Games were still available physically, that was the legal alternative. When transitioning to digital, DRM schemes were often more hassle than simply torrenting the game. Digital didn't win out just because fate, it won out because it became customer preference. In the early days, Valve had to compete with piracy more than anything in the digital space, and they "won" by making the service superior to what you get from a torrent. Valve themselves have talked about this, feel free to look it up. It's similar to how Spotify is a net benefit for the music industry in the digital era because it's a service that's superior to just torrenting music. It taps into that market that gives little to no fucks about doing the right thing. My ultimate point of bringing up that bit of history was simply that good features that customers want to use give you user retention. Offering a good revenue split won't bring enough customers, not when a lot of people were a-okay with flat out stealing for ease of use. Unless Epic wants to play the exclusives game forever and bleed money to retain users, they need to get innovative in order to beat Steam. I suppose the alternative is the bulk of the industry simultaneously decides to exclusively release games on the epic store, and epic doesn't have to pay anything. That isn't likely to happen imo, unless there's collusion.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that if games go to Epic only, piracy will become rampant again. They do the bare minimum to make purchasing the game the superior product. But in a world where there's fair competition with Steam and not perpetual exclusives, they gotta step up their game.
