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Comment by bearcobra | Hacker News Reader

Obviously there's a non-zero cost for developers to publish thru multiple stores, so it makes sense to try to incentivize them with a greater share of revenue. It would be interesting if they tried to leverage the popularity of Fortnite to also do this on Android.

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There's also a cost for the customer; they have to use multiple launchers.

Only sort of. All applications use one master launcher: The operating system. Battle.net, Origin, Steam, etc. all can put desktop shortcuts to individual games.

Steam is much more than a launcher, it's a social networking platform for games. Everyone has their friends lists on there, groups, etc.

Network effects make it difficult to move your contact list over to a new platform.

I've found that Discord has largely replaced both Steam and Battle.net as the social platform.

Agree, but a lot of games use the Steam service for adding and playing together with friends in ingame lobbies. Battlenet also has it's own social service that all games on it use, same with Epic.

In some circles yes, but discord is more replacing teamspeak/skype than steam directly. They are clearly pushing in valves direction, however (Discord has games too etc.).

Also, Discord looks pretty is depressingly badly constructed software.

Haven't we proven time and time again that if a product is attractive enough, it will attract people and you won't really be porting everyone over as much as locating them on the platform?

Plus having the largest game in the world (at the moment) helps build some inertia towards early adoption if they use that to funnel people into the system. I don't need to "rebuild my contacts" if Fornite suddenly requires me to add myself to the EGS, because that just sort of sorts itself out.

The Network effect can be used by Epic as well.

Having to manage all those accounts, installing all that launcher software, and running always on "agents" is anti-consumer.

I've found historically with software that the better something works, the more likely it is to get screwed up. Netflix has made browsing a chore, Amazon Video introduced ads, Spotify is getting clunky as they "optimize" the UI, Gmail taking time to load in 2018 when it didn't in 2015, Android requiring root to install an app to prevent album art from replacing your lock-screen background and apps from making obnoxious color choices on notifications.

Ah well, maybe I'm just getting old and people want less robust, clunky software! /rant

I'm absolutely amazed at how bad Gmail has been running lately. Slow to load initially, UI not updating in a timely manner, keyboard shortcuts stuttering - the list goes on. At first I thought this was a browser issue (I run Firefox Nightly), but it's the same in Chrome. It's all very vexing

I think part of the problem is that services and clients are coupled together. Imagine there were an official, maintained Spotify API and no official client. Nobody would use (and more importantly, have to use) crap like today's Spotify client.

Tim Sweeney said in an interview that they are planning on launching their store on Android in 2019.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/12/04/tim-sweeney-answers-...

Ditto, I'd love to see this pushed out to the mobile platforms as well.

Just wait until digital distribution services catch up to console levels of bullshit and start licencing exclusives or "exclusive for X months after launch" for bigger titles.

Epic is in fact planning to buy third-party exclusives for their new store:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/epic-undercuts-steam-...

> Sweeney told Ars that the company plans to "start small" and will "sometimes fund developers to release games exclusively through the store," Sweeney told Ars.

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