During the first year of Epic exclusivity deals there was some ambiguity about whether releasing on Steam a year late would harm sales/revenues of the delayed game. Now, after about half a year of exclusive games releasing on Steam, the Steam community has proved that there is absolutely no downside to releasing the game late on Steam. People will flock to buy the games they were always going to buy (like Hades or the upcoming Satisfactory). Games that were never going to sell well (like that sci fi roguelike FPS, forgot the name, or Ashen) will not. In either case, going exclusive with EGS is proving to be the objectively correct move. Even people on this forum buy former Epic exclusives the moment they appear on Steam and then some gloat about how they only paid half price for it... as if Tim Sweeney hasn't already given the publisher half a million times more money than that one half of one full retail copy price that you didn't pay.
Any publisher or developer that is offered the Epic exclusivity deal should take it without a shadow of a doubt. The Steam community has proved this for the market.
Epic has also learned that customers can be bought for very cheap. All it takes for gamers to forget that Epic is paying publishers to keep games away from Steam or to even ignore the undercooked, featureless service that Epic provides is one single ten dollar coupon. That's all. This is how they are continuing to grow their store. Remember that time Intel got caught essentially paying off hardware OEMs to not use AMD chips? Gamers were like "OMG! how anti consumer of them!". But when it comes to Epic paying off publishers not to sell their stuff on Steam, it's more like "Pardon me sir, could you tell me what next week's free game is?"
In case there's still any doubt, Epic will never stop moneyhatting exclusives. People are under this illusion that "Oh eventually they'll have to stop and things will go back to normal" but why would they? This is proving to be an extremely successful strategy for them and the more customers they draw, the more it amortizes the cost of exclusivity. They will continue to pick and choose the biggest and best games and do these deals forever. Speaking of Sega, can you imagine just how many new customers EGS will get if they pay to have the next Football Manager exclusively on their store? The only reason Sega might not do that is because a year later they will have another entry so they won't get any money from Steam for it, but for Epic it would be worth it to get hundreds of thousands of FM fans. Sega wouldn't lose a thing. In fact, if it scales up enough, you might even start to see publishers voluntarily go exclusive with Epic just for the higher cut.
Paid store exclusivity is the future that PC gamers have chosen for themselves.
