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Epic Games Store is offering developers 100% of revenue for six months of exclusivity
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Only buying on Steam is anti-competitive
Not really. Steam is not forcing exclusives on their platform. Them providing a better service doesn’t mean the users are anti-competitive.
EGS explicitly pays developers to not release on other platforms. That’s anti-competitive
Exclusive is the medium not the store
A pc game on epic is still a pc game. I haven’t heard of epic preventing devs from releasing on Xbox
EGS is a platform, Steam is a platform. They are both stores and their own ecosystems.
They are paying for forced exclusives to their platform. I’m not going to use a different platform even on my same device because it’s anti-competitive for pc gaming.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
If a game was offered on both platforms do you think people are more likely to get it on Epic than Steam? If not then they have to be exclusive to their store
That’s not my problem. That’s still being anti-competitive. If one platform is significantly better (eg steam) then the competition needs to offer a reason to buy from them. The problem is that EGS has decided that the only way to give users a reason to use their store has been to make sure the game isn’t available anywhere else.
The users are able to make the choice to not support poor business tactics and they have. People do not buy from EGS, due to a plethora of reasons, one of which is likely that they are extremely anti-competitive and buy out games.
They've also been acquiring successful games and forcing a bunch of Epic exposure and "features" on the users.
A store doesn't have the right to my business just because it exists. If I started a PC game store and charged twice as much as Steam or Epic would you purchase from me just to support competition?
A business needs to give me a reason to purchase from them. If the best reason to purchase from Epic is to give them a participation award then no thank you.
it's not. choosing to buy on steam because it's a better experience to you than egs is exactly the result we want from competition. they competed for your favor, steam won, and egs lost. personally, sometimes i buy on gog because i like its features better, especially the offline installer and lack of drm, but even if steam won all rounds that would still be competition, they're just good at it.
anti-competitive measures are the ones that try to abuse an existing market position to take that choice away from you and force you to go one way or another. if you really wanted a grasp on valve, you could argue for example that the steamdeck is anti-competitive on the market of game stores, because it makes using competing game stores inconvenient (even though you absolutely can do it, i have played uplay games on my steamdeck, and could probably easily install egs as well, i just don't have any reason to try). exclusivity is also a very clear-cut anti-competitive measure, because it just cleanly takes choice away from the end user and forces them to go with a specific launcher, or worse, specific hardware in some cases. but just being better than everyone, or as a consumer choosing to go with the best option is not anti-competitive, it's just winning the competition
So only buying coffee from the store I like is anti competitive?
not what that means