My opinion might not be popular but still i believe that Schreier is either misguided or he has spent to much time caring for the devs and this has clouded his judgement.
I do think that he is the best that we ve got (so far at least), not perfect or even adequate after all those recent misses of his but i really think his motives are truly pure.
I 'm crossing my fingers this will be true though since i can not vouch for anyone else than myself (and my family members) yet i think it is evident that all this time he has approached the issue from the less revealing angle, he is making mistakes just like the rest of us,
And i am willing to give this person the benefit of the doubt because he has proven his worth but we get to see so many willing idiots mindlesly yelling the "Just another launcher" narrative so we instictively bag anyone and throw them to the river of stupidity.
Yet i can't find excuses for him forever, he needs to go out there and do his work and not just stay at the comfort zone some EGS friendly devs provide for him.
It really depends who you’re looking at. You have to remember that liberalism and libertarianism, which are two ideologies that are not far apart, has wholly dominated the nerd sphere in general - not just in terms of video games, but even their favorite movie franchise is mainly about a heroic charismatic billionaire CEO who solves the world through self-interested philanthropy. Liberalism believes personal liberty overrides economic liberty, libertarianism believes vice-versa, and that’s really the only difference.
Rami Ismail is a pretty smart guy and an important voice for people of color and those of Arab descent in the game industry, but also, if you look at who does what in Vlambeer, he handles more of the business side and Jan handles more of the actual gamemaking. That isn’t to say one side is more important than the other, I’m sure there’s overlap. But Rami is mostly well-known for keeping the studio afloat after disasters like seeing clones of their mobile games become more popular than their own, having a laptop with their games’ source stolen at PAX, and other catastrophes.
Long story short, Ismail is a businessman, and if your entire career is predicated on how good you are at capitalism then you’re probably the kind of person who likes capitalism, or at least can stomach it for extended periods of time. So of course it’s the liberal capitalist who thinks that a billionaire doing “philanthropy” for indie devs to throw band-aids on the problems of selling games under capitalism is a better solution than not having a system where the self-perpetuating advertisement machine decides whether or not you make enough money to eat.
Schreier stumps for unions and blatantly calls out capitalism as the main source for many problems in the games industry, and good on him for that, but ultimately he’s the editor in chief at a massive publication, the biggest in gaming, and the “sources” in the indie gaming industry he’s talking to are the biggest of the big indie devs, and not the little guys. It’s telling that when Schreier came out in favor of the EGS, he specifically framed it as “I’ve spoken to several devs who said that the EGS kept their studio afloat.” Implicitly meaning he has not talked to the thousands of indie devs who have no chance of winning a billionaire’s golden ticket.