I tripped over this video on YouTube, and couldn't help but think of the recent Epic/Valve drama. The video, by Dan Olson a.k.a. Folding Ideas, was all about aspiring YouTube competitor VidMe, but made some pretty salient points about how a young, growing platform needs small content creators in order to add content and value to their platform, but that the interests of those small content creators diverge from the interests of the platform owners as the platform's popularity grows.
I couldn't help but think of Epic Games' pitch to indie developers, with revolves entirely around giving them a bigger cut of revenue, but proposes nothing by way of structural codification of those developers' actual needs vis-à-vis better long-term discoverability and promotion of their games. Epic Games are doing for video games exactly what VidMe was attempting in the online video hosting space: it's effectively providing a clone of Steam with no additional functional or structural improvements beyond, effectively, a tip jar.
The fact that Epic are already struggling with customer service, refunds, and other basic functions that any online competitor to a well-established digital storefront is expected to have in place at launch is...a bad sign, frankly. To paraphrase Olson's video, the most charitable reading is that Epic are unprepared, which is already not a good look.
Less charitably, it makes Epic look like grifters, deliberately exploiting vulnerable indie developers to grow their own market presence, all the while knowing full well that the promises of better discoverability and long-term partnership are hollow, since Epic's storefront isn't going to be any more beholden to any single indie developer than Valve's is, or Nintendo's.