I'm surprised that they're not migrating customer games to the Xbox store considering Bethesda is a subsidiary of Microsoft.
On the mac the store makes things, in general, easier. On windows its comedy. I wonder how many folks like myself now just instinctively avoid it.
I don't work at Microsoft, but if I had to guess there are several teams working on individual components and they lack a clear leader that enforce a global vision so it falls apart at integration time.
I had an Xbox game pass trial. When it expired it closed the game I was playing. No message. When I tried to reopen the game nothing happened. None of my games worked. But most importantly, it never told me why. Nowhere in the interface does it communicate “your trial ended” or “hey resubscribe to game pass” or “you can’t play games anymore” instead everything just stops working with no explanation. I was midway through contacting support when I pieced together that maybe the trial ended, and confirmed that on their website. That information isn’t available in the desktop app.
(This was over a year ago, hopefully it’s fixed now?)
I don’t think I’ve had Hennessy ever in my life, but they own my favorite Scotch and some friends’ favorite scotch. They don’t go bragging about it, they just collect the checks.
Forgetting that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft is easier to do if it’s not on XBox.
Not to mention that it basically kills modding if you don't also want to crack the game yourself/get a pre-cracked version from somewhere.
Not only with proton or the controller db, but save-game sync, multiplayer invites, their server browser, and everything being tied to my login.
Even managing my game library on steam is pleasant! And the social features they have are.. actually pretty useful. Having a friends list of people who I game with is nice, as is the ability to have low friction conversations.
I’ve even gone to the steam discussion forums for games that are on Steam but I own elsewhere.
What's the better way?
Downloading games off Steam is easier than pirating them. If that's not progress, I don't know what is. Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.
It actually is, it's just called "streaming" instead of downloading*.
For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline. Now all the old media companies (who have even bigger god complexes than game studios) are doing the exact same thing everyone in this thread is discussing with alternate launchers, and creating their own streaming services. And piracy is suddenly back on the rise. Only time will tell whether this will play out the same way as the OP, or whether the flexibility afforded by inherently streamable format will allow them to succeed in splintering where game studios failed.
*Two notes on this:
1) it's a benefit afforded by having a much more linear data format
2) despite what HN commenters may believe, it's only a small percentage of users that care about owning content rather than being able to conveniently access it)
In the US, maybe? Because here in Europe Netflix or any other streaming service has never been the go-to place for _any_ movie. You get to watch what they offer today, but if you want a specific movie, tough luck.
Steam is the place to be for 99.9% of PC gaming, anywhere in the world. This is why gaming piracy is pretty much dead while people are still downloading movies and tv shows to this day.
This is like the famous Dropbox comment
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
I've used the file verification and repair feature many times. It's also a convenient place to enumerate the games I have access to so I can download them on a new PC.
I'm sure this isn't the absolute best timeline, but it sure beats a land where Origin and UPlay successfully beatup Steam and we're all forced back onto walled gardens. And it seems sustainable, the second largest platform (IMO) out there is GOG which is owned and operated by CD Projekt Red - it seems like game studios see a lot of utility from owning a mostly open platform like this.
Centralized software install/update, with a good CDN behind it, is a pretty huge advantage. Even if you don't care about any of the other features of the Steam launcher, that one alone is worth it. Having every publisher run their own download servers means they're much more subject to getting overloaded under heavy demand, or becoming permanently unavailable if the publisher goes out of business.
And generally I think Steam staying alive is much more likely than random places serving stuff. Even if it were DRM free. Just looking at history quite many services have come and gone on PC.
The most important services are of course the first two, and in this sense, you can think of them as basically something like apt, but built with software that requires you provide proof purchase before downloading it. This helps explain why having to use multiple launchers provokes such frustration among users--it means you basically have two package managers running on your system.
Maybe if software update were a part of standard OS services, it wouldn't be such an issue, but as it isn't [on desktops], another platform providing such services becoming popular for doing so shouldn't be surprising.
More cynically, this seems a "games generation" where Microsoft is trying to "win PC gamers back" by being very Steam friendly/Steam forward in their PC releases and strategy. There's a lot better PR for Microsoft here if Bethesda migrates everything to Steam, and it may just be for those PR reasons.