I really had fun with it though the city building aspect starts to feel too loading bar heavy. I wish they had a more clever way to disguise that aspect of it.
I use steam for the ability to plug in any controller I want and instantly be able to use it. I can download controller maps from the community on the fly.
I can stream straight to my TV and play in any room with a TV in it with zero effort. I can join my friends games with two clicks. Remote play allows you to play games you don’t even own with your friends. Works on linux. Integrated workshop. Easy modding.
I use gog for older games not on steam. Works on linux. (Heroic at least)
I could go on with steam, but those are the key points stands alone games don’t offer.
Depending on how you make the game some launchers can make sense. You can set display options before launching the game. Back in ye olden times some games would launch by default in a set resolution which often made changing that in-game difficult as it would be off screen. Also makes your first time launching it a better experience than some low-res garbage. Also, without a platform like steam they can handle updates.
That being said, I don’t think most modern games need those functions. Graphics engines are pretty good at getting screen resolution from your os (not perfect). And platforms handle patches and updates.
Now they’re mostly there to gather metrics and shove ads in your face, and enforce drm.
Updating all of my games is a huge boost. I also enjoy the sync feature as I may play the same game on my desktop, HTPC, and Steam Deck. I like GOG allowing installing without their launcher, but I still just install games through Heroic Games Launcher for the same reasons as above.
I dont really need it but good launchers make things easier, especially on linux where sometimes a specific patch or version of something like proton is needed and i dont want to spend hours figuring it out by trial and error.
Im not a fan of launchers being required though, thats just DRM. But projects like Heroic launcher and Lutris are incredibly nice to have. Steam is alright, its hard to hate on a company that has done as much for linux gaming as valve has, but they do have their problems.
I may check out this GOG eventually. Accounts, subscriptions, micro transactions, and criminal proprietary extortion are why I stopped gaming for the most part. For me, it has been full-source or fuck off for a long time. I cannot fix stupid in anyone else but me. I will not support criminal extortion and bank account skimming scams. They only exist because people have no real moral depth and self respect to say no.
I played PC games since the early 90s, so I am well familiar with how things used to be before steam. And it was fine. I was hesitant to use steam at first, because like you say, I simply didn’t understand the point of it. Sometime after Valve released the orange box, that ended up being the first thing I bought on steam. And back then, some of the first things that I noticed about it was the ease of installing games, and the friends list that let me talk to and play games with my friends. I ended up getting really into team fortress 2, largely because I could play with people I knew, and we could even chat outside the game easily. It was easy to buy other games that these same friends were playing, and then enjoy a different game with them.
I got used to steam and it began to feel convenient, and at the same time, physical media started dying off. Steam let me easily install and uninstall any of my games whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to keep track of any physical media. I don’t have any of my old PC games from the 90s anymore. I have no idea where there went or how I lost them. But they are just gone. However, I still have every game I’ve ever bought on steam.
I’m not a heavy gamer anymore. If I see something I want, it’s easy to just put it on my wishlist and wait until it goes on sale at a price I think is reasonable. If I feel bored, I might open up my full list of games and browse for something to install. My game saves get backed up to the cloud. My controllers just work. Everything related to the gaming experience is integrated into one place, and I like that, it makes it easy. And for the most part, steam kind of just stays out of my way.
It can be convenient. You’re going to launch the games somehow, whether that’s clicking files in a folder or running a command. If you have a bunch of games it’s nice to see them neatly organized in one place with nice visual representation. Non-launcher options tend to either get unwieldy or require more customization work.
The Steam launcher does a whole bunch of other useful things, like managing saves, setting up Proton, tracking play time and achievements, connecting to friends, integrating the store. It’s not hard to see why people like the convenience.
It is annoying when it goes too far… like individual games that insist on having their own launcher.
Heroic is a nice middle ground. GoG gives you simple downloads, that you can then choose to access through Heroic.
Out of all the features Steam offers, the most useful is probably just automatic updates. Much better than having to go check for an update myself and maybe even redownload the whole game every time instead of just the changes.
Also Steam Workshop, multiplayer (if it goes through Steamworks), controller fixes, screenshot and recording functions, chat, forums, etc.
One reason is Achievements. You need software to track it, and it is better to let the platform do it and consolidate all the common code and related UI, but that means there would be a platform process (e.g. Steam launcher / GOG Galaxy) running in the background to process them.
Games get updates far more often than they did back in the 90s and 00s. If your game is installed, it’s pushed to you automatically. If it’s not installed, the next time you install it, you’ll be on the latest version.
Installing a game is passive compared to inserting the next disc, fishing out the serial key, etc. You just click download and walk away for 5 minutes. Likewise, as games are very large these days, you can easily uninstall and reinstall games on limited drive space very easily from the same UI.
Cloud saves. They’re always nice to have. You can rig up something like it if you’ve got the networking and scripting know-how, but once again, it’s just passive through a launcher like Steam.
There’s a lot to be said about the longevity of network multiplayer games that allow you to self host and port forward, but Steam and its ilk mean that the average person never has to learn how to do that ever, and it’s more secure for the end users for Steam to take on the burden of facilitating the connection.
With things like Steam’s Big Picture Mode, you can navigate an entire library and jump from game to game with nothing but a controller.
Launching a game via Proton, whether in Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, or Steam, is just easier and more automatic than not using a launcher.
All that said, there’s a lot of value to GOG for never requiring the launcher (but they make an annoying exception for network multiplayer games).
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