> a recent financial report suggested that Epic paid over $10 million to get Control as an Epic Game Store exclusive on PC, and it's possible the company has done the same to snag some of the more important releases of the year.
A little hard to turn down 10 million.
The colloquial definition of an "offer you can't refuse" is one that would be a bad deal for you, but that you have to accept anyway because otherwise the counterparty would do something even worse to you.
The Epic Store is free (as in beer) to create an account on, and there's no hardware lock-in -- Steam, the Epic Store, and other platforms like GOG Galaxy/itch.io/whatever Ubisoft has can all be run on the same computer at the same time. The situation is completely different from Apple's app store.
What if the game would have made $20m if it was non-exclusive?
Exclusivity deals mean both parties - or either party - is making a huge risk or there's information-asymmetry involved.
Epic is at least bringing the joy of console exclusives to the desktop. Innovative!
It definitely is - one store, Epic, offers deals publishers can't refuse to make a game exclusive to their storefront which limits a consumer's ability to use a platform of their choice to purchase a game. The other, steam, puts no limits on where you can distribute your game (unless you use assets from Valve's own games, but I digress) and has done no exclusivity deals that would force a game to only use their store. Publishers are free to use steam if they want to have 30% taken, but otherwise they can completely forego steam in their distribution.