How is obscene amounts of money forcing anything?

This sounds good for developers all around, and a minor inconvenience for gamers who are free to buy from as many stores as they like on PC. Yet could benefit gamers long term as it motivates Steam to be more competitive.

Anti competitive would be buying up competing battle royale franchises to reduce consumer choice.

Intel vs AMD in the past is a typical example on how money + exclusive deal could almost kill off a competitor.

Then Intel would enjoy a monopoly and instead of being stuck at Skylake for 4 years, we may have been stuck at Core 2 for 10 years.

Or maybe ARM, MIPS, Power or Itanium (!) would have had better opportunities to catch up with x86 and would be the dominant CPU.

Who knows, but AMD dying would have not benefited anyone who was stuck on x86.

Except Intel was the behemoth in the case. Here Steam is the one with marketshare, mindshare, and no serious competition before Epic. These exclusives are also usually time limited. This isn't Facebook buying whole studios and locking up content indefinitely.

> How is obscene amounts of money forcing anything?

Indie game studios have a very hard time surviving.

Giving them instantaneous access to a huge pile of money that allows them to declare success even before releasing a project is something most people cannot reject.

> Anti competitive would be buying up competing battle royale franchises to reduce consumer choice.

That is what they are doing but with game stores. They are effectively buying everything to dry the rest of the stores, reducing other stores choice of customers.

> This sounds good for developers all around

Not really. Devs get money, but they lose the product. Indie devs are not independent anymore. Etc.

If Epic had success building the monopoly, everyone would have suffered, not just devs.

What monopoly? There is a monopoly today; it's called Steam. It has an immense userbase and plenty of user loyalty; it's not going anywhere. If Epic succeeds, there will be two major stores rather than one.

Steam isn't a monopoly though. They don't force exclusivity on their games and many Steam games can be purchased elsewhere (like on GOG).

>Steam isn't a monopoly though

Are you a pc gamer? Because if you are, I don't understand how you can't see Steam as a massive monopoly.

Perhaps you don't because they have done almost all GOOD with their monopoly power. Offline mode, library sharing, massive sales, etc.. but they are quite a monopoly.

If 99% of my library is on Steam, why should I bother buying somewhere else? It's just an inconvenience to me. Ok I can buy off GOG and have no DRM.... how does that really help me? I can already play it on steam with no problems, my friends can play the shared game on steam, I don't have to worry about multiple platforms etc..

Anyway- steam is a massive monopoly and we are lucky they use their powers for good!

The statement is from the perspective of the studios, not customers (studios want to sell in every store they can, customers only buy the game once).

Network effects make Steam a practical monopoly. And it's probably no coincidence it has lower rates for AAA studios since Epic has gained a foothold in the market.

Yeah, but that is a monopoly for the publishers dealing with Steam, not for gamers which don't care as long as it is not broken.

Like Walmart or Amazon, the problem is for devs, not customers.

Epic does not want to be a major store. They want to be the only store.

That is why they have been forcing exclusivity. That is the point: they are anticompetitive.

Steam has plenty of money and users. It also had little serious competition before Epic. While I'm a fan of well regulated markets, I don't think punishing Epic would benefit anyone except Steam shareholders.

Except gamers do not care about Steam being a monopoly (they are just a distributor and does not set prices), but would really be hurt if Epic and exclusivity of titles starts to take hold.