Rachael wrote:You ever heard of the term "a deal you can't refuse?"
How fitting, considering where modern understanding of that term comes from.
People are strapped for cash. I honestly can't blame the developers at all for taking Epic's money.
It depends. In my view, a promise is a promise. If you advertise a Steam release, get people to give you money (kickstarter, pre-orders) based on that promise, or even get them excited and emotionally invested in your game using that promise, then take it away for no good reason, people have a right to be upset (especially if you then also mock or attack strawman arguments over why people don't like the EGS, as a particular dev recently did). It's one thing if you're under actual financial pressure where there's a good chance you may not have the funds to finish the game, but many of the most prominent cases haven't been that (Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, Borderlands 3, Rocket League*, etc). They sacrifice the good will of their audience/fans for corporate money, which is the definition of sell-out.
In the case of Metro Exodus, the game was finished. Boxes and other materials were made or in the process of being made before the deal, and the game was in the final stretch of testing and certification (and neither the devs or publisher were financially unstable). It was so late in production that the boxes had the Steam logo and mention of needing Steam to redeem the key (which was covered over by an EGS sticker). This was made worse by the publisher trying to hide what the deal meant for people who got preorders.
In the case of Pheonix Point, the devs have flat-out stated they had the money from kickstarter and various investors to not only finish the game as advertised, but also support it into the future. They also stated that they knew the deal would cause some people to cancel preorders and they were fine with it. So fine with it that even if 100% of preorders were canceled and all kickstarter money refunded, the investors and Epic money would keep them in the green financially (i.e. they treated peoples' kickstarter money as an interest-free loan with which to get investor money).
* Rocket League isn't technically EGS exclusive... yet. Though they've made it clear the Steam release isn't long for this world.
More onto the EGS itself, it's clear Epic either doesn't know how to make a storefront, or is seriously jumping the gun before it's ready. Just look at the kerfuffle with their first store-wide sale. There were developers that were contractually not allowed to have their game on sale but Epic put everything on sale regardless. Their store was not set up to handle some games not going on sale, so the only choice these devs had was to remove the games completely from the store. The store was (and still is) lacking a shopping cart, and somehow Epic didn't anticipate that people would want to buy a bunch of games at once while they were on sale, forcing those people to purchase each game individually... which then kicked in anti-fraud measures that locked people out of their EGS accounts.
They've also made bold statements about the lack of user reviews in their store being a good thing. While, yes, Steam does occasionally have issues with review bombs (which they've actually added counter-measures for), they were also a useful tool for people to get warned about issues a particular game may have or lies a developer/publisher tries to pass off. I'm sure publishers love this, but it's not consumer-friendly in the least.
More personally (an issue which I understand few people will actually share), Epic's attitude toward my OS leaves me literally unable to use their store. Even if I wanted to, I can't use EGS. Whereas Steam, GoG, itch.io, Battle.net, Origin, UPlay, and even Bethesda.Net work either natively or with tools like Wine. EGS doesn't even work under Wine. As much as I abhor Steam DRM, I do have to give huge props to Valve for the money and work they're putting into Wine/Proton, not only offering Linux games for Linux users to buy (something GoG and itch.io do too), but also putting in the effort to get Windows games to work seamlessly on Linux, to the point where running the Linux Steam client will show certain Windows-only games like Cuphead or Doom 2016 or Dark Souls 3 (and a bunch more) as being available, and you can just plain buy it, click Play, and it launches (on top of that, games played this way are counted as being played on Linux, so they'll know you're not using Windows which Wine can otherwise make it seem like). If one of the >150 currently whitelisted games doesn't work, Valve also promises support.
And this isn't even touching on other problems that have come up for EGS, like privacy issues (they've been caught snooping on Steam's files, and we only have Epic's word that it's harmless), or Epic's connection with Tencent which is connected to the Chinese government.
The videogame industry has always been a tough business with companies starting up and going under all the time. They wouldn't all go belly up if they honored their promises of a steam release, but some of them probably would... And this chance is lessened by the EGS deal. So it boils down to more cash = better financial security. How surprising! 
I don't blame them at all, after all these are often small teams where even one mediocre title can mean hard times for the developers and their families.