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The surprising thing is that PC is an open platform where people could compete with Steam on even terms if they actually did it well. Gamers don't like installi
by zaptheimpaler 2y ago
The surprising thing is that PC is an open platform where people could compete with Steam on even terms if they actually did it well. Gamers don't like installing 5 different game launchers and Steam is the oldest one with all their games and is mostly a neutral party.
I recently installed Playnite [1], an open source game library manager and its been incredible. It pulls in games from all launchers/sources and gives you a unified library. I think all it would take to bring down Steam prices is for studios to adopt one such project but they are too blindsided by the ambition to have their own platform. You still have to do all the downloads,licensing etc. but the fact that it's a unified launcher for all stores is enough for me to prefer it over others.
[1] https://playnite.link/ https://playnite.link/
- hakfoo 2y agoI wonder if what's actually needed is an interoperabiity feature for launchers. If I'm going to use something like Lutris or Playnite or even Steam to organize my games, a non-zero number of them are going to launch a game-specific launcher. Live-service games seem particularly fond of this, likely so they can show you a teaser while downloading a refreshed client. But if they could just publish a RSS feed for updates, the launcher could pull the new files and cut out the middleman.