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"Coffee patrons" would be consumers - literally paying consumers to not shop at your competitor is just offering extremely low (i.e. negative) prices, which may be perfectly legal depending on the context.

Paying off gamedevs would be analogous to paying off dough-makers (or doughnut bakers?) to only supply your store, and not your competitor, which would be super illegal. AMD sued Intel for very similar activity, and won.

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Wouldn't Epic be paying game developers to only put games in their store? Don't console exclusives work this way all the time?

Yeah, that's why the monopoly argument is important. Not because monopolies are illegal, but some new competitor being aggressive is different from the established robber baron squashing potential competition using its establishment.

Epic as a game store is very much not a monopoly by any means. Game consoles are certainly an argument, but thus far none are dominant over the other. It would mostly be a problem if a new console jumped in and Sony/Microsoft teamed up to hardball it out.

Epic already does that and has a number of exclusives to their store, like Alan Wake 2. They also will pay devs to have it exclusive to their store for a year.

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