I have no vitriol for all the steam competitors. Epic gives me a ton of free games that I don't play, gog releases are incredibly easy to pirate, all the proprietary ubi/ea/blizzard stores don't bother me cos I don't play those games.
By all means microsoft join the digital storefront battle and bring some more xbox exclusives to your PC store, exclusively. I'll obtain them the same way I always do every other game.
Microsoft couldn't fight steam if you gave them trillions and 100 years because i mean they made the microsoft store and the xbox PC gamepass app and they're fucking diabolical. And at no point have they ever been fixed or improved or even understand the concept of what they're trying to deliver. Also battlenet only works for the like 10 games on it, it's about as shit as any other crappy client.
It won't and never will compete with steam
They won't compete with Steam because Steam is trying to master the entire digital delivery pipeline and nobody else is. Not Blizzard, not Microsoft, not Epic, not Ubisoft, not EA. Of course Valve is trying to build a platform they can profit off of, but they are doing it by mastering the entire digital delivery pipeline and treating digital delivery as a service for all parties involved rather than looking at digital delivery as a cost savings or a cost control.
Until someone enters the market with the goal of actually improving on digital delivery, nobody will ever compete with Steam.
Okay, hear me out. We make a horrible UI that is infuriating to use. We implement most of the things that Steam does, and we do it poorly. We don't innovate anything; that's for idiots. Then we spend hundreds of millions of dollars getting publishers to exclusively release their games on our platform. Then we spend even more money giving away games to entice the dummies to use our garbage platform.
Since it’s Microsoft they’re gonna undermine themselves by making the dumbest most public anti-consumer move the second their market share grows by like half a percent. I think the console space and their Microsoft/xbox store show that if Microsoft is your main competitor, you basically have a monopoly.
Didn't they already try pushing into the gaming market with their Windows Store versions of games?
Did anyone even use the Windows Store besides the elderly who just wanted their goddamn Solitaire back?
I had to use it for Gears of War 4 and Gears of War UE. My experiences:
- It’s taking half an hour to start the download. What the fuck is it doing?
- Oh good, it’s almost installed. Oh it paused for some reason? No problem I’ll just resume- oh, it’s just restarted the whole 120GB download.
- I’ll restart my PC because Steam can pick up where it pauses between restarts and surely Microsoft the creator of the fucking OS can get something basic like that correct- oh I guess not.
- Oh sweet an update for Gears, oh wait no it’s redownloading the entire game to apply the update.
- Why isn’t the update downloading? Oh support is telling me I need to uninstall and reinstall the game. Oh that didn’t work this time and instead I need to enter an obscure
wsresetcommand instead? - What do you mean I can’t access the game folder to look at the files?
- Why isn’t the game launching any more? It’s just stuck on the splash screen. Oh the store says it’s corrupt? It needs a full redownload again.
Not to mention the issues with Microsoft sign in/Teredo once in-game.
The Xbox app has the same issues because it’s just a differently coloured UI over the same APIs. They’ve had multiple decades and still can’t get the basics right, I think Steam will be fine.
What do you mean I can’t access the game folder to look at the files?
This pissed me off so much. I couldn't uninstall something so I figured I'd just delete the folder. "Access denied" from my own harddrive. Leave it to the OS developers to make the most effective malware
Not scared-- Microsoft can't help but shit in their own oatmeal with every move; and I can continue treating Blizzard games as I have since Overwatch 1 became too wallet-grabby-- ignore it so I don't need whatever bullshit loader they try to push on my machine.
Suck my ass Microsoft, I'll never fall for your digital game rental schemes
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
