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.
We’re not talking about what you currently have to do, we’re talking about anti- competitive behaviour and what you should do.
If you set up your own shop to avoid paying a middle man for something you can do yourself fine. If you set up your own shop and then use your exclusive games to grow your shop into something bigger, then that’s anti-competitive tying. Your shop is not competing on its merits as a shop.
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.
There is a fundamental difference between using anti-competitive behaviour to break a monopoly, and using it to entrench a monopoly. That’s like arguing that a bully using violence and someone standing up to a bully using violence is the same thing.
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.
Where do you think the funding for Valve’s system came from? 21 years of taking 30% of virtually every single PC game sale.