Last year, they all came crawlin' back to Steam, and this year was another strong one for Valve.

From the opinion piece:

Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.

  • AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    7·
    11 months ago

    Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.

    Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn’t suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?

    • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      I think it’s just priorities, those other companies weren’t interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.

      Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.

      At this point it’s actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don’t understand, but also the stuff most people don’t see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they’ve done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.

      Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they’re simply not going to be able to.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.

        Data, they were also interested in that sweet, sweet, data harvesting. Previously only Valve was grabbing all that via Steam.

    • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.

    • NekkoDroid@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      IMO my favorite launcher to use out of all is probably Battle.net, even over Steam. This is probably mostly because Steam is terrible unresponsive and its startup is still kinda ass (I just tested the start and noticed its 3 fucking loading screens: Verifying installtion, Logging in and finally loading the page. All as separate windows).