At some point, someone needs to make a law to break these monopolies.
How about forcing stores to allow moving games into another store. For example, allow me to move a game from steam to the epic games store, or the other way around. Then the whole “but I have all my games on Steam already” problem would be solved when switching to new stores.
What’s better is requiring games to not be tied to any launcher. There shouldn’t be a need for a game to be constantly connected to the internet and need a secondary app running in the background.
But with the way it is now, I loathe the other launchers besides Steam. Steam actually provides some value and not completely unnecessary bloatware. Steam has my friends on it and has meaningful ways for me to engage my friends inside and outside of games. Steam has dedicated forums and mod queues built right into it. Steam has a great refund policy, including games that go back on their unwritten and written promises months or years after release (think Helldivers 2).
Whereas the other launchers are just cheap knockoffs for the sole purpose of corporate branding and to escape the Valve tax (which I can understand is a bit much to charge 30% just to be on Steam) that don’t work nearly as well and haven’t for many years, with ugly redesigns being the biggest changes they’ve made since their original releases. It’s coincidental how EA and Ubisoft look exactly the same in their newest redesigns and theirs plus Epic’s all have that same annoying bug that doesn’t actually remember your username and password and will require you to verify even though you checked the box to remember this PC.
Either way, I wish I didn’t need any launcher, including Steam, to launch games I paid for. It’s comical I can have that experience by pirating the game and the company generates no money from me and I get exactly what I wanted.
The only semi good case for nfts I’ve heard is as licensing. Say a game marketplace sells you a nft license for a game, you put that into steam as essentially a cd key. Then if some other library software had better features down the line you could transfer the licenses.
At some point, someone needs to make a law to break these monopolies.
How about forcing stores to allow moving games into another store. For example, allow me to move a game from steam to the epic games store, or the other way around. Then the whole “but I have all my games on Steam already” problem would be solved when switching to new stores.
What’s better is requiring games to not be tied to any launcher. There shouldn’t be a need for a game to be constantly connected to the internet and need a secondary app running in the background.
But with the way it is now, I loathe the other launchers besides Steam. Steam actually provides some value and not completely unnecessary bloatware. Steam has my friends on it and has meaningful ways for me to engage my friends inside and outside of games. Steam has dedicated forums and mod queues built right into it. Steam has a great refund policy, including games that go back on their unwritten and written promises months or years after release (think Helldivers 2).
Whereas the other launchers are just cheap knockoffs for the sole purpose of corporate branding and to escape the Valve tax (which I can understand is a bit much to charge 30% just to be on Steam) that don’t work nearly as well and haven’t for many years, with ugly redesigns being the biggest changes they’ve made since their original releases. It’s coincidental how EA and Ubisoft look exactly the same in their newest redesigns and theirs plus Epic’s all have that same annoying bug that doesn’t actually remember your username and password and will require you to verify even though you checked the box to remember this PC.
Either way, I wish I didn’t need any launcher, including Steam, to launch games I paid for. It’s comical I can have that experience by pirating the game and the company generates no money from me and I get exactly what I wanted.
That would never happen.
The only semi good case for nfts I’ve heard is as licensing. Say a game marketplace sells you a nft license for a game, you put that into steam as essentially a cd key. Then if some other library software had better features down the line you could transfer the licenses.
Well, there is no need to use NFTs for that. Can just be done in any other usual way.
Nfts are just invoices with extra steps