Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up against developers that largely avoid those patterns (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.
[0] The online has micro-transactions but even if it didn't exist, the single player experience is well worth the money alone and is on par with all the others.
Where, exactly, did you read "gold standard"? No one said that. No one hinted to that. The words stated were "great company" and "one of the good ones".
>Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more bad than good
I listed all major developers, many of which are owned by mega publishers like Sony.
Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing and ethical developers. But they aren't peers to the companies we're talking about. Its easy to be ethical when you're small. Its laudable to maintain a sense of those ethics when you're large, even if the absolute measure isn't a perfect score.
Nintendo is far scummier than you let on; they're among the scummiest video game companies on the planet. It just doesn't come through in their fantastic and "pure" gaming experiences; but the fights their legal team chooses to engage in are ugly, despicable, and very unique among gaming companies.
Team Cherry produced a great game. I wouldn't be willing to call them a good company or a good team; their track record shows as plainly as you could possibly wish that they are terrible at developing games.
But at the same time I think there's something cool about being able to hop in without shelling out $60. And getting updates and new content for years.
From the FTC blog post:
>The FTC alleges that with millions of consumers’ credit cards conveniently in hand, Epic failed to adequately explain its billing practices to customers and designed its interface in ways that led to unauthorized charges. You’ll want to read the complaint for details, but here are a few of the dark patterns the company allegedly used.
>According to the complaint, Epic set up its payment system so that it saved by default the credit card that was associated with the account. That meant that kids could buy V-Bucks – the virtual currency necessary to make in-game purchases – with the simple press of a button. No separate cardholder consent was required.
Scum. Glad Apple booted them from the App Store and the courts sided with Apple.