A few days ago I wrote about the Junk Store coming to Steam, a special plugin for Steam Deck to bring GOG and Epic Games compatibility unnoficially - but it seems to be a short lived idea.
  • @[email protected]
    37•2 months ago

    a launcher that has a primary purpose of launching other games from other stores might have been a bridge too far.

    Really? Because steam has been selling games from companies who do this for years with the only backlash coming from upset customers that the corporations usually ignore anyways.

    • FubarberryMEnglish
      16•2 months ago

      That’s still for games sold through Steam. Most importantly, that’s for games that the companies agreed to sell through Steam.

      If I was Valve, my biggest concern here would be that officially selling a tool for sideloading Epic games could be seen as approving of breaking Epic’s ToS. Epic is also very sue happy when it comes to attacking rival companies.

    • @[email protected]
      1•2 months ago

      What are you referring to? Because in this case Steam would be getting a certain amount once for you to be able to play hundreds or thousands of games on another platform

      • @[email protected]
        17•2 months ago

        The many games you buy on Steam that then launch another god damn launcher from another company when you launch them.

        I hate it, but Steam never seemed to mind.

  • Sneezycat
    35•2 months ago

    Paid product? I’m not sad, we already have Heroic Games Launcher for free, and it works just fine.

    • @[email protected]
      11•2 months ago

      It said it was free to download and use but a convenience charge for getting it on Steam.

      But like you, I’m also happy with Heroic, and there’s also Lutris.

      • Ricky Rigatoni
        10•2 months ago

        There are a few foss programs and games that do that and it does make sense since it costs money to put things on steam.

    • Moog Muskie
      10•2 months ago

      I didn’t agree with it being a paid product either. And I might have been misunderstanding so don’t take my word on this, but I think it was originally open source and free (at least in money, not sure about freedom) for those running Bazzite and primarily designed for Bazzite Linux and that they planned to keep supporting that version, so I feel like all that would do for the Steam Deck is incentivize people to install Bazzite Linux on it so that it would be free.

      • FubarberryMEnglish
        10•2 months ago

        It’s available as a open source Decky plugin, but the steam version was going to be a paid closed source rewrite.

      • @Dasnap
        2•2 months ago

        I’ve installed it on a Chimera machine also via Decky so I don’t think it’s distro specific.

        • Moog Muskie
          3•2 months ago

          Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to make it sound like it was distro-speciffic, I just think that Bazzite was the primary platform target originally (but I might be wrong)

  • ekZeppEnglish
    3•2 months ago

    Heroic Launcher works fine for me. What those others launchers do?