Here's the thing: Steam doesn't need to pay anyone for exclusivity because everyone needs to be on it.
Steam grew so much that
yes, it became pretty much a monopoly in the PC gaming space, if your game is not on Steam it pretty much doesn't exist (unless you're Fortnite, Minecraft or a Blizzard game).
It's not a monopoly, and anyone claiming it is should basically be ignored out of hand at this point.
At worst, Steam has a monopolistic
position that they're not actually acting upon. Which makes sense, because Steam has basically acquired their (theoretically) monopolistic position basically by simply offering a quality product that consumers like, so the consumers flocked there and stayed there. Not by engaging in actually verified anti-competitive behavior like say, Microsoft in the mid-90s.
If Steam was actually
acting like a monopoly, stores like GOG wouldn't exist anymore, and a store like the EGS would have been eliminated before it could have even drawn breath. But that didn't happen, because the store that supposedly has the monopolistic position (Steam) isn't actually doing what monopolies do:
using their power to exclude competitors from the marketplace.
They're pretty simply offering a service that has acquired a critical mass of users through fairly natural popularity. Hell, they're not even doing the thing that a classic monopoly does, which is use their power to raise and manipulate pricing.
All this handwringing over Steam's monopoly comes across as highly dubious since most people complaining about it probably use (and benefit from) at least three services that are monopolistic in a given day (e.g., a certain search engine, video streaming platform and system OS).
Even if you can buy the game in other stores, most of them still require Steam.
I literally just spent an hour of my time writing a post documenting how 76% of my Steam library doesn't actually require Steam, and you have the audacity to quote my post and then claim the opposite?
Prove it then.
That's why so many devs are happy with the EGS, because it puts some pressure on Valve.
Devs are happy with the EGS because they're little heels that want to get a sweet moneyhat. They're not motivated by some altruistic concern about market competition or better pricing and services for consumers.
Developers just want to get more money, ideally by excluding their competitors from the market.
