Permanently Deleted

  • blobjim [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    because I suspect they’re aware the “I don’t want more than one launcher” issue gets worse

    Except they probably use their clients to collect information about your computer, what programs and hardware you have installed, and sell or at least use that information for marketing and business decisions, so they won't want to support a standard launcher. Plus with their own launchers they can introduce you to the store page and notify you of stales and junk. And also supporting standards actually requires some effort and cooperation and desire to improve things which most of these companies have none of.

    • Helmic [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Possibly, but I think the value of that data is less valuable than not paying Valve 30% of their sales revenue, data is worth money but certainly not that much, especially when they're struggling to have many concurrent installations and especially when the games themselves could collect telemetry just fine. I'd imagine such a standardized launcher could also easily support multiple storefronts. Agreeing on the standard in the first place would take effort but also corporations do that all the time anyways when it suits them.

      • blobjim [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Most companies with their own launchers attract people to them with exclusive titles (their own games) and they probably don't lose thaaat much revenue. EA has a bunch of properties, Blizzard has a bunch, Epic Games has Fortnite, and so on. However, EA did recently decided to release their games on Steam again, I think they've probably negotiated a better profit-sharing agreement (most big companies can do this), although it still just launches their own game launcher. It doesn't really seem like the paradigm of Steam as industry leader and other launchers just... existing, is going anywhere. Having annoying launchers probably isn't going to lose them many sales, although with GTAV and RDR2, the Rockstar launcher is infuriatingly bad and might lose some sales.