Epic basically won the lottery with Fortnite and got to hold the jar that every kid will be putting their lunch money into for a few years. Now if I won the lottery I’d probably fuck off and never work again, but smart people and companies use that luck and try to turn it into evergreen income.
In principle, putting that wealth toward a new game store could have made sense for Epic, but Epic took their fuck you money and actually decided to say fuck you to many financially and personally invested people with it. The main problem is that the market is saturated and people aren’t going to change where they buy games or apps on a whim. I imagine Epic studied this and realized that most customers will not be leaving Steam without a compelling reason, so they attacked from a different angle: trying to get devs and publishers to abandon Steam. But as I’ve mentioned before, diddling the numbers of your cut vs. Steam’s or Apple’s is still just leaving you with a math problem that any competent college student could figure out, and no number favors Epic when Steam and Apple are already so deeply established.
The minor good news for Epic was that many indie devs and nearly all games journalists indeed are significantly more retarded than a competent college student, so they just saw “12%” and breathlessly told us how Epic was ending capitalism in the game industry and took the bait. The bad news was that the smart money was still on just releasing your shit on any store that will take it, and especially Steam. So Epic’s next option was to simply pay people to avoid Steam - firstly giving customers $10 coupons but then moving to the nuclear option and literally paying developers and publishers to stay away. This second one was the other part of that math problem which they could sort of obliquely control, ie how many potential customers would buy a game no matter where it was sold if they had limited options. This changes from game to game but the shorthand napkin math says it needs to be “nearly fucking all of them” for it to start making sense to avoid Steam, and that’s why Epic had to start cutting checks.
(While very likely not true, I’d like to think that the amount of money Epic paid a dev is directly proportional to how many people were around that could solve a linear programming or optimization problem, because it confirms that indie devs are dumb-dumbs and most were lucky to get six digits, with the exception of the Subnautica people who somehow made off with $1.4 million)
But that generated backlash, and when coupled with EGS’s seeming indifference toward customer-focused features, it turned sentiment around EGS from ambivalence to actively malignant. So Epic is now sitting on tens of billions of dollars of Fortnite revenue and a store people fucking hate. What to do? Well, if you’re that loaded it couldn’t hurt to sue your competitors and try to have the government get them out of the way by stating that even though you’ll be doing the exact same thing as them, your diddled numbers are inherently more fair and less illegal than theirs.
This is all to say, Epic are acting like assholes because Fortnite lets them, and short of burning down the online marketplace industry they’ll never make that Fortnite money again and have to go back to making rocks look really good on the PlayStation forever.