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.

That can work for small improvements but not for active development at the pace of Chromium and its forks.

Instagram is banned and blocked in Russia but it hasn’t stopped the people from using it at all.

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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.

Worth trying first. In my experience, almost every app works without the Google store. You can also block the internet access for any Google service or app via its settings.

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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.

Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.

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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It’s all in the realm of “what if”. Sure, it could attempt this or that, but it hasn’t, nor is there any guarantee that it would fly. That just brings me back to the original point of when a company that is not partially owned by the Chinese actively works to please the Chinese government to further their business interest but I don’t see much of that with Epic. If you look at some of the other companies in which Tencent has a large stake, like Dontnod, there’s absolutely no sign of the Chinese agenda in the games either.

Since this is a gaming community, it would be more relevant to say that Tencent likely has a stake in something that you already play or use, like Discord.