I mean, Metro Exodus is $10 cheaper on Epic than it was on Steam and people are still mad about it. I'm willing to bet people would buy on Steam just because all their other games are on Steam.

I would definitely pay $10 more to have it under the same launcher I've used for a decade. In fact, there's a couple games out recently I've skipped since they decided to release as Epic Store exclusives.

I don't like monopolies, but I like even less having a dozen game launchers/store/accounts.

And in such, you've proven why Epic is not evil for doing exclusives: There's simply no other way to launch a competitor.

In that respect, Epic is just as evil as Steam, since they don't offer Federation nor the same as support of users of their service as a hosting platform for interaction.

In respect to which platforms are objectively less evil, comparing features and actual interaction with community and developers...

The ONLY way I see Epic as being better is paying developers a larger cut (and as a result some titles selling for slightly less).

Steam is doing more to support /my/ platform (a competitor to Windows), and has done more to further competition in other aspects.

I don't want Discord to be the federation method either, and XMPP ended up failing due to several mistakes and not requiring full Federation and transparent (un-modified, future / client side extension enabling) message passing between end users of different platforms.