It's not the matter of a locked platform per se. Releasing a game on a platform like Steam just increases the likelihood of someone buying it manifold.

The age of physical discs are over, but the developer is still free to release a DRM-free version of the game independently. Witcher 3's Projeckt Red does this. You can simply enter the product key received from Steam to download this DRM free copy.

Those days were gone when DRM became an acceptable thing defended by people even on this site.

Its always that one CEO, wanting to emulate the success that is steam by becoming basically becoming the market and the platform. Self-delusion and believe-shapes-reality needs some realistic observation or else one wastes ridiculous amounts of money reinventing the wheel only for the crowd to flock to the first wheel shop anyway.

Those are resources that could go into inventing the first plane. And some superior sooner or later realizes that you are on a unimaginative crusade and cuts the lifeline, resulting in a dead market-plattform, with contract-bound studios being dragged down with the sinking ship.

Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives...

Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken [1].

[1] https://vgy.me/0E4HBm.png

Also, if you have a Windows Update pending that requires a reboot, attempting to install anything from the Windows Store will fail, sometimes with a cryptic error code and sometimes not even that.

They can do both. Steam is just a larger platform.

Personally, I can play a Windows game purchased on Steam on Linux/MacOS using Wine (This is how I currently play Age of Empires II). You can't say the same about a Windows Store game.

There is a stigma in the PC gamer community against Microsoft, especially after Games for Windows. "Steam or go home" sentiments also aren't all that uncommon. As for the accounts - I really don't know anyone who actually uses the MS store (whereas pretty much everyone who plays video games has a Steam account), and I interact with plenty of end-users daily. Maybe it just happens that the area I live in never adopted it, but I would still say that Steam is the better platform to try to get exposure on.

Can you login to the store without linking your entire computer to that email?

Games stores (for better or worse) are expected to have an ecosystem of services of varying importance:

- Friends list

- Text & Audio chat

- Cloud saves

- Automatic updates

- DLC installation

- Sales and Discounts

- Curation, suggestions, and browsing

- Achievements

The Microsoft Store has most of those, more or less, but the experience is not ideal.

The social services are tied into the Xbox app which works okay, but is quite complicated and Microsofty. Also PC gamers might not have their friends on Xbox or maybe it has their CoD friends, not their AoE friends, etc.

The MS store is not purpose-built for games, so it makes it a poor place to buy them. It's hard to find "real games" on there because you have to sift through mobile games, photoshop, movies, and Xbox controllers. Many PC stores make a big deal about sales with purpose-built home pages, best seller lists, weekly sales, event sales, newsletters, etc. The MS store does not have sales often and if they do you're not likely to hear about them. PC stores put a lot of effort into discoverability. There's personalized home pages, followed curators, recommendations from friends, and detailed search systems with a multitude of tags and sorting options. You can search for a recently released co-op action-rpg with steam controller support and sort by recent review sentiment. The MS store, by comparison, is a mobile app store on a computer.

PC Game stores are expected to have fast and reliable downloads. Steam can consistently download faster than my hard drive can write, and can reliably resume interrupted downloads. Steam can validate the integrity of game files and re-download them if necessary. Other clients seem to do fine as well. Download speeds from the MS store are reportedly inconsistent, and it has (or had) no ability to resume interrupted downloads. For weeks after the ~100GB Gears 4 was released exclusively on the MS store, /r/pcgaming was full of people complaining that the download was interrupted at 95GB and had to start over from 0.

All of these problems are solvable. I believe the download issues have been fixed. The store is already the best place to buy "Play Anywhere" titles if you have an Xbox, simply because you get it on both platforms. But MS has a long way to go to make the store pleasant to use and to win back PC gamers' sentiment.

One practically unsolvable problem is that the store doesn't exist on Linux, macOS, or Win 7, which matters to some portion of games and some portion of gamers.

Literally never used the MS Store

Gaming for Windows Live died. Let it stay dead.