Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
That depends on what you’re doing. A separate login is useful for stuff like cross-platform support. But also, if your game is some sort of MMO or live game you may need some sort of account management if you want to sell it stand-alone.
These days some people just plug into the storefront’s login system, but I also don’t begrudge the ones that don’t, mildly inconvenient as it can be. Especially not the ones that own their own storefront and are only on Steam because you can’t not be on Steam.
In my experience the launcher hate is less about the MMOs that actually are doing something relevant like updating and more the ubisofts and 2ks that are putting in a second layer of drm that can break and usually exists to hoover more data than they could otherwise.
Hey, I’m not going to stand here and defend everybody’s implementation. But I will say that the hate is not related to the implementation because, again, a bunch of these are entirely unintrusive (I know Ubisoft’s is just a pop up now and I think EA will do the same, but don’t quote me on that) and people rage about it anyway.
Because it shouldn’t be necessary.
“Shouldn’t”?
To do what?
I mean, I guess it depends on whether you assume the game “should” only exist within Steam. But, you know, at that point why not buy a PlayStation?
You can sell a game on multiple storefronts/launchers without forcing the steam version to first launch a different app
That depends on what you’re doing. A separate login is useful for stuff like cross-platform support. But also, if your game is some sort of MMO or live game you may need some sort of account management if you want to sell it stand-alone.
These days some people just plug into the storefront’s login system, but I also don’t begrudge the ones that don’t, mildly inconvenient as it can be. Especially not the ones that own their own storefront and are only on Steam because you can’t not be on Steam.
Which, again, I find to be a bad thing.
In my experience the launcher hate is less about the MMOs that actually are doing something relevant like updating and more the ubisofts and 2ks that are putting in a second layer of drm that can break and usually exists to hoover more data than they could otherwise.
Hey, I’m not going to stand here and defend everybody’s implementation. But I will say that the hate is not related to the implementation because, again, a bunch of these are entirely unintrusive (I know Ubisoft’s is just a pop up now and I think EA will do the same, but don’t quote me on that) and people rage about it anyway.
It’s become a console wars meme thing.