[dcastonguay]

For me it’s just because I don’t want another piece of software on my machine that adds essentially no value on its own running in the background that I also have to manage to ensure that it’s not running in the background when I don’t want it to.

I’m resistant (and I think this is the case with others as well) to the idea that games must exist inside of their creator’s special portal; it’s a level of abstraction that I wish did not exist. Every modern desktop OS has some way of directly installing applications and many of them also provide their own stores (Mac App Store, Windows Store, etc.). The only thing “game store competition” is doing is creating a “now you have [x] standards” problem where the pitch of “all your games are located in one place” ends up becoming “all your games are in a bunch of places which you’ll be able to access after you’ve installed several different applications”.