I sincerely doubt that even if another launcher did everything Steam does, it would rival it. People already use Steam.

At that point, you can start grabbing business from steam via promotions and such. You don’t need to rival or outgrow Steam to break into the market, you just need a bit of the market.

And that’s assuming they get to this point, ignoring that Steam had decades to get there. It used to be ass.

It’s not even that other launchers have less features than Steam. It’s just that other than GoG, which has a very limited catalog and no regional pricing, there is not a single store that is not actively anti-consumer to a hilarious extent.

Did I really missed such a feature? I’ll try it out later.

A non-profit which owns a portion of OpenAI, the for-profit company.

Alan Wake 2 didn’t make its money back for a year despite being a huge game on the second-biggest service.

Steam doesn’t care about other stores because other stores do not matter. They can let other stores sell Steam keys, and it still doesn’t threaten their untouchable market share.

i kinda wish we had greenlit, there’s so much shovelware assetflip shit…lotta crap to wade through to find the good stuff.

but greenlit itself is probably worse in the longrun, maybe they should just increase the cost to post a game (that deposit is refunded after certain number of sales, iirc). larger deposit would make it less lucrative to throw out shit

There being a barrier to entry isn’t Steam’s fault. If someone comes and makes a competitor launcher and storefront that is just as good, people can easily switch. Both developers and customers. Nobody is locked in

Steam took years and years earning customers trust slowly but surely. Why would we greet Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard with anything other than suspicion?

Oh cool then just be a prick about it for no reason. Go fuck yourself, I was just trying to help you.

I told you that it does not address my issue. No need to be mad, I have no bad intentions. I expressed what issue I have and adding the game as a non-Steam game does not solve the issues I have.

The epic launcher is a fucking piece of shit. It being a bloated unreal application to serve as a glorified web browser does not help at all

It came off as hostile but maybe I misread.

How does it not fix the problem? You can buy a gog game, add it to Steam and launch it with Proton. You’d just be using Steam instead of the gog launcher you want.

This is a bot ^^

I think you might reconsider what qualifies as “best case scenario” if you end that statement with “when this thing goes, it’s taking the industry with it”. Like, best out of a bad bunch, for sure, but the best possible outcome?

Steam kinda killed gaming piracy for many. Hope they won’t go the Netflix way in the future.

But you don’t have to do anything at all to get rich off of steam

You can’t create new ones afaik, but you can add and report tags. If enough users do either and it meets the threshold it will be added/removed. The order tags appear is also relevant, if the first tag is FPS then it’s the most voted tag. I’m sure devs/publishers can set initial tags but after that it’s users that maintain them.

It is a good idea to keep this simple in theory, but it also is exploitable. Especially since you can’t search by tags set by users vs devs/publishers. Or the first 4-5 tags. I see a lot go into safeguarding reviews, but very little in tag abuse. There’s cheep no effort games with a crazy number of tags - most people can identify trash, but if it can be abused, then what about other legitimate games?

Steam also categorizes tags in 4 types: Genres, Visual, Theme, and Features. It would be nice to search, say, games that are primarily one genre. When I search for JRPG, I don’t want a City Builder that has JRPGish elements, but I’d be ok with a JRPG with City Builderish elements. You could really narrow down what you want if you used some advanced logic. But that’s not simple, so I can see why they don’t, I just wish I could if I wanted to.

But I’d have to disagree, if it’s open to abuse, then it is a dumpster fire. The thing is that the alternative is…well they aren’t doing it. It’s one of the few things I think, if a competitor focused on and got right, would really hurt steam. But no one seems interested in doing that, so for now, steam is all we got.

You can run GOG games via Proton these days btw!

I could understand this sentiment for any pc-platform but GOG. After all, they are the only ones (afaik) that make their launcher optional. And while i do ocassionally use launcher-functionalities from for example steam, i would much rather not have to bother with it if i didnt have to.

The problem is the launcher. He does not want one.

Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this