You can go that way. I'd rather have a front-end to manage it, but having the option means you can do it manually, rely on Galaxy or use a third party front-end pretty interchangeably.
Who wants Steam gone? You can't have competition without competitors.
I want Steam to exist. And Epic. And definitely GOG. Wouldn't mind at all if GOG was the leader of that pack, or at least if Steam implemented similar policies to theirs.
What I don't want is Steam dominating 80% of the market and making it impossible to make PC games without giving them 30% of everything you make. That's bad.
We actually used to be a bit generally mad about it. Plenty of big declarations about skipping Half-Life 2, when that used mandatory Steam authentication for the first time. A bit of a feeding frenzy to crack it in retaliation, too.
Being old makes it harder to get super mad about this.
All else being equal, yes, I prefer games being platform agnostic.
If I have to choose, though, I only care about them being available on PC in the first place (and on GOG, DRM-free, if at all possible). And I certainly, certainly, am nowhere near getting mad at them signing a deal to get money from Epic in exchange for exclusivity. Go hussle, game devs. Do what you gotta do to get by. If anything, it sucks how much less commerically viable doing that seems to be than just launching on Steam alone, going by the performance of recent Ubisoft releases.
Yeah. Because Steam has DRM. Steam IS DRM. That's the problem it originally solved, back when Amazon was still a bookstore.
So screw Steam and other overprotective corporations, I want my PC games DRM-free, since physical copies aren't an option (which is my console solution, thank you very much). They can come meet my requirements or I will continue to prioritize GOG where I can and be annoyed at the lack of a GOG release otherwise. I don't want GOG to give up on the DRM requirement, I want them to get so popular that publishers have to comply with it whether they like it or not.
So from that perspective, if Epic and Steam want to have a pissing contest, I'm in full "let them fight" mode. Who cares.
Oh, it's nicer for them, I assume, but again, I'm not your bizdev guy. Their lawyers can do the paperwork, I just care about the game.
Plus, I think you're misjudging PC ports. The "obstacles" are actually for shipping on consoles, which require expensive dev kits and complex certification and submission requirements. PC ports are easy, you probably have a PC build running for development anyway and PC platforms really don't give a crap about compliance requirements.
If it's not on PC it's a business decision, not about complexities. Having to sign a contract in exchange for money isn't an "added obstacle", it's a motivation to do it in the first place.
Those are pretty similar deals, honestly. In many cases the exclusivity deal gets signed because without the up-front cash the game can't get done. You give up some long-term sales for the up front money and the better revenue split. In both cases it's about resources.
And, again, in both cases that decision can be reviewed later. Either because it's baked into the timed exclusivity or because all contracts can be amended.
But also, there isn't a moral stance here. As a user I care about where and how I can play the game, I don't care about the reasons. I don't need to approve your business agreements before I play your videogame, I'm not your lawyer.
The level of quasi-religious fervor is... kind of scary. Especially given that it's over this one billionare techbro. I mean, good for them, they have a great product and a better understanding of how to make money with only light enshittification, but still...
Because not having a game available is not having a game available. You still, and I can't believe I have to type this twice, don't get to play the stupid game.
For the record, I blamed Steam for nothing here. Some guy said he feels more assured that Steam will keep Linux compatibility, I pointed out that this is not the case. It's not even Steam's fault, compatibility is being dropped either for technical reasons or due to anticheat, and there is no indication that it will be any different with Epic going forward.
I'm not angrier at something being absent from Steam because Epic paid for an exclusive than I am at any other reason why a game wouldn't make it to my storefront of choice.
Which is, let's be clear, very lightly angry. This is choosing a store to buy videogames, not seeking revenge for my clan in holy war.
Yeah, there are a bunch of third party launchers with integrations. Launchbox will do most PC storefronts.
I wish Galaxy was a bit lighter, though, because once I plug in everything it supports we start getting into five digit counts and the whole thing slows to a crawl. It's a bit better now, but it was borderline unusable at some points.
They all have a chance at getting re-released later, unless they are first party (and these days even then).
I mean, Uncharted 4 is on GOG. Not The Last of Us, for some reason. That sucks.
I'd love to see Mario Galaxy on PC officially, but that's not gonna happen, I'm not gonna get mad about it. But Alan Wake II? Yeah, that'll probably make it elsewhere.
Ultimately all it takes for an exclusivity deal to be lifted is for the people involved to agree to lift it. That can be because the exclusivity is timed or because they got to some agreement on it. There is no fundamentally nefarious reason getting paid for exclusivity is worse than Valve being the only platform that is viable for a particular release. The impact is the same.
Maybe I'm just too old and can't cope with the weird whiplash of being there to hear people rage about Final Fantasy showing up on Xbox only to then see this weird vitriol for a storefront compensating devs to get an exclusive on a game inside the same platform.
Like, I get being mad that you'd have to buy a different console to play a thing, but dude, it's a free piece of software, you can just... install it.
Honestly, both things are sheer tribalism and I've never been there for it. Not since the dumb Sega vs Nintendo schoolyard nonsense.
No, that's not how that works at all. Monopolies are bad (and indeed unlawful) even if people think you got them by being super cool.
Google didn't get a monopoly on advertising and search by sucking at it. They had the best search engine and design in a crowded market and that's why you don't say you "Altavista'd" something. But that's still a bad thing and they still should get broken up into manageable chunks, as current regulators are trying to do. Ditto for Apple and all these other oligopolistic online companies.
And... you know, Valve. Maybe. At some point. Not quite there yet. But that's bad even if you like Steam or if they have the better feature set. Which they do. Especially if they have the better feature set, in fact, because like all these other oligopolistic companies, the more time they have to establish dominance and get people to sink further into their ecosystem the harder it is to break it up later. That's true of kebabs AND software platforms.
So are you okay with exclusives but only when the developer is not getting paid for it? Or only when it's on Steam because you just happen to like Steam?
That's such a weird take. It owns the inconsistency so thoroughly I have trouble navigating it.
Since apparently I have to explain this for some reason, I don't particularly like exclusives in general and prefer platform-agnostic games so I can pick where to get them. but if you're only going to support a store, I'm perfectly fine with developers getting paid by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, Epic or whever else. You do you and keep your workers employed any way you see fit.
And when I get a choice I tend to pick GOG because... well, they don't need a little reminder that you're not buying the game you're buying in the payment page, so I get to back up my installers and keep them forever.
Now, THAT is a criticsm of Steam that I'm actually making here.
Well, yeah, presumably they all do. I'm sure the kebab place next door would love to have a monopoly, it just doesn't look like it's in the cards, you know?