But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.
Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash,
Their launcher is perfectly fine.
their exclusive deals were a complete money sink,
Not really. They weren’t as effective as they wanted them to be but they did ultimately gain a significant chunk of market share.
EGS is still not profitable,
No, they needed to gain more market share to break even.
they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.
But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.