[selfhoster11]

Steam game libraries routinely become worth hundreds or thousands of dollars as you spend more money to acquire digital goods. You can't move those to a different account, sell the entire account safely, or activate the titles you already own on a new platform. Nobody would spend all that money on repurchasing all their games just because the EA launcher is more shiny.

The lock-in cost is real and literal. It's far easier to migrate to a different voice comms system (which is free, usually), since you only have to convince your existing social network to create an account on the new thing.

[rkido]

Why would users need to re-purchase everything just to adopt a different store launcher as their primary platform? GOG Galaxy for instance interfaces with most existing stores and friend networks. As long as you're buying games on PC, you're not really locked into much of anything.

That said, buying certain games can lock you into using Windows. So there's that. But it's far better than buying games on modern consoles, which force you to use some special-snowflake hardware just to access the game you bought.

It's impossible to completely prevent all classes of lock-in, but it can be minimized. I would argue that my personal lock-in is minimized, across the axes I care about, by buying everything from Steam and GOG. No hard Windows dependency, no silly hardware dependency, and I'll almost certainly still have access to my games in 40 years.