[molmalo]

Because that's how the market works for buying anything.

It's like saying: how is it better to have multiple supermarkets to buy the stuff i want, if they offer the same product at different prices? Well... it's an option, nobody forces you to do it. You can always go to the same place, and know that there's going to be times when you pay more, and times when you pay less.

But you also have the chance to check on other store's offers and buy there if you want.

> How is having to navigate N stores

You don't "have to". In the end, more offer = better for consumers. It's up to each individual person to decide if they want to find better prices or just go to their default place.

[randomchars]

It sounds lovely, but it doesn't work out this way.

Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store. They only sell it there.

[danShumway]

> Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store.

Yes they do? Steam, GoG, and Itch don't coordinate their sales with each other. They offer different games at different prices at different times. Even Epic's weekly free game is designed to make people check in on the Epic store regularly instead of just buying those same games immediately on Steam.

There are a ton of PC games that are available in multiple stores, and comparison shopping will often give you different prices.

It doesn't just sound lovely, it's the reality of the PC market right now and you can either take advantage of it if you're willing to comparison shop, or ignore it and buy all of your games on Steam if comparison shopping is too much work for you. It's really not theoretical, it's how the PC market works right now.

Yes, there are some exclusives, but even that is fine, because a lot of the games that are exclusive to stores like GoG, Itch, and even Epic, flat out wouldn't have been made in the first place unless storefronts were competing with each other.

This is something that devs try to get across to gamers occasionally with Epic -- having someone step in and fully fund your game with the only restriction being that it's temporarily exclusive to a store is an unbelievably good deal, and it frees devs up to make more creative, interesting, risky games and passion projects that push boundaries and appeal to more niche audiences.

Not only are a huge portion of PC games not exclusive to specific stores, even where exclusives are concerned competition between different storefronts -- each trying to build the more attractive offering of games -- is still better than having one store owned by one company that only funds a small subset of games. PC gaming is better today than it was when only giant companies like Walmart could distribute games.

[randomchars]

I have to admit, you've convinced me. I'm not a gamer, so I didn't have much experience with this.

My frame of reference was streaming services, where more platforms meant fever content on each, and having to pay more to watch everything you wanted. But if it is indeed this was with games, maybe multiple appstores could be the way to go.

[p1necone]

The vast majority of games are not store exclusives. And the alternative is not a single mandatory store that magically has everything. There's a lot of apps that would otherwise launch on iPhone but don't because the developers don't want to or can't deal with Apple's fees and restrictions. (See anything that only works on jailbroken devices, or open source projects that only release on Android.)