I think it is lesser evil compared to having dozens of stores and accounts to manage with some of them dying and taking the products down with them. If you were to play range of titles you could possibly end up with quite many clients running in background, just for that having single big player is positive.
and it invests into wine development to make windows games run on linux.
At least mine doesn't.
(Edit: to be fair, if I had been a little quicker on the draw when Schwab accidentally transferred $60+ million into my account several years ago, I might not be making this particular counterargument.)
not really, because you'd legally have to return that money anyways. your argument still holds.
a better counterargument would be that some banks don't allow their app to run on rooted phones, which is equivalent to anti-cheat measures (since windows is rooted by default)
to protect against what though?
Keyloggers (touchloggers?), I imagine.
They do require that the price of your game on Steam be equivalent or lower than the price outside of it. That’s very anticompetitive, and IMO should be illegal as it doesn’t do anything but harm consumers.
No, they don’t. As far as I know, there is nothing in the Distribution Agreement saying that and you can in fact regularly see games sold for less on GOG than Steam.
The only thing Valve disallows selling outside of Steam for less than on Steam are Steam keys.
Realistically, the alternative without Steam would not be dozens of stores, but (eventually) 2-3 stores, that would all behave much worse than Steam.
And then I remember the third party tries... All the MMORPGs. Pretty much everyone would have their own launcher and then there would bunch of smaller stores with their own platforms.