I honestly think this has been one of the darker times of the Mechwarrior community. Extremely immature and toxic behavior with little to no effort to try to understand where PGI was coming from. Lots of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Youtube Grifters, and a total lack of knowledge about game development on display. This has resulted in a lot of hate towards especially Russ.
The few people I have seen being mature and talking about this in a constructive manner is NuttyRat and a bunch of others on this Stream, I highly recommend watching it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5wvj21TOEo On a more general level, I think it would be good for people to understand the nature of game development today, best explained by this tweet:
In PGI's case, there are mostly only good reasons to take the EGS deal and they would have been very dumb not to take it. As a poster on Sarna's article mentioned, this is what the deal means:
1. More money for development
2. Delay the game away from Gears of war 5 and Borderlands 3
3. Hire more devs to help polish it like a narrative designer, a lighting artist, etc.
4. Pay for the 3 months extra delay
5. French, Russian and German localization at launch
6. A much bigger marketing push
7. A 12% cut on EGS versus 35 % cut on steam
8. More visibility on EGS than Steam (less crowded)
9. The game still ends up on Steam and GOG in 2020
Moreover, I wouldn't say anybody "lied" or "deceived". Using words like "betrayal" and "stabbed in the back" and so on seem very much out of proportion to what was actually going on. We don't even know the details of the timeline and how much PGI was under NDA or hadn't even worked out the contract yet with Epic. The deal wasn't even finalized until June! A couple of guys on Reddit actually wrote something sensible about this:
"The disconnect comes from how the expectations were set. The community treats Russ like he's a character on a TV show where everything he tells you is am immutable fact of the universe. When the universe doesn't match up to expectations it must be because Russ lied. While Russ, when he is being candid, talks in the tentative nature of Business, about how things are today, with the understanding that things might need to change. Then you have the situations where, for whatever reason, Russ cannot be candid, and that is seen as lying by omission rather than put into context.
One of the core roles of a really good community manager and PR person is to properly set expectations about what is a commitment and what is a concept. To underpromise, over deliver, and to avoid being specific in areas where there is potentially uncertainty. Mitch, HBS and Paradox are the example about how to do this well. Wherever a speaker overreach a bit, their statements where immediately qualified as a commitment or an idea along with clear "not to be discussed (at this time)" topics."
"Exactly this. First off, the "they were always planning on going to Epic" is horseshit; the Epic store wasn't even a thing back when MW5 was announced. But then the deal came up, and from a business operations standpoint it made a lot of sense for PGI. Said deal took several months to work out all the kinks, though it sounds like what was initially presented was good enough that the deal was a matter of when, not if. But until you have ink on paper you don't announce the deal. That's how every single business deal works; talking publicly about ongoing negotiations is detrimental at best and a violation of NDAs that would immediately sink the deal and potentially lead to a lawsuit at worst.
Yet the narrative was set by a toxic Youtuber who clearly wanted to be as negative against PGI and Russ as much as possible and mischaracterize what was going on. The problem is that lots of people fell for it and therefore that stands alone as the single dominant narrative now. It also seems like a lot of past pent-up frustration is coming out from parts of the Mechwarrior community and many appear to be reveling in it, while others aren't seeing what's going on. I couldn't imagine the same level of vitriol and harassment would be directed towards HBS, for example.
At the very least PGI could have at least mentioned that there was a possibility they would do an EGS exclusive. At least then people would know what to expect and not get so pissy over this.
They actually did say that. Russ said during an AMA (can't remember which, maybe in April, May or June) that the current plan was to go on Steam and GOG, but they were open to going Epic exclusive if the benefits were good. They've consistently said that they were open to it and that they liked what Epic was doing in terms of lowering the already insanely high 30% cut that Steam charges.