As much as Steam is free to host what it likes, Visa and the others are free not to work with Steam. You could argue the options available to Steam would be significantly limited by that, but the same argument is being used against Steam now in the Wolfire lawsuit. The argument is that Steam violates antitrust law via illegal tying and other means, making it hard for a user who doesn’t agree with their content policies to switch to a different platform, like Epic, which has always prohibited porn games.

Well, some people do want that.

There should be a separate platform for that, similar to how you wouldn’t go on YouTube expecting to see videos from PornHub.

No, it’s not a way to keep anything in check. It’s a way to not pay license fees to Microsoft.

It’s easy to be in a progressive country like Canada and praise the Soviet Union or Russia. I think deep down they know that they’d have a miserable life in Russia or China, so at best they make up reasons for why they can’t move, even though the power of the passports and wages in the countries most of them are from allows them to easily do that, which can’t be said about Russian or Chinese citizens trying to get a visa to even travel to one of the Western countries.

Just realized that I was a little gaslit there, as Epic has already had bundles since 2019, with one of the most recent being the STALKER bundle that costs less than the individual games combined. Just like a game edition, a bundle can even be wishlisted on Epic, a feature lacking on Steam.

The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon. Bundles are also on the roadmap. At the end of the day though, what’s the main benefit of a bundle? It’s the discount, right? I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now). For some countries, Epic also offers significantly better base prices compared to Steam. It still supports the Turkish and Argentinian currencies and presumably has specific price guidelines for those as well, compared to Steam having removed those options. I also remember Epic talking about supporting more regional currencies compared to Steam. From looking at the documentation now, it’s 37 on Steam and 43 on Epic.

Regarding the app, I disagree. It was very convenient to have everything in one place (which Steam fans should understand, given their reluctance to use a different launcher) and I used the chat feature all the time, but after Valve separated them, I just got tired of switching and ended up not installing the chat app after resetting my phone OS. Sometimes I need to message a friend, but I feel like the effort of installing it and logging in is not worth it for those occasions.

People love to bash Epic and list all the (often redundant) things Steam is ahead in, but nobody mentions the ways in which Epic is ahead. Something as simple as being able to chat with your friends is no longer a feature of the mobile Steam client, but if Epic sticks to the roadmap, their app will allow that. It also makes me think of how despite so many years of existence, Steam still doesn’t allow to add game editions to your wishlist, while Epic has allowed that from the start. It was also the first to introduce a custom value field for downloads throttling, before Steam followed suit.