Epic is 50% owned by a Chinese company, who is wholly owned by the Chinese state. Steam is 100% owned by Americans. Good job on being greedy Stardock.
I doubt very much it is 'greed'. Not saying there isn't a financial component to the decision, but I've been an SD customer since '93-'94 (multiple products) and watched their growth, their development approach, and their responsiveness to consumers. I suspect this is driven more by peoples' proclivity to bash early release/previews because they think "Hey, I paid $49.95 for this and it doesn't have my pet feature and they won't say my pet feature is coming so it sucks."
Then they go post a horrible review about how "this game sucks and the last three updates have gotten worse, and they are nerfing players and buffing the AI, and the interface is like MegaMaid -- it both sucks and blows...."
By release time the negative chatter is 60/40/20: "it sucks," "it's the greatest thing since the wheel," or "it might suck, should we even give it a chance?". And half the "reviews" will be from people who didn't even play through the ER to release, they just regurgitated other people's "reviews".
EPIC doesn't allow reviews. Steam does. So from development and marketing perspectives it makes sense to utilize distribution mechanisms that let you roll rapid updates for testing and feedback but doesn't expose you to unwarranted review brutality.
Oddly, much like how someone who's been on a forum since 2011 might makes their first and only reply of 10 years by bashing on a company without taking any effort to find out the rationale for a decision.
Just to pick a random, non-specific example.
