Good for Epic! I've thoroughly enjoyed watching Epic trying to stimulate competition in the online game-store retail marketplace by daring to compete with the retail marketing behemoths such as the old fuddy-duddies like Apple or Steamworks, to name just a couple of those whose brains are locked in monopolistic or semi-monopolistic thinking (like what has been Intel's problem for the past several years, etc). Online game sales are the core of the global software gaming business today--exactly where retail store shelves were in the marketing scheme of 20-30 years ago! On one hand, I want to shout about how long ago that was (seems like yesterday, but it was hardly that)--and on the other hand, I'm still amazed by how fast the entire picture has radically changed. There was a time when I could not conceive of any distribution schemes apart from the sale of boxed copies!...;)

Competition injected into any marketplace where there are too few competitors will create a beneficial atmosphere for consumers and is always a good thing, imo. With this proposal, a consumer could buy a new game in the first six months of its availability from Epic for 20% less than it would cost him on Steam if it was available there, and the game publisher/dev could still come out ahead by 10% on each copy sold over what the same number of copies sold through Steamworks would put into his pocket! This is assuming that the dev/publisher would incentivize his retail customers by giving them 20% of his total 30% savings during the initial Epic exclusivity period, of course. But even if the devs/publishers pass none of the savings back to their retail customers, they still come out at least 30% ahead of where bog-standard Steam retail pricing would put them (Assuming Valve still runs with its traditional 30% commissions)!

One-size-fits-all might be a compelling economic scenario (or I should say "compelled" economic strategy) somewhere in some struggling fascist or teetering communist economy, certainly, but it's not something that works or will ever work in a vigorously competitive capitalist economy. Competition is great, and whatever Epic wants to do that stimulates it is A-OK with me.