No, you're not listening to me.

Epic. Took the lootboxes. Out of Fortnite.

Altogether. No loot boxes. None. They're gone.

So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.

But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?

That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.

Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.

That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.