it’s not great for consumers.

Not in the short term, but having an alternative to Steam (or anything with a lot of market share) is great for the long run. Moreover, at least everyone knows that the majority of the contracts would expire in 6 to 12 months. For all intents and purposes, Steam exclusives are a lot worse because there are many times more of them, and you can’t mark a date on your calendar when you can buy them if you can’t or don’t want to buy from Steam.

Keep in mind that, as an example, just recently Steam just decided to no longer support the local currencies of Argentina and Turkey, resulting in no regional prices for the regions on Steam. If Epic didn’t exist and didn’t support regional prices for those regions, all those users would have for third-party titles is GOG, which has a much smaller catalog and seems to support fewer regions. Microsoft Store is also an alternative now, but I’d argue its rise was spearheaded by Game Pass, which relies on the “paid deal” model pioneered in the PC space by Epic.

No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite.

I think you’re confusing the launcher with the store. The origin of the store itself can be traced back to Sweeney arguing about Valve’s “junk fee” of 30%.

they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.

How is targeting niche operating systems helping the anti-cheat sell?

Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything

Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision

This reads as mutually exclusive to me. How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision? Moreover, it’s very common for a publishing agreement to also be legally binding, so everyone in this and other industries is used to that (or guilty of it if you view it as negative).

that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.

Not if it’s done by an underdog. Much of the US antitrust law for example revolves around monopolizing. Challenging what is argued to be a monopoly in a currently ongoing court case ripe with evidence isn’t monopolizing.

Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1?

The reason the Epic store was created is Valve’s unwillingness to lower their store fee that was way above the operating cost (7% still being profitable in Epic’s internal calculations made public by a lawsuit).

Epic has a lot more power in the anti-cheat and game engine spaces, but still keeps their software open, whether it’s by keeping the source code available or making the software compatible with Linux.

An exclusivity deal is signed by both parties, so it’s just as much of a choice developers make. By the way, like Valve, Epic seems to favor Wine over native ports, given their donation to Lutris. Unlike Valve though, Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.

Steam is full of de-facto exclusives that cannot be purchased and played elsewhere, meaning that you have to accept the Steam price, policies, practices, and their launcher in order to play those. Borderlands 2 was de-facto exclusive to Steam from 2012 to 2020, when Epic effectively rescued it from the exclusivity by paying 2K to give it away and add to the Epic store. If anything, Epic rewarding developers for doing what they’ve been doing on Steam is better than them not getting paid.

Allegedly? There is plenty of evidence of that in the Wolfire lawsuit. See for yourself from page 160 here.

That was a side effect of them upgrading the game from DX9 to DX11 and from 32-bit to 64-bit. Also, are you consistent and dislike Valve as a company for doing the same with CS2 for Mac?