Buying/Selling exclusive rights ... you can find that everwhere. Most recently with Disney as one of the bigger examples, buying everything left and right.
You can also find have it with TV shows or products you can buy in one grocery store but not in the other. Its everywhere and its not even new to the gameing industrie.
I remember that, when you would still buy games at store physicaly, that you couldn't find them in every store that sold games. Even back then there where exclusive deals for certain shops to sell a game or combining a certain promotion with a game.
Later you had big publishers like EA buying up companies to corner the market, then came Steam. Basicly createing a monopol on downloadable games for years.
Do you have to like it? No, definitly not. I would also prefere if companies would make their products widely avaible. Is it something new? No definitly not and it will not go away anytime soon. From a quick look I found that the oldest lawsuits about this data back to 1414. So its been around for a few hundret years...I guess it will stay a while longer.
As for Tencent and sharing data. The goverment forces, to my knowledge, the companies to share the information. Willingness has nothing to do with it. Also may I remind you that the US goverment wanted to force Apple and Microsoft to implement backdoors into their systems too. All under the "security" arguement. Its allways facinating how people are willing to give up their personal freedoms for "security".
On the point of bad wording, yes I also made that mistake it seams. "Modern life" didn't meant you going for tupperware
I meant you should stop using your computer, mobile phone or smart TV.
Also don't go online. Lots of chinese servers around or at least using chinese hardware and there was this report that chinese companies incooperate chips in server hardware to monitor stuff.
You may also watch or listen to Tencent sponsored music and films as Tencent is also involved in those two markets and mobile gameing and cloud services.
Speaking about Tencent investments, you can find them here too
- Activision Blizzard
- Frontier Development
- Funcom
- Paradox Interactive
- Riot Games
- Snapchat
- Spotify
- Tesla
- Ubisoft
So Epic is just one of many "western" companies they have invested into. Are you consequently also avoiding those, now that you know that Tencent is invested there?