The thing about game launchers like the Epic Game Store is that they tend to be ungainly, clunky built-by-lowest-bidder beasts that aren’t pleasant to interact with. Somehow they’re never high quality, polished products despite being profit centers. That’s where much of that feeling of loathing comes from.

Steam certainly isn’t faultless here but it’s less clunky and and adds value with features like shoring up of Windows’ abysmal controller support, which makes a big difference. If competitors want people to want to install their stores, they need to be treating the project with respect and hiring on a team of full time well compensated high quality engineers to build it. Be a VS Code, not an MS Teams.