Yeaaaah, no.
First off, the VAVLe breach was 34,000 people and due to the nature of it, nobody was ever actually hacked, nor could it have been 'more' than 34k, and it was because a CDN fucked up caching for VAVLe while trying to stop a DDoS. It wasn't even VALVe's fault, and what was exposed was game lists (who cares), emails (who cares, if you've ever sent an email your email address is probably known anyway), profile info (who cares, none of that is private and most of it was public anyway), and very rarely addresses (yeah, that's bad).
Fortnite was 5 million accounts, and exposed everything about the account, full details, effectively gave the attacker full control of the account- CCs, addresses, it let them buy things and send them to other accounts, change and view emails, see security questions, EVERYTHING. And Epic has constantly been having security problems, including their android installer being so poorly made you could get people to install whatever the hacker wishes with the official installer. About the only security sin Epic hasn't committed has been keeping plaintext passwords.... that we know of.
This is all really fuckin' bad, but their attitude is what makes it so I'll never buy their shit again. Anti-competitive practices, their smug anti-consumer attitude, and the way they are openly boastful about abusing other platforms to advertise their own despite VALVe being a class act about the whole thing, the fact that their response to one of the largest breaches of the year was complete radio silence, and finally and most damningly, instructing customer support to deny that anyone was being hacked at all during the month they knew about it and were thinking about fixing it. (It was a XSS attack, it takes literally 20 minutes to fix for something that's giving out free access tokens)
Trying to pretend I don't like Epic out of basic fucking racism is beneath you, contrabardus, and frankly you can go fuck yourself for saying it was.
Regarding the whole "racism" nonsense...
I'm pretty sure you know better than that. You've shown that you are aware enough of the topic to be aware of the accusations flying around regarding Epic and Tencent and the context of them.
My comment was referencing global politics and the modern "red scare". It's about the numerous accusations of espionage regarding Tencent being an actor and data gathering for the Chinese government, and accusations that Epic is complicit and enabling it. Accusations that thus far have no real evidence and seem to be little more than attempts to prey on people's political biases, and the new chilled pre-post-war slap fight.
That has nothing to do with anyone's ethnicity. Accusing the Russians of espionage by way of election tampering doesn't make someone racist against Russians, and that's true regardless of how much truth there is to the allegations. This is no different.
It's not "*Gasp* CHINESE PEOPLE!"
It's "*Gasp* COMMUNISTS!"
You can go fuck yourself for falsely trying to tie it to racism.
Moving on to everything else...
Valve got lucky that it wasn't worse than it was, that's all. The point is they are not immune to the same kinds of issues that every other online service might experience for various reasons.
There have been several large data breaches at Valve over the past several years, often involving financial information, usually by way of hacking. Valve itself said back in 2015 that around 77,000 accounts are hacked every month, and at the time said that number was growing. That means probably at least around a million accounts are hacked per year. That can be defined as "secure" exactly why?
It took ten years for them to patch a known bug in the client that allowed remote access to user's PCs.
You are not "safer" on Steam than you are on any other service.
Also, "class act"? You're seriously remembering that with rose colored glasses.
Funnily, people said the same things about Steam's "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer" practices when Fallout NV launched, followed by numerous other games that required Steam to run on PC. Look how that turned out.
I've seen and heard all this before, directed at Valve. This is the same shit, on a different day. I see no reason that the end result will not be the same.
My issue isn't the idea that Epic sucks, because they absolutely do. My problem is the double standard falsehood that Steam doesn't and is somehow better or safer. They absolutely are not.
There is no "good guy" in this scenario, it is two huge lawful evil entities competing that don't give a fuck about anything but their own bottom lines. The only real difference is that one is more established than the other and we've grown accustomed to their bullshit and have had time to get over it.
The only reason I'm even slightly for the situation at all is because of the effective monopoly Steam has, and the problems it is creating. Despite what some might argue, GoG, Uplay, and Origin aren't enough to say that isn't true. Just because they don't have a literal monopoly, does not mean that they do not basically have complete control of the market just due to how much of it they control.
Epic is a shitty company too, but the two of them being in direct and serious competition may actually force them both to be slightly less shitty as they vie for the attention of consumers and be better for the overall industry.
I don't want Epic to "win", because that would mean they would take over Steam's effective monopoly and they'd be just as bad if not worse once they had that position. What I want is a stalemate, which would be better for the market overall and could lead to others having a better chance to grow and compete as well.
I still maintain that if Steam is left in the position it has unchallenged, we're heading for another games collapse just like the one that happened in '83, for the exact same reasons, because Valve apparently has no concept of hindsight.
Would I prefer to see someone besides Epic do it?
Sure, but Epic is pretty much the only one bothering with even attempting it at all and I think we need that second big storefront to be there and wrest the near total control of the digital distribution market Valve has away from them for the sake of a healthy market long term more than I dislike Epic as a company. Epic is pretty much the only one to ever even really threaten to be a contender, Origin and Uplay never even came close.
If simply being a good service was enough, GoG would already be in that position. We've seen how that has worked out.
Epic isn't even really the worst option. Better them than EA, Activision/Blizzard, or god forbid, the fucking Yakuza money laundering scheme, otherwise known as "Konami".
At any rate, at the end of the day, if someone is really that worried about their personal information and security, they need to just stop buying things online period.