You can now easily run the Epic Store on Linux with Lutris, Epic suggests applying for a grant

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: NeverthelessA nice way to put it! The only downside is: voting with wallets means only "yes" votes will be counted. This way one of the most frequent arguments in favor of the Epic Shop (including exclusive deals) is: "I don't care!".

I don't think so. CEOs do have an idea of the market size. Epic can't have precise numbers of how many people are boycotting them but they do have an idea of how much of the market they have penetrated with their exclusives. Remember when they were caught browsing in steam files and uploading the content? They don't sell your friend list to Chinese government but they do get an idea of the size and kind of people with one client or another or both of them and their network.

When people that refuse to install their client adds up they'll notice. And it's good they do. The sooner they realize we won't yield the sooner they'll stop being a cancer and adopt a model that is functional to the PC gaming industry. Valve is private company. I dunno what kind of cash reserves they have but assuming they have decent reserves they can fight an attrition war better than Epic. Only that for as long as this nonsense goes on there will be repercussions on the financing of their side projects like VR, linux, proton and so on. Especially since they are already dealing with the Artifact fiasco. And that is bad for all PC gaming since Epic is not compensating with its own PC focused initiatives and, as far as they let us know, they have no intention to ever compensate. For them PC is just one platform like another, they just started their world conquest quest from here because being open makes it more vulnerable to market manipulation. Their short and long term strategy is purely to pass bigger revenues to publishers by sacrificing gamers and with no strings to ensure that part of these revenues publishers get go to actual developers (actually recent news looks like Epic has an issue with its own developers). But PC gaming has a die hard number of informed trend setters and influencers. And there is and there will always be resistance.

Most gamers don't see it and stop at Sweeney proclaims of being the savior of the industry, but Epic is actually charging part of the costs of their attrition war on to them (when they do not absorb transaction costs and offer nearly 0 features that require some kind of cloud maintenance cost). Given how much money Epic has it's unlikely that Valve won't be forced to cut something itself in the medium long run. Which means that in the next years PC will lose competitivity to consoles and any other new player (Stadia and such). And I don't want it.

This is a commercial war for PC gaming. I simply want to do my little consumer part to make this madness stop as soon as possible. And I know at Epic they'll notice a little more now that Epic store can not be installed on linux.

I think you're doing the right thing of course! I'm just a bit frustrated to see so many people falling for trojan offers from time to time. It hurts themselves, and it hurts all of us, because it sets standards. Valve and all potential other shops simply might be forced to sell userdata too some day, when Epic succeeds to lure away developers with bigger revenues.
People rarely even know what their behavioural data is worth to the data miners, and what it's used for. They think money from personalized advertizing magically falls out of the sky and pays Google, Facebook, bonus systems like Payback in germany (I don't know what they are called in other countries), and the likes, but the only source of money for the whole economic system is the end consumer. So the price for all spying, datamining, advertizing, manipulation, free software (as in free beer) and services is paid by the consumer anyway, just invisibly. On top of that datamining gives them the means to manipulate us even more effective.
Linux gaming on Steam, GOG, Itch... for me is the chance to pay and play great games, with or without DRM, no further strings attached. I would really like to keep it that way! I gladly give my money to developers directly, but I won't pay someone to spy on me if I can prevent it!