The social stuff may be bloat to you, but it helps me to see which friends are online, and let’s me join their games or invite them to mine.
There’s nothing that epic adds that I care about and I refuse to buy their exclusives, because that encourages them even more to keep doing that.
Steam may not be perfect, but it’s pretty damn good. I have enough with GOG and Steam, and don’t want to add multiple storefronts to the list of launchers on my PC.
I don’t have an issue with the soft limit on the number of keys, if the limitations aren’t too strict. The way it’s described makes it sound like it’s just to prevent abuse.
I didn’t even have a problem with the price parity, since that’s limited to the sale of said Steam keys on other store platforms, which makes sense. The developer can still hand out keys for free, just not sell them cheaper anywhere else. I would however find it problematic if they also required price parity for sales of non Steam key copies on other stores.
If they offer it on steam and then sell Steam keys on their own website, that should get them the most from each sale…
Understandable, but I was sold on it after the free trial. I actually got the results I was looking for most of the time, and I love that you can block/demote/promote certain sites, as well as the search lenses as they call them.
The incognito search url is also practical, searching with Kagi from your incognito browser windows.
No ads, no personalized search bubble, … Worth the money to me. Apparently much of that can also be achieved with SearXNG, according to what people say,but you tried that already.