Personally, as a customer, not a developer, this is disappointing to me, as there’s still no reason for me to shop on Epic when they don’t support my operating system, so this is likely just going to entice more developers to make me wait 6 months to play their games. Nonetheless, it’s gaming news.
There are no games required to be exclusive on Steam, unless you count Valve’s own games and put an asterisk next to Firewatch.
Wait what’s up with Firewatch? I couldn’t find anything obvious with a search
Valve bought the developer of Firewatch, and they ended up working on Half-Life: Alyx. Firewatch is still available on all storefronts it was available on before the acquisition, and other Valve games are not.
No, because they don’t need to be explicit like that since competition is far behind. Steam gets to enjoy the pleasures of complete market dominance which makes them appear more friendly than they actually are. If Epic gets close and be starts really eating Steams marketshare, you can bet your ass they’ll start pulling strings like exclusives.
You can’t blame everyone else being shit on Valve.
Steam started losing business to Epic and revised the terms of their revenue split. Competition is far behind in more ways than one: this deal is good for people selling games, but they’re not offering me reasons to buy from them. Going all the way back to traditional retail, if there were exclusives at Best Buy, Gamestop, and EB Games, I’d buy the game from just about anywhere else, because I hate the practice. A carrot works better than a stick, IMO. They’ve got Epic Online Services providing much-needed third party cross play services, which is great. They could start making generic, open standards for other things that Valve has incentivized for tying games to their platform and that would work better than making me wait 6 months to play a game on Steam, where I’ve got a plethora of features that I use and enjoy.