domi , 6 hours ago

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.

A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.

Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.

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.

Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.

Their launcher is perfectly fine.

Fine? Yes. It does the bare minimum of being able to buy a game and start it. Does it do everything I expect a modern game launcher to do after existing for almost 6 years? Nope.

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.

They are “not losing much money” while providing a fraction of the services Steam does. They say 30% is too much, we can do it in 12% and yet they severely lack in social features, have no modding support, no VR support, no in-home streaming, no Remote Play Together, no Big Picture, no Family Sharing, a barely functioning Steamworks alternative, no Steam Deck support, no Linux support and absolutely zero open source contributions. That’s just the obvious stuff I can think of right now, every single menu you open in Steam you find a barebones menu in the EGS.

They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.