I haven’t played any of them but Balatro is my vote for game of the year. I’m tired of the awards featuring recycled game design and never ending franchises. I think I’d also be ok with Astro Bot wining.

Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the store front.

This doesn’t seem to match my own experience but I would be curious to see the steam vs epic sales numbers for gearbox. I use steam because it has good features. If epic supported user reviews, a flexible refund policy, a workshop for user mods, voice chat, cloud saves between devices, achievements, profile customization, the ability to stream games to a different device, etc. I might be more inclined to try it. I waited for borderlands 3 and wonderlands to come to steam and be on sale before I purchased there was zero incentive for me to create an epic games store account unless I really wanted the game right away. Epic exclusives were a good business idea (it worked for Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo for years) but they needed to develop a good store front along with them because it just isn’t sustainable.