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Comment by FredFredrickson | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I fully agree - I hate having all kinds of junky game clients running on my computer when I ought to just be able to have one, Steam, which is obviously doing a decent job.

On the other hand, I think that competition will drive Steam to be better (or maybe, just maybe, result in something better than Steam), and so I don't necessarily want the other companies to stop trying to compete entirely, either.

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The other companies aren't really trying to compete with Steam per se, they just want to inject their own custom babysitter to analyze your computer and see if they're complying with their rules. When you open a game from Steam that's produced by one of these companies, it chains in its own loaders and achievements and stuff. It totally sucks, and it's a terrible end user experience.

It'll be exciting when the fogies in charge of these companies die out. They seem to have difficulty grasping the concept of computers and digital distribution.

I think they are probably more interested in avoiding the ~15-30% (rumored) cut that Steam takes for digital sales of their games. And I know in EA's case, they want to sell DLC through their game, not through Steam's client specifically to avoid that charge (that's the reason some EA games were removed from Steam when Valve changed their policy on the matter).

They do this even on games purchased directly through Steam. It's obviously not about cutting out Steam, because they still facilitate their sales via Steam and presumably are still obliged to render commissions. As Ubisoft says in their own announcement, UPlay did not accept payments directly; distribution channels like Steam or physical retail were still required to obtain the games.

This isn't really a market that benefits from competition doing anything less than the same the same thing, though. Steam is acting as more of a dumb distributor than a publisher, and are an established player. All Ubisoft and EA have is their own titles. They're not going to attract indie players, and they're not going to attract other publishers' work if all they're trying to do is utilize their titles to garner users. In other words, they're not currently trying to be the next Steam, they just want to take a bite out of Steam.

If either of those companies wants to make a real effort at getting a distribution platform off the ground by competing with Steam on the developer side and the pricing side, then that's competition I'm willing to see. As it stands, they're simply trying to leverage their developers' work into membership.

Can't speak for Ubisoft, but Origin sells games not published by EA. I think right now they sell Sega, Square and Warner Brother games. They also sell physical copies of games not published by them, including some Valve games. They're growing their catalog.

I agree. However, in every current case Steam is just making all these other platforms look bad.

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