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Comment by skeletal88 | Hacker News Reader

It is not only about requiring the sony account in countries where it is not available. It is also about forcing players to log into yet another useless account, when the game is bought from steam. This practice is widely hated by gamers everywhere. If I buy a game on Steam, why would I be required to log in to some other account or launcher to actually start the game.

The publishers wish to somehow capture the players with their own launchers, but this is never going to do them any good and is widely hated.

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Overdue for Steam to forbid the practice.

Would probably be seen by governments as anti competitive and abusing their monopoly position.

> Would probably be seen by governments as anti competitive and abusing their monopoly position.

What monopoly position? There are dozens of game stores available on all the platforms Steam supports with nothing restricting users from installing and using however many of them they want. Outside of Valve's own Steam Deck hardware users had to go out of their way to install Steam in the first place. Even there the installation of third party launchers is not just supported but encouraged.

Some of the world's most popular games are not even available on Steam.

That’s not their job, and they already do what they need to: it requires disclosure in the games page/metadata. Customers can make an informed choice, except for cases like this where it’s changed post release.

> That’s not their job, and they already do what they need to: it requires disclosure in the games page/metadata.

By the same logic was it not Apple's job to decide that music downloads shouldn't have DRM and tell publishers to either get on board or not be available on iTunes?

I mean just like in that case I wish it didn't need to come to this, I wish the publishers would just not be piles of garbage to begin with, but this is the world we actually exist in so sometimes it's nice for a player in a position of power to use their power for good.

I cannot read this without laughing out loud, thinking about the crap Apple has been getting for having exactly such policies in their app store.

It’s not the same. Apple is entitled to have whatever rules they want on their store. The only reason it’s an issue is because they don’t allow any other store on the hardware.

Steam cannot stop people from installing other game stores, so they can have whatever rules they want.

The days of loading up physical media, installing, and playing the game are gone.

Publishers have been hard for micro transactions. That’s the whole reason for it. Maybe they are also siphoning your usage data, but that’s mainly a side hustle at this point.

Why cut a piece off for Steam when they can bypass them entirely and force users to buy directly?

> Why cut a piece off for Steam when they can bypass them entirely and force users to buy directly?

That is a completely different issue, and if you believe you don't need steam go ahead.

But here people brought and played H2 via steam, before Sony decided they could profit off of the game's popularity to boost their PSN account numbers by forcing all players to create a PSN account.

>The publishers wish to somehow capture the players with their own launchers, but this is never going to do them any good and is widely hated.

Nah, if it was possible to sign up for PSN accounts, people would have hated it but done it. Look at how Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA, and other enshittified game companies still sell gajillions of copies.

It's inaccurate to lump in the actual reason for change (game being unavailable in regions) vs. a reason no game company has ever been motivated to change ("we don't like making thirdparty accounts").

Is anyone using the Rockstar "Social Club"?

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