Imagine you’re a sex toy manufacturer.

Imagine you make some of the best vibrators the world has ever seen. You’re one of the best at it in the whole world. Your marital aids have won major awards. Your best work has routinely sold out faster than you can make them. Jenna Jameson has enthusiastically endorsed your work and your company – and uploaded personal demonstrations to Pornhub. Your lead dildo designer has been referred to as the ‘Michaelangelo of Personal Massagers’.

And your next creation is gonna be amazing. It’s got 6 speeds. It’s got several attachments that look like they came straight out of a Hentai. It’s dishwasher safe. It’s got wifi so you can pleasure your girlfriend from 500 miles away. It automatically pulses in time with whatever’s playing on Spotify. It transforms into a robot, and its got a built-in cappacino machine for when you’re done.

Everybody is eagerly awaiting your newest vibrator. Your new toy was the most discussed topic at the latest DildoCon. Sex toy aficionados are buzzing about your joy buzzer all over Reddit. You’ve been making magic wands for a long time, and everyone expects great things.

Now then, for years and years, you’ve sold your selfie sticks primarily at Dildo-Mart. And they give you the same deal you’ve gotten for years: we’ll give you $39 dollars for every orgasmatron you manage to sell. This deal has been good for a long time. It’s tempting.

But a new upstart has come along. Vibrators R’ Us wants to sell your new lady sticks too, and they’ll give you $53 per vibrator they sell – even though they’ll still sell it at exactly the same price. That’s… a lot.

But wait, says Dildo-Mart. We’re the biggest sex toy shop in the world. Everyone in America is within 10 minutes of one of our fine, upstanding family stores. Also, if you sell a whole BUNCH of dildos, we’ll improve your take to $45 per dildo.

And Vibrators R’Us responds, well, $53 is still substantially more than $45. Also, while we’re not quite as close to everywhere as Dildo-Mart, everyone in America is within 15 minutes of one of our stores.

Dildo-Mart says ‘but wait! We have forums! We have trading cards of dildos! We have ratings on our web site!’

And Vibrators R’ Us responds “We’re going to add all that, but how relevant is that, really, once you’ve turned the vibrator on?” Then they pause and say, “$53. Dollars. Per. Vibrator.”

If you were a generic, crappy sex toy manufacturer, you might be crazy to take that deal. After all, most people go to the store that’s closest to them. But you’re not. You know that people have been waiting years for this sex toy. They’re planning on taking time off work the day it comes out.

So why on earth would you sell your new toy at Dildo-Mart? If you are fairly sure that everyone is going to actively seek out your amazing new creation, you know that they’ll drive the extra five minutes to get it. Making it available at DM is costing you $8-13 bucks per vibratogachi sold. And almost everyone will choose to buy it there, because it’s just easier to do so.

Sure, Vibrators R’ Us may offer you something in exchange for an Exclusivity deal just to be sure you don’t switch if offered a better job but at those numbers, you don’t NEED it. Your customers are still paying exactly the same price. It’s availability to pretty much exactly the same set of customers. You get somewhere between 17-36% more money for every vibrator you make. In exchange, your customers are minorly inconvenienced. After which, they get an amazing new crotch rocket.

The disconnect between developers and gamers around the Steam/Epic store split centers upon a basic mental disconnect: gamers don’t realize that Epic isn’t competing for their business. Epic is competing for Gearbox’ business.

Game developers and publishers work with partners all the time. It may be contract art for the game, or purchasing rights to a graphics engine, or help marketing the game, managing communities, performing user testing, or even printing CDs. Most of these choices are invisible to the player – so much so that if, say, we do a crappy job printing CDs, you’ll likely blame us rather than whoever we hired to do it for us. And that’s fine.

Before recently, there was really no choice for developers in terms of partners to sell and distribute your newly released PC game: you could either roll your own solution (as Blizzard did) or use Steam. Yeah, yeah, there are options like GOG and Humble Bundle, but these retailers specialize with selling older games (which is part of the reason Steam is willing to work with them).

Epic is trying to build a new store, one which offers developers a new option for selling their game that is more attractive to developers. But they have a big problem: steam is so much the ‘normal’ way to game on your PC that getting players to switch to the Epic Games store is really, really hard. Especially since you can’t really use consumer price to compete.

Gamers want Epic to compete with Steam, but Epic can’t until they build a customer base, and the only way to do that, really, is exclusive content. And the only way to do THAT is to make developers a deal they can’t refuse. Gamers looking at Epic ‘trying to build a monopoly’ have it backwards, actually. They are trying to break what is effectively an entrenched monopoly, and to do that they need to combat a decade plus of habit and inertia.

If Epic succeeds, then Steam will forced to get better. If that happens, everyone wins. Game developers will have better choices of where to sell their games. Gamers will have better tools for launching games and discovering new product. Price wars AFTER the initial launch window become likely.

But this only works if customers have compelling reasons to open a second launcher.