| > Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won. What universe do you live in? - Broken games still pre-ordered - marginal updates sold at full price - double/triple-dipping with microtransactions and battle passes - DRM still [predominant and still hurts performance - every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value) - rootkit as anti-cheat - offline game that require online connectivety - online services get shutdown - LAN multiplayer is a thing of a past What did games exactly won? - Paid skyrim mods? It's back. - MS game sharing thing that rendered GameStop business model useless? IMO a mistake, MS was onto something there. |
I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.
Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.