Epic has HAD plenty of time to work out making their market more compelling. One of the most frustrating things about it is how many YEARS they've had and how little effort has gone into it during this time.

I'm a VR dev by trade and a gamer by (nearly exclusive) hobby. I'm well deep into Epic and always will be. And it makes me angry. They're intelligent guys and the Unreal engine is fantastic, but the anti-consumer decisions they've made over the last few years have been very frustrating.

The ability to search is a particular sore point. Unless you know the exact name of what you're looking for, you're going to be unsuccessful, and the community have been screaming about this for literal years.

Can users not just point Google at the site, or are the contents not index able in that way?

>I'm going to buy Borderlands 3 (and so are all my friends that grumbled about it being a time exclusive, and they'll buy it from Epic because we all want to play right out the gate together)

All my friends and I (30+ crowd) are like "fuck that, I got other shit to play" for Borderlands 3 but we all grudgingly used Steam back when CS:Source came out. I wonder if it's an age thing. I know my backlog is years long as this point so waiting 6 months to play it isn't making me lose sleep.

That happened to me too. When I had more time, I was also much more willing to just buy it wherever.

Coming along with getting old is having more things to do instead of video games, like side projects, or board games, or hanging out in person. Personally, starting ~3 years ago much of my video game time started getting replaced with tabletop RPG's as a way to spend time with friends, even online ones. I hadn't ever played tabletop RPG's before that point.

So when several of these games came announced as "not on Steam", my reaction was also "it's ok I can wait."

I've experienced somewhat the opposite. From 18-30 I had Saturday night AD&D every weekend, then people had kids, got different jobs, moved around, and now getting everyone around a table together is near impossible. We still spend time in person but it's usually one on one for a quick beer or chat on the patio with whoever happened to crop up. I also just have tons more family engagements; nephews and nieces to take out for birthdays, graduations to celebrate, dinner at my wife's parents one weekend, dinner with mine the next, siblings coming in from out of town. When we do get a free weekend we usually travel or go hike. Growing up has killed my tabletop life, but it's still a good life.

Luckily my computer gaming friends still have time for a match here and there, and games that are part of series we really enjoyed(like Borderlands, or Diablo though that franchise doesn't really grab us the way it used to) can usually bring a few of us together at odd times in the evenings. And double luckily my wife loves Rocket League and we usually squeeze a few matches in before we wind down for the evening.

Yeah agreed. As I've gotten older, my tolerance for putting up with experiences and tactics I don't like has decreased. I dislike Epic attempting to strong-arm me into using their platform while still dealing with ongoing security concerns and adopting anti-consumer behavior, so I won't use them. Just fine to wait and play some of the many other games on my eventual to-play list