These PC stores / launchers are platforms. They have different things, but like consoles, their main business revolves around a store where they sell games and DLC's/IAPs.
In cases like EA, Epìc or Ubisoft they don't aim to compete against Steam (even less against consoles), in their case their main focus is to sell their own games skipping the 20/30% revenue cut sent to Steam or others.
Regarding PC stores vs consoles, PC does not compete against consoles because their demographics, gaming habits, purchasing habits, genre preferences, place of the house where they are played and several other things are very different. The userbase overlap between both represents a percent pretty small.
How can you say this, while ignoring that some consoles (like Xbox) share 100% of their library with Steam, and others like PS5 share like 90% of the same library? When PC share in markets like Japan have grown to almost match console, whose share of that market has stagnated over the same period of time? When many 3P games that didn't see releases on PC until years later, now prioritize Day 1 for platforms like Steam?
And like
@Landiri was saying, these storefronts are platforms and practice a lot of the same competition as console hardware. Steam is littered to the brim with exclusive games; like
@DarkLordOtaku said, Steam had 'first mover's advantage' and that allowed them to build up so much market share naturally over the years that they basically get defacto exclusives. It's actually similar to what the PS2 was able to do, though that platform was less about first mover's advantage (Dreamcast beat them to the punch) than it was a combination of that (vs. Gamecube & Xbox) and shoring up a strong library of exclusives in a year's time or so, plus the benefit of DVD playback.
Honestly the parallels between Steam and PS2 are quite strong and I'd say the time it took for other launchers like EGS and GOG to come into their own fits about well with the time it took for Gamecube & Xbox to come to market when considering the console market was quite mature by early '00s while the digital storefront market was in its infancy for the '00s and some of the 2010s'.
Anyone who says they want "real competition" should know that any new competitor in a space against an incumbent like Steam, has to leverage
SOME form of content exclusivity to build up real momentum. Simply competing on features does nothing, otherwise TV & film streaming services would be doing the same thing. But Steam fanboys continuously ignore this because they know it's the truth, and they simply don't want to see Steam be legitimately threatened by another storefront on PC. They don't want competition.
According to Endymion (YouTuber) there is currently a civil war inside Sony between the Japanese and American side. Basically Japan wants to go back to the traditional non woke way and America wants to double down on the woke insanity. However America has had a lot of under performing games lately so that is giving Japan a lot of leverage.
Apparently, this deal is away for Sony Japan to go back to the traditional way capitalizing on from software. I know it’s all a rumor from a YouTuber, but I think he’s been around long enough and I feel like just looking from the outside and this kind of adds up.
1: How would HE know this?
2: It sounds like a parody of SEGA of Japan vs SEGA of America during the '90s
3: Companies aren't spending billions and making long-term changes to their businesses with long-term effects over a stupid (mostly hyper-Americanized) culture war.
If Sony of Japan assumes control of the gaming side again, it'll simply be due to being more cost-effective and in line with whatever tastes they favor for the market. These companies don't care about woke vs. non-woke nearly as much as some people think. I.e., almost all of these companies have both liberal and conservative investors, take investments from both, and have done so for decades.
It's always about the money, and that means they'll pander to anyone when the money's right, woke or anti-woke. They laugh at this culture war stuff BTS, because they know it's stupid.
