PC gaming's many launchers, reviewed for 2024: Steam still puts the rest to shame
Let's put a score on them all—the good, the bad, and the GOGly.
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Steam has had years of first mover advantage. If it wasnt ahead it would be shameful.
There's truth to that, but there also isn't really any reason why we couldn't have a second exceptional launcher and store for games. It would be nice if we did.
Gog is a good competitor for a store. A launcher seems against the goals of drm free software though.
Yeah there's been plenty of competition with a lot of money behind them that have still failed to beat Steam, look at Epic
Epic chose to spend it's money buying exclusivity deals for games and pissing off consumers, rather than using it to build an actual competitor to Steam as a storefront/game launcher/mod manager/chat application.
Yeah, that's why they failed. They opted for really short sighted options and throwing money at it rather than actually trying to compete legitimately.
Sorry, didn't realize we were in agreement haha. I wonder if network effects would kill any real steam competitor before it has a chance, and maybe that's why Epic tried to capture that userbase first.
Another issue is that Steam already does so much for both the consumer and developers. People got all pissed about their 30% cut (mostly because Epic told them to tbh) but Steam actually does provide a lot of services for games on the platform like Workshop. I guess they technically provide forums too but those are a hell scape and would probably be better off destroyed.
