Mark my word, once Gabe pass it’s gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn’t rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn’t actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS’s deals. (Let’s be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)
And to my experience, Steam’s recent years’ updates to store/client are not something I like as well.
- I don’t like the gamification of sales event etc.
- I don’t like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
- I also don’t like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
- I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.
For EGS,
- their search sucks
- library page sucks, you can’t really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
- auto updates are pretty on par so that’s okay.
- their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it’s far worse than steam one.)
- I like that they adopted Nintendo’s gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
- games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it’s similar on steam as well.)
I want to finish reading your post but now I’m just too sad about the thought of GabeN dieing
I will say one of the things i don’t like about egs is nothing similar to steamvr, I still highly enjoy my index and want that industry to do well and refuse to invest in a store with no skin in the vr game.
also, I’m finished with windows forever and steam has native Linux support while egs needs a weird combo of wine, bottles, and lutris to be able to achieve something somewhat similar
that’s right, Linux also have a worrisome spot as shown by RedHat, you can gain sort of dominating position and cut off the older GPL source access. And it would be very dangerous to have some popular distro slowly acquired and then merged into a single one. I am not active Linux user at home but like you I would probably peace out if Windows goes subscription model. (they current pricing I’d still willing to spend a couple hundred and let the OS updated for 10+ years. (windows 10 almost 10 years. )