Unfortunately this is not an option. Valve's Steam agreements forbid publishers from charging less money on competing platforms.
https://www.masonllp.com/case/valve-mass-arbitration/#:~:tex...
(Others have pointed out that this fact is contested, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625225)
I can see it being reasonable to ban selling steam keys for less than they are sold at steam. But selling a steam-less license for less than what it costs at steam seems reasonable.
The rumor, for many years, was that you could sell a game separately and if it didn't use steam keys and steam services Valve did not care. If you wanted to sell steam copies, there seemed to be two conditions. 1. Keys sold off of steam must make up less than some percentage of on-steam sales. 2. If you have a sale on another storefront, there must be a matching sale on Steam in some time window.
It is entirely possible that valves notoriously bad communication abilities resulted in a company believing a total ban on discounts was policy, but the fact that other publishers seemingly are not and were not held to that standard for many years is certainly odd.
Sure, and that goes into ways it should be able to compete well with other stores, not just be "the default".
> a uniform way
Also known as "a complete monopoly", and this is exactly the mountain that any competitor has to completely break. Epic's use of both paid exclusives and free games is to build you enough of a library that you (and your friends) likely have and want to play at least some Epic Games, and hence, already have both Epic and Steam installed.
Only once both stores are somewhat similarly available to you, can Epic really compete on the price and features aspects.
EDIT: The other thing that's important to realize about monopolies is that nothing remains the same forever. You might like Steam today, and feel we should all just let Steam be a monopoly because they're "good", but what happens when Gabe retires and a private equity firm comes in?
The only difference between Steam and Ticketmaster is that Steam hasn't tried to maximize value extraction yet.
The epic store program is trash though, it is extremely slow and clunky and power hungry and lack most of the features I have in steam. They do have multiplayer integration which is nice, I have played games with friends there that were free, but the store being such a bad program is the main reason I still buy games on steam.
Steam isn't some super well made program, if epic store was a better program I would prefer buying games there for that reason. But as is epic store is way worse in almost every way, it takes seconds just to view a page, the epic store is much nicer to browse as a web page than in their dedicated program but I can't play the games from their web page.
If they fixed that then I don't think people would hate buying games on epic store, but until then I am pretty sure the main reason people still prefer steam is that epic store is garbage. Not sure why they don't just fix the app instead of spending so much money on exclusives or free games.