For example, Borderlands 2 (on PC) was Steam exclusive for something like 7 years and nobody seemed to mind. Borderlands 3 (on PC) was EGS exclusive for 6 months and people got very upset about it.
How is it not better to have a game available on two launchers within 6 months than to have a game available on only one launcher for 7 years?
It seems like not requiring either one would be the more neutral, agreeable position to take.
It’s like putting an android apk file on your website for an app.
If you’re giving it away for free to friends, sure.
If not, how do you sell it? How do you stop people stealing it? How do people find out about it?
Obviously, you the answer is usually “you write your own installer / updater” and do your own marketing.
Maybe that’s fun, and there’s something to be said for owning the entire stack… but it’s a loooot of work and probably not a reasonable financial decision to make.
we solved that issue long ago: make the APK a thin client to the actual service you keep on a server. Devs don't care where you download your APKs anymore. that's what the 90+% piracy took from us: the idea of premium, offline games.
advertising is tricky, but if we're being honest with ourselves: google play has only been a hinderance to discovery these days. My ideal pipeline is uploading to F-droid and throwing an APK release on Github as well.
and as a last bit of irony, we're already seeing those backdoor deals being opened up as we see how there was a point to the price fixing argument Wolfire accused of. They could have just let Overgrowth sell on their website, and now Valve is playing a game of cat and mouse on whether they re getting mass arbitration or class action.
>and you don’t have to create yet another account or have another buggy pos launcher on your computer.
Steam is another account I don't care much for personally. And steam has always allowed for third party accounts to be needed. You think then GTA 6 launches in 2029 on PC or whatever that people are gonna complain about needing a Rockstar account?
A lot of that "discourse" is just turf wars and entitlement.
It's not unlike everyone here that loves to champion Apple even when the article is about Apple being the most openly evil it can possibly be, except so far Valve hasn't really done anything like that.
and look how they equated to sales. Just world fallacy isn't working out.
GOG may be more consumer friendly, but from what I could read EGS is the 2nd biggest PC platform in the US.
>except so far Valve hasn't really done anything like that.
they've done plenty, just behind closed doors. They have their own interesting lawsuit situation that HN conveniently buried a few weeks back.
This is silly too though, it's no different to Steam both are consumer hostile systems where you own nothing. It's just Steam had the early years where it built up good will through some sales.