Comment by uglytruck@kbin.social on Blizzard games are coming to Steam

I guess they’re giving up on convincing people to download their launcher.

I really wish Steam would put their foot down and stop these launchers. They are nothing but a nuisance and add no value for the customer.

EDIT: Just to be clear, when EA Play joined Gamepass there wasn’t a separate launcher when you went to play an EA game on the Xbox. Steam could make this work with them and the other companies. They have enough pull to make this work - it would be greatly welcomed.

Steam having a monopoly is not a good thing for anyone. Competition is good, even if the other launchers are a bit annoying.

False. It’s a good thing for Gabe.

Yeah, steam is good, but it can get bad if they sit around for too long and get fat. The threat of others is a good thing.

I just wish the competition gave any attention to Linux support. GOG Galaxy has been out idk how long, they sell Linux games, and still not even a launcher.

How is a shiti launcher a competition…

You want competition go to GoG or Epic… Or pirate

Yeah but like, launcher isn’t a market. Game Store is the market they’re in. I’ll happily buy a game from a different store if thats the only place it’s offered or even if it’s just cheaper there. The annoyance is when they want to be Steam. I don’t want to be forced to download another launcher to play a game. If you want what Steam has, create a launcher that offers better services than Steam.

But most games aren’t DRM-free, so the launchers are necessary to verify your account and ownership of the game. Otherwise every store would be GOG, and most publishers won’t use it.

Steam already does that verification.

Yeah, but why should Steam be the only game in town? That’s a very dangerous monopoly.

What are you even talking about? It’s an application that launches a game. It adds nothing of value to the process of opening the game. How is it less of a monopoly to use a launcher to launch a launcher to launch a game?

There’s plenty of others. GoG and Humble come to mind as the major alternatives.

That’s an argument for Steam not being the only game store, it doesn’t make much sense after you already bought it from Steam and the game requires an alternate launcher to be installed.

But on that other matter, I think you have a point in theory, but EA, Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard don’t seem to have any interest in providing a better service or unique benefits. Steam’s dominance is overly maligned when it’s the only one where the company actually earned its place, by providing a better service.

And even then Steam doesn’t even have as much of a monopoly over PC games as console manufacturers actually do over each of their platforms. But since it is by design that consoles only support the platform-maker approved games, it doesn’t even register in people’s minds as a monopoly. As if they were never supposed to control these devices they have bought.

Launchers are a solution to DRM, not the solution. The way today’s modern market is, it’s understandable that some gamers have forgotten that there used to be games you bought directly from the publisher’s website. DRM was done by asking you to sign into your account before launching the game, a lot of games still make you do this today. There’s also the tried and true method of phoning home with a product key for DRM as well. There’s no shortage of ways to be independent, very few companies are interested in doing so because Steam is convenient.

Aside from the fact that logging into every game separately would be a nightmare, it would only work for online games and be a major hassle for developers because it means they also need to compensate for not having a launcher on things like automatic updates and deployments. It’s not really a solution either side would like.

I’m getting downvoted hard but people are forgetting that a game store not having a launcher is suicide. GOG tried that, started bleeding money, caved in and made their own launcher. Steam also has 20 years under their belt so saying worse launchers shouldn’t be allowed to exist would just kill competition entirely.

GOG and Humble are really good stores though

Gog is reportedly failing and Humble’s success is because they’re selling Steam keys, so they still depend on them.

Steam has competition by way of Epic, EA, Blizzard. Steam is just the far superior product and people don’t want to change

Competition is good, even if the other launchers are a bit annoying.

What does “competition” between companies really mean? It means they are competing for customers. Annoying me with shitty launchers is the opposite of competing. Make things cheaper, offer better services and more features. This is competition. Steam (and GOG) is the only one actually “competing” here. And look what happened? Microsoft, Ubisoft, Blizzard… one by one they fall to Steam because they simply cannot comprehend this fact.

Having a monopoly is not good… I just wish others wouldn’t completely ignore Linux users… Valve/Steam on the other hand is seriously pushing it forward which makes me very much biased toward them.

Yeah. While them having the most successful platform for distributing games can be troublesome in the monopoly sense, I’m still sunny to them just because of their support for the Linux community.

At least Valve isn’t a public company and beholden to shitty investor politics though, so I am more okay with Steam than… literally any other game launcher.

Plus they’re the only launcher that fully supports Linux, so until that changes I am rooting for Steam.

i love how polarizing the votes on this are, you aren’t wrong. gog is a huge competitor but they have their own launcher too which is annoying

This isn’t a monopoly issue. Other launchers exist. Most of the games on Steam are available on these other launcher, yet people still prefer Steam.

I can only speak for myself, but I prefer Steam because it’s more customizable so I can set it to open to my library first instead of a rotating ad banner, the storefront ads are not intrusive and can be easily ignored, and steams remote play is something that no other launcher offers.

In fact, I am not sure what the other launchers offer that they excel at over Steam.

So let them distribute their launchers and storefronts, Valve couldn’t stop it. But it’s not monopolistic for Steam to say “if you want us to approve your product for our store, you can’t have the game launch into a pop-up for someone else’s store”.

According to the steam page it says it only requires a battle.net account. Usually it says when another launcher is required.

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