Hacker News Reader

Comment by maverwa | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s using steam daily for probably 50-75% of their lifetime now: I don’t love them, but it’s the lesser evil for sure.

Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative.

XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a game in steam, and I almost forgot the epic store exists, despite their “free game” Marketing campaign.

It’s not perfect, it’s anti-consumer way to often, and it’s for sure a monopoly’s, but steam is still my favorite poison And yes, if they decide to disable me account and cut me off my pile of shame I will have an impact.

But owning games does not seem to be an option generally. Exceptions exist, ofc.

View on HN

GOG is great but I'd like them even more if they did some of the wine/proton work that Steam does for Linux users. For the dosbox games at least it's not much to do (for them nor for myself to be fair.)

Steam is simultaneously hard to like, as a DRM service, but also hard to dislike as they put so much care into getting games running on Linux and have a very reasonable return policy, full refunds for the game not working makes it easy for Linux users especially.

I won’t complain about anyone investing into wine/proton. GOG/CDPR just seem less willing or less capable of spending that money. Valve is essentially printing money. From sales, but also from other, morally less likeable sources like gambling. It’s nice to see them spending at least a tiny part of this in ways that serve the greater good (besides their own business).

Same point: it’s not good, but that’s reality for you.

To be clear, there are many games on Steam without DRM. It's up to the publisher whether Steam DRM is used or not (or if any other 3rd party DRM is used, for that matter).

I suspect almost all of the games on GoG, if they are also on Steam, also don't have DRM on Steam.

DRM and especially 3rd party launchers are both things that get me to skip games on Steam. I wish Steam made it simpler to just filter those games out of your store view.

I’ll never get over the hypocrisy of people loving steam and its exclusives while hating EGS and its exclusives. I’ve never seen an almost purely tech-focused crowd pull so hard for a monopoly before.

Does Steam push big titles to be exclusive, or are games exclusive to steam because they don't have a market need to also be on EGS?

To the second line, systems with a network effect tend to clump people together.

Yeah, I can't think of any explicitly Steam-exclusive games off the top of my head, other than maybe Valve's own titles.

Given Steam's history and market position, they don't need exclusives at this point. I do remember the likes of Outer Wilds and Final Fantasy 7 Remake being EGS exclusives for the first year of their respective PC releases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com