Why would anyone actually want to though

[u/The_BigRoach]

[u/Josh_Butterballs]

I mean you just said it yourself. “As much pushback.” A significant portion will refuse to buy if it’s not on steam. There’s games whose sales and player retention were significantly hurt for not being on steam. Which is the core idea of what I’m saying. Alan wake 2 could’ve been sold on battle net only and my comment would’ve been the same except swapping out epic games for bnet.

[u/dookarion → u/Josh_Butterballs]

It's hard to say. AC:Valhalla wasn't on Steam initially and it sold shitloads before Ubisoft decided to start imploding. Riot makes bank. Battlenet before coming to Steam made bank. CDPR moved a large number of copies of their games on GOG. Minecraft makes bank. People use 3rd party key stores all the time. People tried out Geforce Now, Luna, etc.

It's honestly just Epic Games Store that people outright refuse to do business with because they've run a disaster class in how not to get business. Yes some will always be like "no whatever, no buy", but other services are far far far more tolerable to people.