So I recently built a living room gaming PC. Installed Steam, Epic Store, GOG, Origin, XBOX, Rockstar Social Club, even Twitch. Pretty much anything where I have a library of games. And let me tell you, what a pain in the ass it is!
I keep all the games organized in Playnite. If I try to launch Epic games from Playnite, most of the time nothing happens. So I start the epic client and... oh look, it logged me out again. So now to play Maneater or whatever I have to log into my password manager with its complicated passphrase from a tiny HTPC keyboard, grab the password, paste it into Epic, wait for Epic to update, click the game icon again, and now it launches. Heaven forbid I actually set up 2FA, cause then I'd have to go through that too!
To say nothing of the fact that the Epic store runs like ass on a brand new third-gen six-core Ryzen CPU with an current-gen GPU and 16gigs of RAM.
Some of the other game stores behave just as bad as this... the only ones that actually seem to work reliably are Steam and GOG, and they've been around a while. Origin constantly nags about updates and "you logged in from another PC" bullshit, Rockstar can't seem to hold on to a session cookie to save its life, and the Twitch client is just a mess all around. XBOX kind of sucked in Beta but they finally fixed the worst issues there.
Multiple launchers is NOT ideal. We all have this fantasy idea that competition will make everything better but really what it results in is now we have a bunch of garbage launchers running on startup (and if you don't have fun waiting for them to update every time you launch them). Just like with streaming... competition is making everything worse
If you "don't spend time in an app store" you're either only using one or two of those launchers or you're lying. The last time things "just worked" was when Steam reigned supreme and unchallenged. (And that's not necessarily a good thing, nearly everyone knows that Valve is a good citizen solely because of management, and I have no doubt that one day that will change and Steam will suck.)
Absolutely agreed, but consider what would happen if only one of those game stores you mention were allowed to be installed on your gaming PC. Then you'd have to go through a single gatekeeper, and I bet you a bunch of the games you like just wouldn't be available at all, because they'd either have been capriciously rejected, or because their developers can't make the terms work to their satisfaction. But because this mythical single game store is the only game in town (heh), there's no recourse.
Or maybe most, or even all, of those games you play might be available on this single app store. But expect them to be worse, because their developers have to pay a middleman a larger fee for distribution, which leaves less money to build the game itself. Expect them to be missing features, because this gatekeeper makes it harder to build some features, even if it's through well-meaning policies.
It absolutely floors me that people on a site called Hacker News are praising the role of a gatekeeping corporation that locks down devices they own to the point that they don't even really own them.
You phrase this as an either/or proposition... either 1 app store with its gatekeepers and rules (and frankly, the Steam supremacy was a good king to live under...)
The real answer is neither. Fuck all these proprietary launchers and app stores. There are other answers.... personally I feel like these platforms need to be run and controlled by a nonprofit, with a charter that holds customers' and business' needs equally without a primary duty to greedy shareholders. Either that or sideloading
edit- and I think most folks are OK with living under a good , just king. Steam is this, and many argue that Apple was this at some point in their past. Since we are all apparently too stupid to handle a truly distributed method of installing software like sideloading or old-school brick and mortar retail, we have to learn to live with a store of some kind, with all that entails. And in that case, we're OK if the platform is fair and just
> because they'd either have been capriciously rejected, or because their developers can't make the terms work to their satisfaction
edit2- this never really happened with Steam, amazingly enough. Surely there are edge cases, and there are certainly reports of Steam staff working with devs to ensure a positive release (which is a nice way of saying they have probably forced developers to alter their product), and Valve has certainly made some bad decisions (which they thankfully backed down on). But Steam was such an improvement over the old distribution model that its downsides were almost unfairly outweighed by its upsides. And now they own the market with such a large competitive moat that Epic has to give away boatloads of free games (and good ones too!) and a PR campaign of trashing competitors just to seed their userbase.
You're not taking into account the differences in how App Store and Steam behaved
App Store has a natural monopoly on the iDevices. (And I would love to see this broken, a jailbroken iPhone in the old days was a wondrous thing) This is because Apple owns the platform and are heavily incentivized to use that integration to maximize their own profit and growth.
There are no such incentives on an open platform like Windows. Steam had to be better than the status quo and it seems they took that to heart, so much that entire ecosystems have built up around Valve's generosity -- ecosystems that compete with Steam itself -- and that Valve could pull the plug on tomorrow. But I bet they won't, because they seem to be interested in a vibrant and healthy ecosystem, and because their attitude of good stewardship is apparently quite rare these days, giving them a significant competitive advantage with mindshare.
It's a totally different ballgame. Google uses anticompetitive dealmaking and sheer force of will to try and achieve a semblance of what App Store does, and up until recently their success in that area was mixed at best. Google Play is closer to Steam in that regard, but their execution sucks.
But even if Steam was as vertically integrated as Apple something tells me they would be a lot more permissive and generous in how others sell on their platform. Steam offers a ton of value-add and, while I don't hang out in gamedev circles, the only bitching about price and Steam's 30% cut I've seen comes from Tim Sweeney and noone else
> Absolutely agreed, but consider what would happen if only one of those game stores you mention were allowed to be installed on your gaming PC.
That is how it was several years back with Steam and everything was just fine. The new stores that popped up are, with the exception of GoG and Itch.io, in the service of large companies.
I will only offer that finding content on Apple TV now that everyone has the ability to not only sell content but resell content (eg, HBO on Prime), it's gotten to the point where we sometimes give up on finding a particular movie or TV show and do something else.
I'd like other stores on iOS too, but there's a qualitative difference between 1, 3, and 6 vendors that doesn't necessarily make 6 better than 1. In fact 6 is probably default worse than 1, and requires active management and cooperation to make it behave.
You don't get a cheaper game, especially not if you live in India where Steam will basically give you a 66% discount on every single game automatically. The 18% fee reduction goes straight to the developer. I have spent quite a lot of time chatting with friends on my "App Store".
Having everything locked behind a single App Store is the perfect way for the government to enforce bans without building a “great firewall”. It’s no coincidence that a few days after Trump signed an executive order to ban TikTok/WeChat then Epic (heavily backed by Tencent) engaged in a PR-focused lawsuit that would encourage Apple to allow side-loading apps, which, if implemented, would allow Chinese companies to easily bypass the ban. It’s also worth noting that apps are already violating people’s privacy in so many ways (the latest example is copying clipboard text while running in the background) - without the App Store then there’s no doubt that the privacy violations would become even worse.
Instead of clicking icon A, I click icon B and if I get a cheaper game, all power to Epic.
I don't spend time in an app store. I spend time playing the game.