The biggest advantage Steam has over other platforms:
They’re not publicly-traded, meaning they are inclined to look out for long-term success vs. short term profits.
Steam is already on their systems, and may have been for 20+ years. Nobody wants a dozen fucking game launchers and Steam already has virtually every game in existence available there. Not to mention the “community” features, friends lists, etc. Every other platform is simply too late.
They have 20+ years’ experience learning what gamers want and implementing it.
Amazon could probably compete with them if they really wanted to, but that would involve a large, long-term, consumer-centric investment, which probably isn’t a good use of their money.
#3 is the key I think. Valve’s business model is figuring out what their customers want and then providing it to them. Amazon’s model is to capture enough market share so they can start the enshitification process.
I bet the fallout with Vivendi and the lawsuit that almost bankrupted them taught them a major lesson to never be beholden to outsiders and thus never go public.
I can see how you’re trying to justify a bad mangling of an analogy.
If we follow your modification of your modification of the analogy, you want physical cases for your games, which has nothing to do with launchers at all.
Though it seems you don’t want launchers at all, you want independent executable files, which isn’t what a launcher is in this context.
The biggest advantage Steam has over other platforms:
Amazon could probably compete with them if they really wanted to, but that would involve a large, long-term, consumer-centric investment, which probably isn’t a good use of their money.
#3 is the key I think. Valve’s business model is figuring out what their customers want and then providing it to them. Amazon’s model is to capture enough market share so they can start the enshitification process.
Yes but also #3 is closely tied to #1.
Heroic is FOSS. They have no money, and still made a better launcher for Epic and Amazon’s games than Epic and Amazon can.
I have held off game launchers on Linux for a long time.
Then I tried Heroic to play Frostpunk and avoid the hassle of setting it up myself.
It is perfect.
since the update to counter-strike that required it. so that’s what? 2003?
my original retail counter-strike was the first thing on mine. retail hl2 was second.
Our Lord and savior has always been gamespy
I bet the fallout with Vivendi and the lawsuit that almost bankrupted them taught them a major lesson to never be beholden to outsiders and thus never go public.
Basically only 2
I want a launcher for each game though
do you also keep every single fork in its own kitchen drawer?
I keep all my cds in separate cases as a better analogy
More like you keep different CD players for each CD.
I assure you that I use the same computer for each computer game
But a launcher isn’t something you use for storage, that’d be your file system.
Cd player executes the code on the cd
Computer executes the code of the game
Now you see how different drawers or different cd players don’t work?
The launcher can just be the .sh file included with the game
I can see how you’re trying to justify a bad mangling of an analogy.
If we follow your modification of your modification of the analogy, you want physical cases for your games, which has nothing to do with launchers at all.
Though it seems you don’t want launchers at all, you want independent executable files, which isn’t what a launcher is in this context.