Even though I noticed this on the first day, I waited until they sent out an e-mail before making my decision. I really hoped that they would've at least offered a standalone client, but no such luck. I'll be requesting my refund shortly; I will
not support Epic Games and their policies.
I have to say that I saw this coming. And I get
why you're doing this, PGI, I really do. But I also think that it's a grand miscalculation on your part. I can tell you as a Steam gamer with a 2003 account (who started playing MWO, at its inception, outside of Steam), that the Epic Games store is almost universally despised on Steam. And Steam isn't even pushing any anti-EGS agendas. Out of the hundreds of friends I have on Steam, I can't name anyone who actively uses EGS. I'm sure some people have accounts to bank the freebies, but
no one takes it seriously. There is very little overlap between the two user bases, with Steam being the established giant of computer gaming, and EGS mainly catering to mobile Fortnite transplants, and a small portion of the new-to-PC gaming crowd in general (which they're doing by giving out a lot of free games, which wind up as posts on deal sites, luring people into buying into the platform who normally wouldn't have bothered with PC games to begin with).
Fortnite players and casual PC gamers are
not your target demographic, PGI. While competition on Steam is indeed intense, at least it's full of communities focused on co-op gaming, and with co-op games generally being somewhat uncommon, you would've seen at least moderate success. On the other hand, on EGS, no matter how much they'll feature your game, it will still be invisible to EGS users unless they give it away for free, but even then, that would be terrible for the MechWarrior community itself, since the player base will be nonexistent anyway - the game will sit in users' libraries, untouched. When Borderlands 3 flops, pay close attention, because that franchise is monolithic, and if
it fails, then just think of what that means for
you. I have hundreds of hours in that series, and neither I, nor anyone else I know who likes Borderlands, will be getting Borderlands 3.
Then there's the matter of privacy and security. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I've had slightly more intimate experience with the way China does business, and there's a
lot to worry about. Their government plants its roots in all business activities, especially IT companies, and
especially IT companies with Western clients. You can be
sure that Tencent is under mandate to mine and transfer as much Western customer data as possible and send it off to the Politburo, which means Epic Games will be forced to comply. Their damn client has been
proven to phone home some pretty critical stuff, including browser traffic. Personally, I can't wait until they implement some actual community features in EGS, so that we can start up some democracy and Falun Gong groups and chat rooms, and have them show their true colors.
I know that this might seem as excessive paranoia to some, but the sad reality is that sometimes things actually
are this bad. People might think that they're insulated from these concerns because Epic Games is still an American company, and will serve as a proxy to protect them, but that's not how the corporate world works. And the Chinese
love keeping Western lapdogs as pets. It seems like a terrible, racist thing to say, but it really
is part of their high-end business culture. You'd think that Sweeney wouldn't fall for it, since anyone worth that much money can be assumed to be alpha as hell, but here we are. The world is
full of cases of founding executives getting forced to do terrible things with their companies, or get voted out or fired, after big acquisitions. Case in point: MoviePass.
All of that said, because you're offering refunds while letting people keep their preorder bonuses, and because this has been at least
somewhat transparent (despite the deflection leading up to the announcement), I'm not going to stop supporting/playing MWO. I just hope that this is indeed worthwhile for you, financially. If postponing my access to MW5 for another year means that you can keep the lights on and the MWO servers running, I'll suffer through the wait. Just don't expect me to pay full price once the game
does hit Steam.
Edited by Baron Blitz Fokheimer, 12 August 2019 - 12:36 AM.