Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
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Yeah. Because Steam has DRM. Steam IS DRM. That’s the problem it originally solved, back when Amazon was still a bookstore.
So screw Steam and other overprotective corporations, I want my PC games DRM-free, since physical copies aren’t an option (which is my console solution, thank you very much). They can come meet my requirements or I will continue to prioritize GOG where I can and be annoyed at the lack of a GOG release otherwise. I don’t want GOG to give up on the DRM requirement, I want them to get so popular that publishers have to comply with it whether they like it or not.
So from that perspective, if Epic and Steam want to have a pissing contest, I’m in full “let them fight” mode. Who cares.
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Yeah, and they were all failing at it.
Until Steam.
We actually used to be a bit generally mad about it. Plenty of big declarations about skipping Half-Life 2, when that used mandatory Steam authentication for the first time. A bit of a feeding frenzy to crack it in retaliation, too.
Being old makes it harder to get super mad about this.
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Who wants Steam gone? You can’t have competition without competitors.
I want Steam to exist. And Epic. And definitely GOG. Wouldn’t mind at all if GOG was the leader of that pack, or at least if Steam implemented similar policies to theirs.
What I don’t want is Steam dominating 80% of the market and making it impossible to make PC games without giving them 30% of everything you make. That’s bad.
Zero DRM isn’t the only reason games aren’t published on GOG right away, and that may not even be the main reason for the countless games that release day one without Denuvo.
GOG also doesn’t have the best infrastructure for pushing updates. Stories abound of it being a slow process, whether physically uploading the files or authentication taking a while. Invariably, game updates will show up later on GOG than they will on Steam. GOG also has a very consumer-friendly return policy. All that, combined with it being simply a smaller marketplace, doesn’t place it well in cost-benefit analysis.