulled is absolutely spot on in my opinion. And Steam making sales opt-in is important, especially in the examples given, where a game either has just come out or is about to come out. I remember a game I wanted last Steam sale had come out of Early Access (I think it was
Parkitect) right before the sale, but the developer didn't put it on sale, because they were worried about permanently devaluing their brand new game.
The rest of this thread is fairly questionable to me though. The thesis seems to partially be that "Gamers don't know how to articulate what they dislike about Epic, but really it's actually
capitalism."
Which I suppose is
probably true for some of us, but I really do not believe
that's the issue that the overarching "angry PC gamer" has.
And the Amazon and Diapers.com example is an interesting one to bring up, because as far as I remember, consumers didn't
generally care about the price war. And I've talked about this before, but the reason comes down to the differences between traditional retail (even "traditional" e-commerce/retail) and the entertainment industry.
If Amazon starts a price war with another retail front like Diapers.com, what happens to the consumer and how can they react?
- At a very surface level, whether the discounts are ill-gotten/illegal/dubious or not, consumers see diaper prices going down.
- The retail fronts often begin offering competing benefits or loyalty programs. In the case of the famed Diapers.com incident, Diapers.com was offering great shipping deals. So Amazon started offering special free (emphasis on free) discounts for families through a program called "Amazon Mom" that gave members two-day shipping on diapers/baby wipes, 20% off those products and occasional special discounts.
- Note real quick that all of this was happening on Amazon's storefront, which was already popular, fairly well-designed and usable.
- Now, was this freebie permanent? Obviously not, duh. It was largely a Trojan horse to get people into Amazon Prime, which I recall they started offering to parents for free 3-month trials at the time. It was also a way to get people into their grocery subscription services. Now the Amazon Mom benefits still exist, but they've been rolled into both Amazon Prime and give subscription requirements (i.e., you have to be part of Amazon Prime and have 5 baby product subscriptions to get the discounts).
- For many people though, given that there are supposedly 100 million people in the USA alone with access to Amazon Prime, that still might be a worthwhile deal. You buy a monthly subscription for diapers, baby wipes, toilet paper, detergent, and one type of baby food, and boom you're qualified for the 15-20% discount, in addition to your other (seemingly) customer-friendly Amazon Prime benefits.
And here's the absolute kicker:
If I don't want to buy my diapers from Amazon after they bulled Diapers.com, I can probably buy them from a dozen other places. In the USA, there are eight national supermarket chains (including Costco, Walmart, Target, Kroger owned stores, Ahold Delhaize, and Albertsons), as well as any number of local chains like Mitsuwa, Hy-Vee, Raley's, etc, and any local family small businesses.
If I want to buy Satisfactory,
I can literally only buy it from the Epic Game Store. We can talk about whatever monopolistic practices other retail industries have, but they have nothing on what the gaming industry has accomplished in terms of "exclusive products."
All of which is to say, people have gotten more uncomfortable about Amazon over the last few years,
but even talking about base optics, Epic's businesses tactics are even less appealing to consumers than Amazon's. If Epic would have even matched what Amazon did to Diapers.com, for better or worse, they probably wouldn't have gotten half the push-back that they got. If they had implemented say, some form of a loyalty program, genuinely better prices for consumers, had their games on a well-designed and usable storefront, and not had products be
exclusively sold by them...then suddenly they look a lot less threatening. They might still
functionally be as threatening as they are now, but they wouldn't
look that way and therefore probably wouldn't have pissed off so many people.
Part of the EGS pushback is really down to the
optics of how a megacorp is wielding their money. Most corps do it with a defter touch, so consumers either don't notice or don't notice until it's too late (say Amazon in 2005 vs Amazon in 2019). Epic's great misstep was being so brazen about their waving their money around like it was part of some kind of phallic measurement contest.
Also, the whole thing about "not innovating or making a better product" is
kind of silly. Amazon won its share of the e-commerce market, for better or worse, by largely pioneering the one-stop-internet-shop. Epic, again for better or worse, created its money from designing a useful game development tool set and creating a "better" Battle Royale, if not somehow creating the first actually good one.