There’s a difference between being feature-rich and popular and being a monopoly.

Call me when Steam is buying competing stores to shut them down.

Steam does force the sellers on their platform to not give better discounts elsewhere. So basically if you see a game that’s 20% off on steam and it is ATL, you won’t find it 30% off anywhere else.

Not necessarily a monopoly but definitely not allowing competitive pricing.

Now that I think about it, it’s probably why Epic has to go with the “timed exclusive” approach instead of just giving you a bigger discount.

Not actually true. They only require price parity for steam keys. Basically don’t sell steam copies anywhere cheaper than on steam. Any other copy you can sell for whatever price.

I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.

But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.

Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.

Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?

Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?

That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.

I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.

But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.