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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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People love a launcher. People hate multiple launchers. People despise launchers they use for a single game.
That said, it probably wasn't the launcher that killed sales, other than the fact that it wasn't on Steam for some random discovery sales. People who wanted to play the new COD bought it, and then found out what the launcher was, not the other way around.
I agree, but certainly not all launchers are at the same maturity. I love Steam because it's so much greater than the sum of its parts -- community controller layouts, cloudsaves, Workshop, forums and community content, a marketplace. I do have other launchers with a fair share of games (GOG for example), but still it's not nearly the experience of Steam.
As a couch gamer, my setup is wholly reliant on Steam. Big Picture mode makes it viable to navigate using only a gamepad, every other launcher requires a mouse.
Maybe I'm the odd one out but I like the individual game launchers. Having everything grouped into steam, epic, ubisoft, etc can be convenient but then you run into issues when those services have downtime. Not to mention they include lots of bloat (if I want a program to download and run 1 specific game, I don't want to download an entire store, library, forums, and social network along with it).
The issue is when the launcher for that one game is also a launcher for a bunch of other games you don't want, is otherwise unnecessarily bloated, and full of ads....
May as well just Steam....
Edit: I don't mind a launcher for a game, if it's just for the one game. Do me some updates and news about happenings in game while it installs? Cool, I can dig.
Try and shove 7 other games down my throat and sell me a bunch of shit, have a launcher that's unnecessarily large for basically being a download/install manager? Get fucked.
I don't think lumping steam in with epic and ubi is valid. I can't recall any significant downtime on steam in the years and years I've used it. Even if my internet is down, my locally installed games are still functional.
Steam is actually just a web browser. The store and forums and such are just web pages. You're not downloading anything proprietary to steam. You can do the same in firefox or whatever.
I'm a little confused at your perception of things. I don't see things that way at all.