From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper
Epic cannot do that because
In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”
(source)
However, Epic regularly offers coupons out of pocket. Right now you can get 33% off any game above $14.99 or the regional equivalent, as many times as you want, even if the game is already discounted by the publisher. You also get 10% as cashback.
