One was a jury trial and the other wasn’t. Google had plenty of records of their internal communications but Apple had a different practice. This article by The Verge does a decent job at highlighting the differences.

Steam is largely driven by Valve’s own games and freebies as well. 1.5M currently playing Dota 2 and CS 2, with the next best being F2P games: PUBG with 370K online, Apex Legends, and Naraka.

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If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper

Epic cannot do that because

In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”

(source)

However, Epic regularly offers coupons out of pocket. Right now you can get 33% off any game above $14.99 or the regional equivalent, as many times as you want, even if the game is already discounted by the publisher. You also get 10% as cashback.

Valve’s actions do not have to copy those of Google for it to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Focus on the Steam-specific arguments deemed reasonable enough for the judge to allow the trial to go through, like those on the MFN, high profit margin related to the 30% fee, user reviews manipulation, and so forth.

Heck I’m sure that they very quickly came up with a functional shopping cart at the very least.

Steam has been offering third-party titles since 2005 but still had no shopping cart as of 2008.

In the Epic trial, Google made some of the same arguments as those used to defend Steam, like the presence of competing stores or the claim that it wins people over by the quality of the product.

Epic’s expert made these relevant points:

Google impairs competition without preventing it entirely

Google’s conduct targets competition as it emerges

Google is dominant

And we know who won in the antitrust case. Let’s see what happens in Wolfire et al v. Valve.

Not to mention that open source software can and sometimes does contain spyware.

Debunked time and time again.

Epic’s current approach to reviews is arguably better anyway. There’s no toxicity, incentive to troll to farm points, and it’s randomized, so it doesn’t enable review bombing.

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They own Easy Anti-Cheat, which has kernel level access and collects data as part of its user agreement but these people keep regurgitating the debunked claim of the launcher being spyware. Occam’s razor, anyone?

Gamers and developers benefit from the developers being paid rather than not being paid for the same thing.

Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.

The story of most of Valve’s games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.

Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.

Dev: I’m not interested in exclusivity

Epic: then we have no interest in having you on our service

If anything, the example you brought up proves the opposite. Darq is on Epic and its developer even took money from Epic to make it free, so there is no grudge even past the dev’s publicity stunt.

Steam was literally forced on those who owned a physical copy of Half-Life and wanted to play it. The dominant position has nothing to do with the service offered by Steam. It was dominant when it barely had any features. GOG competing with it on features and in fact offering the bonus of DRM-free games hasn’t improved its market share of about 0.5%.

What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?

You risk losing the audience when the other outlets’ reviews are up days before the game release while yours will be published a week after the game release unless really cutting corners or reviewing a short game.