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My 100 Croatian Lipa: Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, compre
by NikolaNovak 5y ago
My 100 Croatian Lipa:
Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way.
No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the consumer - why do I need Uplay, Origins, Bethesda launcher, any of them, let alone all of them? What purpose do they serve, other than an annoying mandatory layer? Why do I need Battle.net for the one game I play on there?
Given the lack of positive value proposition, even seemingly minor annoyances are perceived as massive friction. For example, I find Microsoft's offers infuriating - I cannot understand their subscription tiers or services at all, they all have meaningless generic Xbox names that change every 6 months to a different meaningless set of Xbox names, and completely mangle what one can expect as a PC owner, or Xbox owner, or both. I have no idea which Xbox-named offering or app does what and how they relate. It's like IBM naming everything "Watson". I inadvertently committed to a multi-month months subscription thinking one of the games I wanted is available on the cloud, only to discover I was completely mistaken - and it took me a WHILE to confirm that to my satisfaction. I don't know if they are confusing out of ineptitude or intentionally.
Geforce Now, on the other hand, has a meaningful value proposition to me: it lets me play games on the cloud, on any of my devices, and when away from home. That has benefits and value to me that I can clearly understand. It's seamless, it provides clear value to ME, the consumer, and then gets out of the way.
Same with GoG - it lets me download games DRM free onto my machine and save them for the upcoming apocalypse.
Everybody else is just a pain in my kiester :-/
- smcl 5y agoI already thought it was cute that the Crotian currency was "kuna", I had no idea it was also subdivided into "lipa" too :D For others: kuna means "pine marten" and lipa is "linden tree" in many Slavic languages
- NikolaNovak 5y agoThings are no less cute in my new country with Loons and Moose :->
- slavik81 5y agoI own Mirror's Edge on EA Origin. I bought it shortly after release. I still have the box with the CD key. I can still download and install the game. However, I can't launch the game because I've exceeded the install limit of five copies. I need to run the deauthenticator utility on the computers I installed the game on, but that's not possible because those hard drives were wiped years ago. I generally trust Valve to treat me fairly, but EA, Ubisoft, Konami and Bethesda (ZeniMax) have not earned that same trust.
- ssl232 5y agoIt's in this situation where pirating the game is 100% justifiable. You literally own it already.
- baud147258 5y agoIt's exactly what I did last time I couldn't play a game I bought on Steam because of third party DRM issues; though that time it was with Ubisoft and their new uplay that wasn't compatible with the game (and I don't think I had my uplay account information anyway)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Macha 5y agoSimilarly EA banned my Steam issued Red Alert 3 key from multiplayer because it had been used by too many users and refused to help. I never shared the key anywhere, and only installed it on 3 machines over 5 years.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoMy Steam copy of the original Crysis has the same issue. Not necessarily Steam's fault, but other publishers can always stack their own DRM on top of the Steam DRM. And yep, EA published Crysis.