Ultimately more money going to people who actually make games instead of to people who hold up a storefront is a good thing.
Except does that really happen with Epic exclusives? Or does the extra money go towards the executives and the shareholders? It's foolish to talk about how the people who make the games benefit from Epic when Epic itself is guilty of abusing their own employees.
Consider this - for most indies the developers are the shareholders and even if not all of them are when there is enough money to go around you are less likely to be pushed into overtime and more likely to get enough time to comfortably do your job. And even if we are talking non-indies then guess what - it is the same thing. Shareholders are less likely to breathe down your neck and rush you if you make them more money. Oh, and of course in both cases the more profitable a development studio is the less likely it is to get closed down and for people to have to look for new jobs. And sure, Epic has a decent amount of crunch but it is due to trying to catch the lighting in a bottle with a live-service game that is actually successful and in most studios there is no such rush to cash in on a trend while it is successful and instead the crunch is actually caused by the lack of money or an investment not being worth it after a point which is something that greater share for publishers and developers would help with.
Businesses are free to distribute their games how they please. It seems counter productive not to sell to as many people as possible, but I’m no CEO. There have been man games that I missed out on because of exclusivity, but I have a big enough library and backlog to ever go without.
Well, the thing is that just because you are on a platform does not mean that you are selling it to everyone on that platform. There are big games that will sell no matter the platform despite the vocal backlash. And there are smaller games that really benefit from the guaranteed sales and even from the visibility that the EGS is giving them as there are very few games there and releases happen rarely. Basically every game released on EGS is seen by anyone who bothers to open up the store and look through the news section and that unfortunately does not go the same way for steam where there are multiple releases every day, most of them being complete trash which makes users less likely to look through those new releases.
Thats true. I have never even tried RDR because if this. I’ve forgone games because of the publisher or a hundred other reasons, but never just because of the launcher. I have, however, neglected to even consider a few games because they are on a launcher that I dont have. Metro is good example. Outer Worlds is another. It looks cool but I probably wont even read reviews until its on steam. Not because I hate Epic, but because I have enough to play and buy to last a lifetime already. Its just one extra step that seems unnnecessary at this point so I’ve developed a “their loss” attitude for now. Also, once those games are on Steam or whatever, there will be other new releases etc for them to contend with.
Well, that kind of attitude is actually the problem exclusives are meant to combat. If you would not even consider a new platform because you can get all you want on the one you have installed then a new platform has no chance to succeed at all. The point is to force you to consider the new platform for products that you actually want and are exclusive to that platform so for the next game you actually would like to think where you want to buy it from. And it takes one "must-have" you are not able to wait for to make you consider the other games that you would rather wait for to release on Steam.
It is tough to criticize, but still valid for any customer that is hindered, a developer/publisher if they go for that 'exclusivity' money for whatever reason. After all, the gaming companies have to make a profit by hook or crook somehow.
This possible emerging intent & practice of these gaming companies asking for potential customers to back their game initially while stating it will be for so & so platform(s) to then change that if/when they appeal enough for an 'exclusivity' deal is, imo, the deceitful part. When a gaming company changes like that, midstream, all those initial start-up backers should be given a refund option with no hassle. The gaming company altered the direction of a game's release from when a customer decided to back it financially & was advertised as something specific. Then the customer can decide to still back the game or receive a refund.
Pertaining to the launchers I'm sure they all have their boons & deficits with some more than others but some launchers are older & bigger & probably more stagnant whereas some newer launchers are newer & need more time to develop & hopefully not just for a cash grab.
For myself, the possible 'exclusivity' doesn't bother me much. I've seen it for consoles since long ago. Heck I still have my original golden Zelda cartridge. What I don't support is this saying 1 thing then doing another after taking peoples' money by saying the 1 thing.
From a games consumer perspective, PC digital storefront exclusivity is at most a minor annoyance of having to install yet another launcher.
Remember when Epic launcher read your list of Steam friends without getting the user's permission? Why should anyone trust them after that? A security risk is not a "minor annoyance".
You mean like the time Valve fucked up massively and introduced a glitch a couple years back that allowed customers to randomly access cached copies of one another's accounts with personal information and card data included?
Big difference between intended actions and unintended ones.
No. No there isn't. Valve had a responsibility to its customers, and they were fined for their data breach accordingly.
Also, just to demonstrate how selectively biased the Steam crusaders are, the fact that Valve is the one who left their user data unencrypted for Epic to allegedly mine was completely overlooked, sunshine.
Man that seems wrong, I don't think someone has the right to take something from someone just because it was left there unprotected, in my country that's called stealing.
And don't get me wrong, steam has done some bad shit, that's why I prefer to buy my game from GOG, if it's not there then I go to steam.
But if you think that unintended and intended behavior are the same then there is no point in talking about it.
What was missing from the article is any mention of "staying power" by the distributor.
Competition in general is very good for consumers, I agree. But, digital distribution for games is a very different proposition because we, the consumers, require the digital distributer to never stop trading!
If I'm buying a physical product, I don't give a shit about the company selling it because I will physically own the product. If I'm buying a service or something consumable, again I don't give a shit about the company because I will use the service immediately or consume the product immediately.
With digitial distributors of games, I HAVE TO CARE about the company because if the company disappears, I lose access to 100s of £££s worth of games that I can never get access to again without repurchasing. That is a unique challenge to digital games distributors. There are games that I bought on Steam 10 years ago that I still occasionally re-install and play. Games are too big to have the entire library permanently installed (not to mention what happens when I rebuild my PC).
So, from that perspective, I fully support a monopoly. I was only comfortable buying games through Steam years after it had established itself because it had proven it's superiority and staying power. I'd also lost 5-6 games prior to steam through other digitial distributors because those distributors (including EA back then) were shitty with tracking users and purchases.
Epic can't provide that stability. If I buy a game through the Epic store, I'm fairly confident I won't be able to access it in 5 years time. They may be swimming in money right now due to Fortnite, and sure, the company itself has been around for ages, but that's no guarantee that the store will still function in the future.
So, as long as Steam continues to offer extremely cheap games with great offers and a massive selection, I'll continue to only buy games through them, safe in the knowledge that they'll still be around for years to come. If Epic's store is still there in 5 years time, then and only then will I consider using it.
Businesses are free to distribute their games how they please. It seems counter productive not to sell to as many people as possible, but I’m no CEO. There have been man games that I missed out on because of exclusivity, but I have a big enough library and backlog to ever go without.
Well, the thing is that just because you are on a platform does not mean that you are selling it to everyone on that platform. There are big games that will sell no matter the platform despite the vocal backlash. And there are smaller games that really benefit from the guaranteed sales and even from the visibility that the EGS is giving them as there are very few games there and releases happen rarely. Basically every game released on EGS is seen by anyone who bothers to open up the store and look through the news section and that unfortunately does not go the same way for steam where there are multiple releases every day, most of them being complete trash which makes users less likely to look through those new releases.
Thats true. I have never even tried RDR because if this. I’ve forgone games because of the publisher or a hundred other reasons, but never just because of the launcher. I have, however, neglected to even consider a few games because they are on a launcher that I dont have. Metro is good example. Outer Worlds is another. It looks cool but I probably wont even read reviews until its on steam. Not because I hate Epic, but because I have enough to play and buy to last a lifetime already. Its just one extra step that seems unnnecessary at this point so I’ve developed a “their loss” attitude for now. Also, once those games are on Steam or whatever, there will be other new releases etc for them to contend with.
Well, that kind of attitude is actually the problem exclusives are meant to combat. If you would not even consider a new platform because you can get all you want on the one you have installed then a new platform has no chance to succeed at all. The point is to force you to consider the new platform for products that you actually want and are exclusive to that platform so for the next game you actually would like to think where you want to buy it from. And it takes one "must-have" you are not able to wait for to make you consider the other games that you would rather wait for to release on Steam.
I have to agree.
Frankly, for the average user, past a certain point features are irrelevant. Content is the end all and be all.
Did people buy the objectively more powerful PS3 last gen? No. The objectively least powerful console of the time, the Wii, ran away with the prize because it had the most unique exclusive content. I get that you can call motion controls a feature, but they ultimately boil down to exclusive games that the PS3 and Xbox 360 did not have and attempted to slapdashedly emulate through the Kinect and PS Move.
Are people buying the XBox One X, objectively the most powerful console right now? No. It's in last place, because their exclusive line up doesn't compare to the less feature rich PS4 and the far less powerful, but far more unique Switch.
If features were platform sellers and exclusive content wasn't absolutely necessary, GOG, the objectively superior platform, would be the de facto king of the PC space. But it isn't, because name recognition and library are what actually matters.
Man that seems wrong, I don't think someone has the right to take something from someone just because it was left there unprotected, in my country that's called stealing.
And don't get me wrong, steam has done some bad shit, that's why I prefer to buy my game from GOG, if it's not there then I go to steam.
But if you think that unintended and intended behavior are the same then there is no point in talking about it.
I don't think you understand what EGS actually was getting from the Steam file it was accessing. What it was doing was rummage through that file which is on your system and then create checksums of your steam username and the usernames of the people in your friend's list then copy those hashes to a file locally. The file with those hashes was only uploaded after you decide to import your steam's friend list to EGS. Effectively the program did not really access any information that was not already on your PC, when it stored it locally it stored it in a more secure way than the information was initially available in and moreover - in a way that is almost impossible to be reversed(basically the only way to get what was stored is to brute-force through possible names and find a match that way) and when EGS uploaded the file it was already in that secure, almost impossible to reverse format.
From a games consumer perspective, PC digital storefront exclusivity is at most a minor annoyance of having to install yet another launcher.
Remember when Epic launcher read your list of Steam friends without getting the user's permission? Why should anyone trust them after that? A security risk is not a "minor annoyance".
You mean like the time Valve fucked up massively and introduced a glitch a couple years back that allowed customers to randomly access cached copies of one another's accounts with personal information and card data included?
Big difference between intended actions and unintended ones.
No. No there isn't. Valve had a responsibility to its customers, and they were fined for their data breach accordingly.
Also, just to demonstrate how selectively biased the Steam crusaders are, the fact that Valve is the one who left their user data unencrypted for Epic to allegedly mine was completely overlooked, sunshine.
Man that seems wrong, I don't think someone has the right to take something from someone just because it was left there unprotected, in my country that's called stealing.
And don't get me wrong, steam has done some bad shit, that's why I prefer to buy my game from GOG, if it's not there then I go to steam.
But if you think that unintended and intended behavior are the same then there is no point in talking about it.
Okay, here is what we need to disavow. It isn't intended vs. unintended.
Valve's glitch wasn't an "accident." They failed to properly quality control an update on their platform. That was a choice on their part. Any consequence and legal liability that stems from that is their responsibility.
It's funny Valve actually used to be pretty relevant in both releasing socially relevant games like Half-Life/CS/similar, and had an awesome engine on top of that. Then as Steam became a bigger and bigger deal they've moved on to buy relevant teams/games like Portal and DOTA, and now that Steam has been around and successful pretty much forever the only games that Valve can make now are late to the trend like Artifact or DOTA autochess.
Even Valve's minigame collection in The Lab only had mostly Unity games in it, rather than Source 1 or 2 games. So even their own engine has fallen to an extent.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Man that seems wrong, I don't think someone has the right to take something from someone just because it was left there unprotected, in my country that's called stealing.
And don't get me wrong, steam has done some bad shit, that's why I prefer to buy my game from GOG, if it's not there then I go to steam.
But if you think that unintended and intended behavior are the same then there is no point in talking about it.
I don't think you understand what EGS actually was getting from the Steam file it was accessing. What it was doing was rummage through that file which is on your system and then create checksums of your steam username and the usernames of the people in your friend's list then copy those hashes to a file locally. The file with those hashes was only uploaded after you decide to import your steam's friend list to EGS. Effectively the program did not really access any information that was not already on your PC, when it stored it locally it stored it in a more secure way than the information was initially available in and moreover - in a way that is almost impossible to be reversed(basically the only way to get what was stored is to brute-force through possible names and find a match that way) and when EGS uploaded the file it was already in that secure, almost impossible to reverse format.
I understand the technicalities of it, if you want to see it that way, then they were still taken something from a source from which they shouldn't have, for that purpose API's exist, now I don't know if Valve provides one that exposes Friends list, nor I think it has any importance to the topic.
I'll take the anti-Epic store people seriously when they rage against Steam for having thousands of exclusive games only on Steam. Until then, they are a joke just mad their monopoly has a small competitor trying to break it. Nevermind the fact they make false claims of certain games being exclusive when they are on multiple PC game distributors, but just not on Steam temporarily (like Outer Worlds).
ok tell me what game is steam only? who is not valve game? and tht steam only is because steam forced the devs to only drop there
anyway reading all comments, I can undertand most don't know what they are talking about, always nice to read these, always funny
People have every right to not use the launcher they don't like. People should not tell other people what they can do or can't do. If a dev wanted to take the money from Epic to keep their game going be my guest. It when dev try to be shady about it and Epic back them up just to be just like steam to make so much money they can.
In the long run trust is very importent if your a small indie dev. Killing off your long term consumer never a good thing if they being shady about it.
Vavle has fallen from grace and most people were in agreeance. Here comes Epic and all the sudden people are upset that vavle has competition. Sadly it was epic that stepped up to compete against them, one sleazy company trying to compete with a lazy greedy company...
Vavle has fallen from grace and most people were in agreeance. Here comes Epic and all the sudden people are upset that vavle has competition. Sadly it was epic that stepped up to compete against them, one sleazy company trying to compete with a lazy greedy company...
Valve always had competition. Other consumer bring something new to the table what they offer. Epic just trying be like steam but with less option.
My problem with the idea of exclusives is that the success of that will bring more of it. It was true of lockboxes, and gacha, and all these other things that were not really fun in games.
I'm 100% for competition. Heck, my favored method of getting a game is buying it direct. I'd like to give the developers 100% instead of 85% or 70%. I do, however, want merit based competition, not who wants to toss out the bigger down payment on having something to push customers to use their marketplace.
I simply won't support games that go this route, because I want jack all to do with the eventual 100 launchers if the exclusivity idea pans out. I'll be on to something else by the time that they become available. Same holds true of big title console games that port over for the most part.
Epic could improve their store and remove a lot of the good reasons to avoid it (including things like multiple game purchase issues that still plague them)... but after they opened their mouths that launcher is something that would take an extreme rarity in the gaming world: a sincere apology and follow through. I'd support any of dozens of other stores, but the odds of ever supporting theirs is pretty darn low at this point, unless maybe a Japanese guy or a Czech take over (yes, citing the two how seem to have actually done such a thing). *Sean Murray came close, but didn't quite hit the apology right. He chose silence instead. I'll give them credit for the effort on the game though!*
I don't buy or play consoles, and a large part of that is avoiding exclusivities. I like a bunch of Nintendo games, I like a bunch of Sony games, Microsoft has a few worth playing, and all of that adds up. It's a ridiculously expensive hobby.
On the other hand, I can build a PC and replace parts every few years, buy games at huge discounts, install emulators to play most of those console exclusives I wouldn't have access to without owning the hardware, so if that bullshit starts effecting PC gaming, there are and will be plenty of other ways to circumvent having to deal with it. It's annoying, and I don't think it serves the consumer, but I'm being pragmatic here. It won't be the end of the world or my enjoyment of games.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I play on PC and avoid more than a few things. This includes Epic. I don't trust the company for other practices that makes me not believe they are in it for anyone but themselves. The exclusive titles can succeed or burn and I won't care. I hate the launcher. I wanted the Mechwarrior game but now I will not. If not for Humble then I probably would only use GoG to buy games.
I will be honest that I can't blame exclusives happening as each launcher has rules and so on when it comes to indie teams as that means a lot more work. I don't know enough about larger teams on what that would mean. I just know I am tired of it feeling like if I want to get everything that I might enjoy then I need 15 programs running. That is why I don't like the exclusives. When it was really only Steam and then GoG there was not much but now publishers have their own that even if go through another store launcher then will open it up and so on. Too much clutter for me.
Okay, here is what we need to disavow. It isn't intended vs. unintended.
Valve's glitch wasn't an "accident." They failed to properly quality control an update on their platform. That was a choice on their part. Any consequence and legal liability that stems from that is their responsibility.
Without diving deeply into the matter in question, this is a very key point. There's a gulf between unintended consequences and negligence, and a lot (if not most) cyber security incidents are due to negligence on someone's part.
What does that have to do with missing out on the civil war and re-stoking the fire while we're still recovering from the wounds of battle?
The article was well written and formatted but didn't say anything different than the points everyone was smashing each other upside the head with already.
Hell, you're missing all the juicy conspiracy theory and the tit for tat. Have mercy.
P.S. Borderlands 3 officially comes out April 2020 and I can't wait.
lol Well, that's true. I did miss out on seeing the forums go up in flames. TBH, I don't have much time to read through the forums, other than just checking on my articles and engaging there.
I will endeavor to cover the exact scope of Illuminati involvement in a follow-up article, though.
btw, something the anti-exclusive folks should consider is other exclusives that already exist and are highly successful in other media.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, ect. all have their own exclusive content that's not available anywhere else. You've also seen Disney and CBS getting into the game, as well.
I'd submit that Game of Thrones and Stranger Things are highly competitive in the open market without exclusivity, but those shows are being leveraged by their companies to drive additional traffic to their respective services.
There are exclusive songs, art, even products that are only sold at specific stores. It's usually not the inability to be effective that creates exclusivity, but rather the mutually beneficial opportunity to capitalize on something's popularity. When you're dealing with a newer company like Epic Games, then it's also a key part of growing that company in order to be more competitive in the general market.
Bottom line, you see successful exclusivity all the time. It's all around you.
Comments
Consider this - for most indies the developers are the shareholders and even if not all of them are when there is enough money to go around you are less likely to be pushed into overtime and more likely to get enough time to comfortably do your job. And even if we are talking non-indies then guess what - it is the same thing. Shareholders are less likely to breathe down your neck and rush you if you make them more money. Oh, and of course in both cases the more profitable a development studio is the less likely it is to get closed down and for people to have to look for new jobs. And sure, Epic has a decent amount of crunch but it is due to trying to catch the lighting in a bottle with a live-service game that is actually successful and in most studios there is no such rush to cash in on a trend while it is successful and instead the crunch is actually caused by the lack of money or an investment not being worth it after a point which is something that greater share for publishers and developers would help with.
This possible emerging intent & practice of these gaming companies asking for potential customers to back their game initially while stating it will be for so & so platform(s) to then change that if/when they appeal enough for an 'exclusivity' deal is, imo, the deceitful part. When a gaming company changes like that, midstream, all those initial start-up backers should be given a refund option with no hassle. The gaming company altered the direction of a game's release from when a customer decided to back it financially & was advertised as something specific. Then the customer can decide to still back the game or receive a refund.
Pertaining to the launchers I'm sure they all have their boons & deficits with some more than others but some launchers are older & bigger & probably more stagnant whereas some newer launchers are newer & need more time to develop & hopefully not just for a cash grab.
For myself, the possible 'exclusivity' doesn't bother me much. I've seen it for consoles since long ago. Heck I still have my original golden Zelda cartridge. What I don't support is this saying 1 thing then doing another after taking peoples' money by saying the 1 thing.
Man that seems wrong, I don't think someone has the right to take something from someone just because it was left there unprotected, in my country that's called stealing.
And don't get me wrong, steam has done some bad shit, that's why I prefer to buy my game from GOG, if it's not there then I go to steam.
But if you think that unintended and intended behavior are the same then there is no point in talking about it.
Competition in general is very good for consumers, I agree. But, digital distribution for games is a very different proposition because we, the consumers, require the digital distributer to never stop trading!
If I'm buying a physical product, I don't give a shit about the company selling it because I will physically own the product. If I'm buying a service or something consumable, again I don't give a shit about the company because I will use the service immediately or consume the product immediately.
With digitial distributors of games, I HAVE TO CARE about the company because if the company disappears, I lose access to 100s of £££s worth of games that I can never get access to again without repurchasing. That is a unique challenge to digital games distributors. There are games that I bought on Steam 10 years ago that I still occasionally re-install and play. Games are too big to have the entire library permanently installed (not to mention what happens when I rebuild my PC).
So, from that perspective, I fully support a monopoly. I was only comfortable buying games through Steam years after it had established itself because it had proven it's superiority and staying power. I'd also lost 5-6 games prior to steam through other digitial distributors because those distributors (including EA back then) were shitty with tracking users and purchases.
Epic can't provide that stability. If I buy a game through the Epic store, I'm fairly confident I won't be able to access it in 5 years time. They may be swimming in money right now due to Fortnite, and sure, the company itself has been around for ages, but that's no guarantee that the store will still function in the future.
So, as long as Steam continues to offer extremely cheap games with great offers and a massive selection, I'll continue to only buy games through them, safe in the knowledge that they'll still be around for years to come. If Epic's store is still there in 5 years time, then and only then will I consider using it.
Frankly, for the average user, past a certain point features are irrelevant. Content is the end all and be all.
Did people buy the objectively more powerful PS3 last gen? No. The objectively least powerful console of the time, the Wii, ran away with the prize because it had the most unique exclusive content. I get that you can call motion controls a feature, but they ultimately boil down to exclusive games that the PS3 and Xbox 360 did not have and attempted to slapdashedly emulate through the Kinect and PS Move.
Are people buying the XBox One X, objectively the most powerful console right now? No. It's in last place, because their exclusive line up doesn't compare to the less feature rich PS4 and the far less powerful, but far more unique Switch.
If features were platform sellers and exclusive content wasn't absolutely necessary, GOG, the objectively superior platform, would be the de facto king of the PC space. But it isn't, because name recognition and library are what actually matters.
Valve's glitch wasn't an "accident." They failed to properly quality control an update on their platform. That was a choice on their part. Any consequence and legal liability that stems from that is their responsibility.
Even Valve's minigame collection in The Lab only had mostly Unity games in it, rather than Source 1 or 2 games. So even their own engine has fallen to an extent.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
I'm 100% for competition. Heck, my favored method of getting a game is buying it direct. I'd like to give the developers 100% instead of 85% or 70%. I do, however, want merit based competition, not who wants to toss out the bigger down payment on having something to push customers to use their marketplace.
I simply won't support games that go this route, because I want jack all to do with the eventual 100 launchers if the exclusivity idea pans out. I'll be on to something else by the time that they become available. Same holds true of big title console games that port over for the most part.
Epic could improve their store and remove a lot of the good reasons to avoid it (including things like multiple game purchase issues that still plague them)... but after they opened their mouths that launcher is something that would take an extreme rarity in the gaming world: a sincere apology and follow through. I'd support any of dozens of other stores, but the odds of ever supporting theirs is pretty darn low at this point, unless maybe a Japanese guy or a Czech take over (yes, citing the two how seem to have actually done such a thing). *Sean Murray came close, but didn't quite hit the apology right. He chose silence instead. I'll give them credit for the effort on the game though!*
On the other hand, I can build a PC and replace parts every few years, buy games at huge discounts, install emulators to play most of those console exclusives I wouldn't have access to without owning the hardware, so if that bullshit starts effecting PC gaming, there are and will be plenty of other ways to circumvent having to deal with it. It's annoying, and I don't think it serves the consumer, but I'm being pragmatic here. It won't be the end of the world or my enjoyment of games.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I will be honest that I can't blame exclusives happening as each launcher has rules and so on when it comes to indie teams as that means a lot more work. I don't know enough about larger teams on what that would mean. I just know I am tired of it feeling like if I want to get everything that I might enjoy then I need 15 programs running. That is why I don't like the exclusives. When it was really only Steam and then GoG there was not much but now publishers have their own that even if go through another store launcher then will open it up and so on. Too much clutter for me.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I will endeavor to cover the exact scope of Illuminati involvement in a follow-up article, though.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, ect. all have their own exclusive content that's not available anywhere else. You've also seen Disney and CBS getting into the game, as well.
I'd submit that Game of Thrones and Stranger Things are highly competitive in the open market without exclusivity, but those shows are being leveraged by their companies to drive additional traffic to their respective services.
There are exclusive songs, art, even products that are only sold at specific stores. It's usually not the inability to be effective that creates exclusivity, but rather the mutually beneficial opportunity to capitalize on something's popularity. When you're dealing with a newer company like Epic Games, then it's also a key part of growing that company in order to be more competitive in the general market.
Bottom line, you see successful exclusivity all the time. It's all around you.