While I liked it, the lack of controller support made me switch to Playnite back in my Windows gaming days.
Playnite is awesome. One of the few pieces of software I really miss having on the Linux side of things.
Once you have it set up, you truly have everything gaming in one launcher. Non-steam-VR platforms, emulators, etc.
And I liked the UI a lot better than Galaxy, too, but that’s more subjective.
Have they fixed integrations? A few years ago, all integrations consistently were breaking one by one,which made the usage very frustrating
It’s weird how ruthlessly it tears down battle.net for its interface, but doesn’t even mention it for steam
I like steam’s UI. Only thing that I wish it was better is steam forum’s UI. I wish it was more like lemmy, where you can better see who answered you. Other stores don’t even have forums, except maybe for GoG, I’m not sure about that one.
I generally agree with you but watch this video, it’ll show what steam could look like
Sadly steam is no longer a viable platform for purchasing games in Argentina, so I have to disagree with this article
Sadly Argentina is no longer a viable country, so steam had to disagree with being involved.
For those out of the loop and don’t care to check, Argentina and Turkey have had very volatile currencies for years now. Developers had to constantly update the pricing on those countries because the currencies keep losing value. So Valve decided to ease the burden on the developers and let them set the pricing based on the USD. That price then get converted to the local currency based on the exchange rate. When the exchange rate is 1 USD to ~800 peso it’s no wonder that game prices are insane.
It’s higher now, more like 1 USD is around 1200 (black market rate, the ‘real’ value) The problem per se is not that the store is in USD now, but that during the transition many games abandoned regional pricing and set their prices to the default, which is the american value. So for example the game Jedi survivor is now listed at USD70, and with taxes it comes around to ~USD110. I’m working full time as an accountant, and that’s a third of my monthly salary, which is completely unaffordable.
Was is ever to begin with? In any case luckily the Microsoft store still has competitive prices so we still can use that
Is there a universal launcher like Lutris available for Windows? I was looking to build a gaming HTPC and want to interface with it with just only a controller, just like a console.
Launchbox. But the 10foot controller interface is behind a paywall with a weird scheme.
(not for windows, OS) Maybe have a look at Bazzite? It’s supposed to be a SteamOS but Fedora based. I’ve been meaning to have a look at it eventually, so i dont know how it actually is, maybe it’s garbage for all i know
There is ChimeraOS too, based on Arch.
The problem with Linux is that you will always have to tolerate a nontrivial section of games being straight-up unavailable, of games breaking, running suboptimally and requiring hacky solutions to run, and the complete absence of first-party support from hardware manufacturers and game developers. It’s not suitable for HTPCs despite having terrific UI unfortunately.
You can add them as shortcuts. UWP need a tool to set them up in steam, but you can do them too.
They’ll still need to open the other launchers to run, but it’s about as close to seamless as you’ll get. You can make Windows log in automatically, not lock when it sleeps, and launch to steam big picture mode. It might take a search or two to set up, but after it’s (minus windows being windows) relatively out of your way.
You can do the same with Linux, but you lose anticheat games and setting up other launchers is more work.
If you’re going to try and compete with something like Steam, you need to actually compete.
Most launchers are storefronts at best and nothing else. Often the buying experience isn’t even good.
I would like to see Steam broken up so it is just as a storefront as well
Monopolies
As the comment section points out; it’s impossible to compete with steam because they have so many adjacent perks
And all software should only ever do one thing, otherwise it’s bloat
