And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

It isn’t. You can still buy physical copies of PC games, mostly AAA tho, but nobody does it anymore. Also, there are consoles that are delivered without a cd drive, so they are digital only.

And I’m not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I’m saying that if GOG dies, you’ll only really have Steam and Epic

To be fair, steam is my platform of choice now anyways because of their awesome linux support.

I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn’t have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games

Certainly a worry, however, in case they do become shitty, I’ll just download a bunch of cracks for my games and leave the platform.

Steam didn’t start off where they’re at now, they’ve had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

I don’t care tho?

Seriously, this is the worst argument to me. Why should I as a consumer care about that? If someone sells a flip phone now, you’re not going to say: “Oh man samsung had such a big headstart obviously their phones are better”. If a company enters a new space, they have to compete on the same level, not on the level of 20 years ago.

Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is

Ye agree, it is their game rn so they can do that. But a majority of games weren’t.

Why is no one mad at them?

People are mad at them. However, Epic is the one enabling this shitty behavior so they are the ones getting most of the hate.

they have had like a 10+ year headstart on cornering the PC marketplace

So Epic had like 10 years of learning from steam and doing it better, offering a competitive platform and experience. However, they didn’t do that because that actually takes time, money and effort so they just artificially tried to limit the amount of titles for sale on steam, which is basically trying to strongarm consumers into using their platform. Which is quite the same practice you see from any big players in any industry, from apple to john deere - and all are getting hate for it.

you’ll be glad there’s still some competition left

Competition like the EGS? No, I’m definitely not happy about that.

Steam is a huge reason why PC games went fully digital almost two decades ago

Not really. Games would’ve gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might’ve sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would’ve never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

Not really comparable IMO. Epic has paid devs/publishers in the past for not releasing on steam. Gearbox, Ubisoft etc

Nobody is mad that fortnite isn’t on steam.