It’s definitely possible, but we also have to consider that total sales doesn’t have a strict correlation with profit. It may be true that there will be a lot of sales upon a Steam launch, but then at that point the game would have already been out for a while, and (presumably) the game would be selling for less than the initial cost. So even if total sale ends up being the same, accepting exclusivity may still lower profits

That’s also assuming that total sales will end up being same. I don’t really have any hard numbers to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that there’s a sizable number of day one sales that can be purely attributed to hype. You know the type - a person who buys a game because they saw marketing materials but then never actually plays it. A delayed Steam release would be missing out on those hype sales.

Ultimately, I don’t necessarily think that exclusivity will always hurt the developers in the long run. I don’t even know if it hurts developers most of the time. But it does make me curious about what the exact numbers are - the amount of exclusivity money, the sales numbers over time, the total profit, that kind of thing