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Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
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this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Apple is a different case I'd argue because until that lawsuit there was no legitimate way to install applications without using Apple's storefront—that's a much less defensible position IMO.
FWIW, my understanding is that many economists side on exclusivity contacts being by definition anti-competitive & anti-consumer in spirit if not strictly by law. The whole point of them is to remove the agency of the consumer and attempt to force their hand, after all. The whole Blizzard Activision acquisition by Microsoft was complicated predominantly by concerns of the exclusivity opportunities (mostly around CoD) following acquisition being anti-competitive.
You've got a good point about their first party games, but then no one is really giving epic grief about fortnite being a platform exclusive for them. People get annoyed about it more when they've paid third parties such as Square-Enix to not release on any other platform. It's not just on the PC either, I'm pretty sure Sony got a lot of flak for paid third party exclusives to keep them off Xbox a little while ago.
No, that's what I'm saying.
People were mad that exclusives were going multiplatform at the time. Metal Gear on Xbox sent some PS fans into fits of rage. Final Fantasy going from Nintendo to Sony and then going multiplatform pissed people off on every step of that process.
Inconsistency aside, there is a difference between paying a third party to make an exclusive title and buying the third party. The Xbox deal wasn't an exclusivity deal, it was an acquisition.
Let me put it this way, nobody in their right mind would claim that Netflix buying a show and putting it exclusively on Netflix is anticompetitive. The entire point of the platform is competing on content. If that still sounds implausible, roll it back a medium and think of TV stations. Again, nobody would get mad that a particular show airs specifically on a channel, even if most shows are made by production companies contracted, not owned, by the distribution channel.
Now, when the nerds were raging about exclusives I was on the camp that platform agnostic content is ideal, and I still agree with that sentiment. But it also seems pretty obvious that the notion that contracting out an exclusive from a third party studio is anticompetitive in a way that a first party release is not seems absurd. Why would it make more sense for The Last of Us or CounterStrike (especially CounterStrike, which was originally an indie mod acquired for a full release) to be exclusive than for Alan Wake II to be exclusive? Was it weirder that Ratchet & Clank Up You Arsenal was exclusive than for A Rift Apart to be exclusive just because Sony didn't own Insomniac for the first one but they did for the second?