I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
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 have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.