Comment on The Outer Worlds w/ All DLC free until 26 Dec 2023 4PM UTC
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoIt’s even worse when you’re old enough to remember the same kind of people that were complaining about Valve creating Steam and forcing them to download it in order to play their games and then complaining that non-Valve games were starting to depend on having Steam installed and having to download part of the game at a time when bandwidth sucked… The same kind of people were saying they would forever boycott Steam but today they’re made that someone tried to break the status quo again.
non-Valve games were starting to depend on having Steam installed
The problem was/is their policy of allowing the non-Valve games to also require their own storefront launcher alongside Steam.
There was that one dark period of "Games For Windows Live" on Steam, but those issues are pretty rare nowadays.
That’s also an issue, but them becoming the default provider and having such a huge market share isn’t something that players should be happy about, they might be managed by someone that cares about players but Gaben could die tomorrow and get replaced by someone that doesn’t. Competition should be celebrated even if it’s not perfect.
Competition needs to do better than simply existing to be celebrated.
If I open a storefront that costs twice as much as Steam with none of the features you wouldn’t support it just because “it’s competition”.
I would certainly encourage the effort but tell you that you need to do better on pricing
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Huh, I actually never used Steam until it came to Linux. I switched back in 2010 or so, and before that I either downloaded games directly from the dev or bought disks.
I don’t understand what was wrong with that model. I remember buying Minecraft directly from the website back in 2012 or so, and I did the same with Factorio (2014?). I remember playing Starcraft 2 with its own launcher, which again I got through the website. The same is true for League of Legends.
I don’t get why everything has to be through some launcher, though I do appreciate what Steam is doing for the Linux community, so they have earned my business (if it wasn’t for Steam, I wouldn’t play nearly as many games). But from an overall gaming perspective, I agree that having such a dominant platform isn’t good, and I would probably buy from other stores if they offered a decent experience, but I’m not going to jump through hoops to play games.