The mental gymnastics to talk about discoverability when developers are literally abstracting their games from the number one location of eyeballs to a store no one wants to use, then telling users they're wrong for not wanting a fragmented ecosystem on their PC "because marketing" is so fucking dumb. So stupid. It's the "gorilla in a suit" Steve Ballmer school of business where they think their super smart business acumen and marketing departments can make sheep consumers go anywhere they want and eat any shit they tell them to. And we all saw what happened during Ballmer's tenure of Microsoft: everyone, most notably Apple and Google, ate their lunch and post-Ballmer caused the company to have to undergo a major pivot in order to stay relevant.
Why have Apple been so successful? It's the ecosystem, stupid. That ubiquity of service (Apple pretty much provides end-to-end service for everything you'd want to use their devices for) and continuity across devices drives their platform. Valve brought similar, though more open, qualities of that ecosystem to the PC and became the center of gravity because they provided a level of ubiquity of service and portability across hardware that no one else has come anywhere near accomplishing.
The way I see it is if a money grubbing operation like EA - who are traditionally more craven and stubborn than literally every other AAA publisher in gaming history - has given up its war of attrition with Valve, and if Microsoft - who own the fucking Windows platform - can't win with a home side advantage and has given up its war of attrition with Valve, then why is anyone who shows no interest in developing an ecosystem like Valve's even bothering at this point?
If you want to topple Valve, throwing money at it is only going to solve half the issue. And regarding Epic, they threw their money around in all the wrong places. Trying to scoop up 75-85 Metascore 1-12 month exclusives is dumb - they might as well have set their cash on fire. There are plenty of ways they could've more wisely spent that cash, including developing their own games, buying studios to make more games, hiring and developing their client, building that irresistible ecosystem and so on.
The other half is actually having the sense to innovate. Finding potential users who aren't currently buying games and finding ways to make them buy games. And even here Epic got it all wrong: why try and lure people who are already happily buying PC games on established stores when they could be building bridges with underserved audiences? The first sign I've seen of Epic doing this is via the Android client, but their PC side is so toxic now that I can't see the cross-platform benefits really being a selling point anymore.
If they'd come out with an Android client, promising "buy once, play on mobile and PC" they'd have actually served an audience who want that functionality and may then think about which store they buy their games on.
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