understand why steam has its standing.
Because they forced people who bought physical copies to download a proprietary launcher?
And what has that to do with a monopoly? They forced other developers to sell their game on steam? No, over time it developed into a platform that was just more convenient in so many ways than physical copies, for gamers and developers. Steam wouldn’t have taken off if it was as shitty as the launchers from ea/ubi and so on. And so what if they were the first ? Wow released in the same year and had its own proprietary launcher, so they could charge users monthly. While Steam is free and their servers are free to use. It’not like we wouldn’t live in a world without proprietary launchers it it weren’t for steam, we would just have shitty ones, almost exclusively. Just compare the the movie/tv-show platforms, all the same shit in different shades of brown.
You talking about EA? Or Ubisoft? Or Epic? Or Blizzard? Or Rockstar? Or 2K?
Valve. Keep up man, pick up on the social cues
Retail copies of half-life 2 required Steam, and that was just the beginning. I returned several physical copies of games over the years because of the Steam requirements.
Oh yeah buddy. I just hate how Steam is just so inconvenient and useless. It costs so much and takes up all that space that could otherwise be the latest CoD! I would so much rather have a few hundred different profiles and logins for the few hundred games I would forget that I have!