I trust that Steam will be around for a very long time. I can download DRM-free installers from GOG. Everyone else? I don't know, I have much less confidence.
If I buy a game in store X, and it’s available on store/platform Y, I should be able to play it on both.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.
I recently bought a Nintendo Switch, and although I’m happy overall, some games have very heavy limits built in (think: max number of units in games), and they’re also available on PC/steam, but I would have to buy the games twice. I just can’t get over myself to do that, I shouldn’t have to do it. At the very least make the license transferable! :)
It actually works quite well. I can purchase a movie on the Roku Movie Store (powered by Vudu) and have it appear as purchased on my Apple TV with iTunes, and all of the big studios are members so not that many films are missing.
You also now get a Movies Anywhere code in the box of most Blu-ray purchases, which works exactly like you would expect and appears on all the stores as if it were a Roku or Apple TV purchase. (Ultraviolet codes are grandfathered in if you have any of those.)
Moving outside of PC games, I think things get very hard to argue for cross-portability. Each platform has a unique (closed-source) tech stack, and that requires paying developers to write code to take advantage of the features available on each of those platforms. Since portability incurs measurable costs, it's hard to argue, for me, that users shouldn't bear some of the brunt of those costs. If legislation were already in place, such a price could be built in to the product.
The problem, however, is Valve. Monopolies have no incentive to open up to sharing with outside entities. Steam likes to seem open with abilities to hand out keys and such and a good API, but the reality is it is all in service of keeping people locked to their platform. Meanwhile, GOG has shown a willingness to hand out licenses for games you own on Steam, Epic Games has talked about being open to such initiatives, etc.
But in particle this bridge between stores is anti-GDPR and can be abused from some stores.
Say I'm a publisher; I can sell my games for 5% cheaper than all the competing platforms and let my installer/store languish. All it needs to do is let people buy the game, and my competitors can do the hard work of actually distributing the game, updating it, supporting features like community pages, friend lists, steam workshop etc.
People buy the game from me because it's cheaper, and the other platforms can pay the actual cost of supporting that license.
These keys are often stolen or pirated.
The Steam subreddit has a page dedicated to it https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/wiki/dangersofkeyresellers
The keys from these sites are frequently revoked after they're discovered stolen.
However, all of the sites listed at isthereanydeal.com I have tried are not that. It's not clear what the business model is, but they're absolutely depending on steam to deliver and maintain the content, and it's not clear that steam gets any money out of the transaction.
Bethesda games are a good example of that. You can pay 80$ for Skyrim VR or get it on g2a for 20$. This is just because the game is very frequently on sale for about that amount.
Consequently, it's good business to onboard them, even at an immediate loss.
In practice, I think this actually hurts the established guys. A big reason I prefer to buy on Steam is because the majority of my library is in Steam. A PC gaming library also has more longevity.
In general, I would be reluctant to buy multi-platform titles on the Switch. If porting was available, I would buy certain titles on the Switch or pay to move it to Switch. I would then pay to move everything over to Steam if my Switch died.
Mandating transferable licenses across platforms means that a PC player who has no intention of ever owning a console device now has to pay for the engineering of the port (and vice versa for console players).
On the same platform, OTOH, this seems like a decent idea.
I wonder if they tried the subscription thing first but then gave up and just went with the buy model as a least-worst choice at a point in the cycle where it was too late to back out of the whole endeavour.
Stadia uses custom hardware so games can't just run on Stadia as-is, they have to be ported, which requires investment from the game's developers (or a porting shop).
I have to imagine most publishers that Google approached expected them to foot some of the bill for that work, if not all of it.
They should have gone with standard hardware basically.
With Google's reputation of killing products, and the hubris of thinking they could just waltz into the gaming space and be competitive within a year, it's no wonder that no one took them seriously and the product never took off.
Other streaming services like GeForce Now (sp?) let you install games you already own on Steam and play them on a cloud computer, which is a much more attractive model I think.
I wonder how many of those can be retrieved (and are playable) from archived copies?
Edit: available meaning "available for purchase" (my mistake, thanks for the corrections)
On other hand purchase might be disabled by developer, but game page is still visible: https://store.steampowered.com/app/210550/Angry_Birds_Space/
But of course adding a non-Steam version of the game doesn't magically give you a Steam version of the game absent a key-based import (which Valve supports both technically and a matter of policy).
Managing a hundred different games from a dozen different sources is a pain.
If we lived in some fantasy utopia with standardized identity authentication and easily-verifiable-cryptographically-secure-proof-of-purchase then maybe distributed content distribution could make sense.
Audio works fine almost always [1]. Controls usually work ok (I use both an x360 controller and a steam controller) but sometime it requires a bit of connecting and disconnecting, but to be honest it is probably more of a proton issue than steam link.
Overall I'm quite happy, although it is not yet a seamless console-like experience.
[1] There was a brief period last year when steam would crash when running under PulseAudio, and switching to alsa would prevent audio to be streamed. The issue fixed itself, either because of a steam update or a system update.
There are 2 problems with this.
1. You can't downloaded patches of game updates (with good ux). You would need to downloaded the entire game for every update which is bad.
2. You can't install the game to the system without a program.
>and payments from their website
Steam can provide less friction to make a payment since someone likely already has payment information attached to their account. A 25% cut is worth it if they can make more than 25% revenue than they otherwise would have made.
There is also the marketing potential of being in the steam store. Gamers looking for a new game can see / find your game. You can see people on your friends list playing your game. You can see friends reviewing the game or getting achievements on your feed.
And with Steam(at this moment) there is no way to tell it to "please don't update this game and let me play this version". You can disable the automatic updates but you won't be able to run a game from the launcher if you are not uptodate because the Play button is changed to Update.
Lol no patch installers were a thing before Steam. And usually more efficient - for the longest time Steam would re-download any changed files.
That would essentially be a launcher. We are talking about a downloaded on a website. A website can't patch a file, not know what patches you need to get up to date.
Download a legal copy of the game from anywhere. No DRM, but your license key gets checked against the blockchain.
Back in the day, you can borrow your friends game after they were done. DVDs can be shared. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also don't know how IPFS people would feel if they became the CDN for commercial software.
The feature would be that it's structurally decentralized in a way that decouples content creators from delivery.
What does that have to do with IPFS? IPFS doesn't really care what's on top of it.
All of the prospective "stores" can host their own IPFS nodes and contribute to the bandwidth availability, just like how a CDN works.
Isn't that DRM?