I happen to know some first-time indie devs that were given this deal. The deal is incredibly generous. Basically, epic offered them a bag of money in exchange

I happen to know some first-time indie devs that were given this deal. The deal is incredibly generous. Basically, epic offered them a bag of money in exchange for a certain period of partial exclusivity (basically "don't be on Steam"). That's it. This bag of money allowed the developers to: - Grow the dev team enough to accelerate time to launch--QA extra engineers, heck, the devs even used the money to pay for porting the game to other devices! - Guarantee that they could continue to fund development of the game after launch. Bugfixes, DLC, etc. - Have enough left over to "try again" and launch a sophomore game regardless of the performance of this one. You'd think that fans of indie games would love this. Who could possibly be opposed to having an indie dev get funds that would enable them to graduate to managing a small indie game studio instead of a ramen diet & 20 hour work days in the living room. And yet they got enormous amounts of hate from so-called indie game fans and members of the gaming community. And yes, the devs were aware that the hate was coming from a disproportionately small number of people and that most people don't actually care at all. But still, the psychological toll of having to deal with the harassment was enough to make them strongly consider not taking the money--even though it was the right thing to do both from a financial pov and from a development pov (because it would guarantee they could finish and support the game). The crazy thing is that even if you hate epic you should love these deals: cheer for your favorite dev, then wait a year and buy the game on Steam, doubly sticking it to the man.