re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
Not on Steam? No direct release? Steam released, but with a bunch of bolt on EULAs/Denuvo/3rd party launchers?
The seas will provide.
i don’t get the “steam good, other launchers bad”. it’s still a launcher and drm…
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
- good UI (store & settings)
- no forced ads
- reviews
- discussions
- workshop
- player stats
- a lot more settlings / options
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It’s more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
What do you mean “no forced ads”? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
You can turn that off.
https://majorgeeks.com/content/page/disable_steam_popups_notifications.html
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
I fail to see the distinction. If I want to just play a game, it’s still getting in my way.
Turn it off then and quit complaining about something so insignificant.
Up until this thread, I had tried several times to find out how to disable it. That setting name is obviously obfuscating itself.
I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.
Then stop reading. Some of you people are really aggravating.
Who people? Reality people?
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going “yeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe it’s fine to have some competition on PC storefronts” and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads they’re not ads, they’re the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
I don’t even like the Epic store.
Of fucking course Steam isn’t advertising soda, they sell games. It’s still an advertisement… just because it’s relevant to the platform you’re on doesn’t mean it’s not an advertisement.
Turn it off in the settings if it annoys you…
You can turn that off, you know
Removed by mod
Still think it’s a bit different, steam is essentially a store so I’m expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a “paid” product that shows you more ads on something you already “own”.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
- Steam Link
- Cloud storage for saves and screenshots
- Over the internet couch co-op (I don’t remember the name.
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
Theres also steamvr link to make meta’s quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via… well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That’s Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don’t get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming… but it’s not a gift, it’s either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesn’t use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and it’ll run fine. It’s still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
