this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Yeah, but why should Steam be the only game in town? That's a very dangerous monopoly.
What are you even talking about? It's an application that launches a game. It adds nothing of value to the process of opening the game. How is it less of a monopoly to use a launcher to launch a launcher to launch a game?
It's not just a launcher, it's a storefront. Uplay, EA-whatever, and Rockstar Launcher are all storefronts where you can buy the games those companies make.
The launcher itself is a UI which lets you "launch" the game. Steam for example, is a launcher and a storefront, as is Uplay.
Having all your games in a single launcher/storefront is bad, as it gives a single company entire control over your games, and monopoly pricing.
Also remember that Steam takes a 30% cut, which is totally unnecessary, and is what directly caused giants like Ubisoft and Rockstar to make their own storefronts. Because why pay a 30% tax just for selling your game, this ain't the 1990s anymore with CD-ROM pressings.
Fuck Steam and it's monopolistic, 30% rent seeking bollocks.
Tell me a single benefit to me as the consumer of blizzard or any other company forcing me to install their launcher and run it everytime I open a game I bought through Steam.
It's adware.
Edit: To be fair and give credit where it's due: Mike Ybarra said it will be "directly through steam", so if they follow through with that I commend them for it.
There is no benefit, I never claimed the launcher within a launcher was a benefit.
The problem is the cancer that is Steam itself. We need more competing storefronts which don't require the Steam launcher, and even better if there's no launcher of any kind at all, just a binary to run to play the game.
Gog? Itch? Plenty of developers choose to sell their games in DRM-free formats. Plenty of games don't even cost money.
Exactly, and I have written about how much I love GOG and Itch and why I hope they take more market share away from Steam.
Just a note, as a storefront, there are plenty of competing options that work with Steam. Think Humble Store and other resellers, Steam doesn't take any cut from those sales and while they do enforce some standards (Things like staying close to price parity with Steam on alternate storefronts) and can refuse to give out keys, the market there is definitely very healthy.
20-30% cut, which is in-line with most digital storefronts.
Companies exist to make money. Making money will never be "unnecessary" for a company. And hosting secure data centers around the world delivering 15 Tbps a day is not exactly cheap.
Also remember that Ubisoft and Rockstar (and Microsoft and Blizzard) came crawling back to Steam all the same, meaning they thought they would make more money even with the 20-30% tax. So a 20-30% tax must seem pretty fair to these companies for what they are getting.
There's plenty of others. GoG and Humble come to mind as the major alternatives.
Yeah, and GoG is fantastic and I'm so glad it exists. We need more DRM-free storefronts without launchers for sure.
That's an argument for Steam not being the only game store, it doesn't make much sense after you already bought it from Steam and the game requires an alternate launcher to be installed.
But on that other matter, I think you have a point in theory, but EA, Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard don't seem to have any interest in providing a better service or unique benefits. Steam's dominance is overly maligned when it's the only one where the company actually earned its place, by providing a better service.
And even then Steam doesn't even have as much of a monopoly over PC games as console manufacturers actually do over each of their platforms. But since it is by design that consoles only support the platform-maker approved games, it doesn't even register in people's minds as a monopoly. As if they were never supposed to control these devices they have bought.