How does that benefit me, Joe Customer? I’m not getting a lower price by going to EGS. I’m just getting more friction in finding a game I want to play.
Others have complained about Steam's lack of curation causing discoverability problems. It was at the height of this controversy that Epic launched their store promising better curation. Again, this helps consumers because not all consumers are alike. Some consumers do not want arbitrary moral decisions to block game availability, while others want this so that they do not have to wade through "garbage". Others, still, want to make that decision for all consumers.
Do you wish that the Mac App Store were the only way to get apps on your Mac?
Free games are a marketing practice, nothing more. It's not a sustainable business practice, and it's paid for by Epic's exploitative Fortnight lootboxes. The "free games" will become part of a paid monthly subscription (or just go away entirely) when Epic feels like they have the audience they need.
And me? The value those free games might provide me is not worth the cost - being marketed to by a company whose values are quite the opposite of my own.
It's a marketing practice that would not happen without competing stores. The end result is user benefit.
> it's paid for by Epic's exploitative Fortnight lootboxes
Why does it matter to me how it's paid for? Does not allowing competing stores change where Epic or Amazon get their money? The end result is that I benefit from Epic and Amazon getting to compete.
> being marketed to by a company whose values are quite the opposite of my own.
I find Apple's values to be opposite to my own (selling low privacy devices and lying about it, preventing me from doing general computing on my devices, etc.). With competition, I would at least have a choice of finding an app distributer like F-Droid whose values are closer to mine were I to be stuck with an iOS device.
You still haven't answered the question about whether you would prefer if your Mac didn't allow you to install apps outside of it's app store.
Also, if there are more stores it's less likely that entire categories of games will be unavailable to you (or available but worse due to reduced budgets) due to all game stores having rules banning them, and in general game stores are less likely to be able to enact policies that serve them at your expense.
They don't. The prices, between MTX and multiple release versions, have gone up if anything.
> they will be better
Pretty close to unuantifiable. What quantification we have, critic scores, aren't showing any movement in the ~decade since Steam got competition (Origin, GoG, etc).
The only benefit seems to be for the shareholders and corporate executives thus far.