If Epic wins Exclusives + the game is sold for same or More than it would elsewhere, clearly it deserves an F-U.
But in this case the publisher is making more AND they are passing on some savings to the consumer.
The competition is that now Steam needs to up their game so that these devs refuse exclusivity with Epic.
In the end it'll be a win for consumers.
It might be. This all assumes that they don't just use their giant piles of cash and benefits they gain from funneling people to their engines/games to push cutthroat rates that other platforms can't compete with as easily, rip up the market in the process and then use their future position to strangle all of it, similar to the very real concerns with Amazon now.
Consumers only benefit when the market is fair. The market (as far as I'm concerned) stops being fair when it becomes segmented and the competition stops because one player is holding the cards and the other players don't even get a chance to compete.
Either way, this isn't giving me a choice to make between stores to indicate which I want to support (and thus encourage more competition). It's forcing me to make a choice of play it here or not at all. I didn't like it when Steamworks was pushing developers into Steam-only, and I don't like it now.
For some none of this is no issue at all. For me it's make or break. Deep Silver has said "We'd rather take the cash they're throwing at us and limit your options on how to play our game, while using the low fees to cut the prices a bit as a consolation" and my response is: "Nah, I'm good"
I'm looking at a 30+ game waitlist of games I REALLY want to play, and that's not even looking at the 100 or so other games I haven't gotten around to. I can do without this, and not bat an eye.
Edit: Just to clarify. The optimal competition scenario I could have seen from this would have been Deep Silver using the reduced fees to offer the game at a reduced price on the Epic store while leaving it normal price elsewhere. This most certainly would have encouraged customers to go to Epic while still giving them a choice in the matter. This if anything would most certainly be the type of thing that Valve would have to adjust to. But there was another element to this deal which almost certainly involved a big bag of cash in return for exclusivity