Your posts reads like « The sky is falling » in many more words.
I seriously just don't understand your paranoïa at this point. Just having Steam doesn't benefit the consumer and storefronts vying for your money will only mean price wars just like in retail.
Because we all know having walmart, target, best buy and Amazon means higher prices for the consumer, right?
Oh, you get me wrong. I'm actually for MORE storefronts. I'm for less launchers though.
Razer opened their store this year. I already used it MORE than I bought on Steam this year. I especially like their Razer exclusive sales. If you buy a featured game, that is often with a light discount, you get a 10€ discount to be used on a 20€ purchase minimum.
Thanks to that, I bought Moonlighter, which gave me a 10 bucks coupon... That I used to purchase 20€ of indie games.
See, that's how competition works. And I redeemed all of these on Steam, to enjoy their amazing features.
Now all of this was possible because of Steam's policy on steamkeys.
If we get a 10% cut for storefronts though ?
All of these store die. We only get storefronts with launchers, backed by big companies.
And when two of them decided to practice store exclusivity... Well...
In fact, I totally agree with you. More storefronts means lower prices. That's what it meant as Steam is the bigger ecosystem/launcher.
But Epic and even Discord ? They go against that mindset. It'd be like Gamestop buying exclusive rights to selling PS4 games and lowering their videogame cut to the point Amazon and Best Buy cant sell it lower than 3-4% of their MSRP.
