openmic.social is an uncensored community. You may encounter strong language, controversial opinions, and mature or NSFW material. You must be 18+ to browse. Illegal content is prohibited and removed on sight — please report it. By continuing, you accept that you may see content you personally disagree with.
Steam. Apparently I’m supposed to be angry they are a locked down monopoly but compared to practically EVERY OTHER GAMING COMPANY IN THE WORLD they are frickin’ saints.
They’ve done so much for gaming on Linux I forgive them for having a convenient launcher that launches everything
Yeah, it’s one of those things where one could argue that steam is successful in part to being entrenched (all of your friends are on steam and all of your games are on steam, so might as well continue using steam), but also… other game launchers are just worse? The fact steam has a lot of useful features, as well as surprisingly few scummy incidents in its history just makes it not worth switching off for me :p
Do other launchers have the workshop functionality to add mods directly from their launcher? That’s been something I love about steam
All the ones I can think of are for individual games rather than general launchers lol. And third party mod launchers that you have to add your own games obtained elsewhere :p
For me steam input the big one that pulls me towards steam; seamless proton integration too, but that one I could handle losing, steam input on the other hand I think is one of the best input remappers out there, I even added all my non-steam games to steam to make use of it too haha
Yeah, I saw an article about Epic’s CEO having a gormless rant about Steams AI filtering and how but Steam was for them.
All I could think was: “well, make a better product then”
GOG Galaxy is the only launcher / storefront that comes close to competing with Steam, and that is because the one thing they do better:
DRM-free games.
The rest is about equal or slightly worse.
If Epic looked at the customer base and analyzed what people wanted I am sure they could build a better platform than Steam, but with a CEO as unlikable as Epic’s and with his trackrecord it would take many years of hard work and effort to even begin to come close to Steam.
It would probably take some massive PE/VC enforced changes at Valve where they start to enshittify Steam and the loss of confidence in the platform that will follow to make the other platforms competitive.
Make no mistake, it’s coming eventually. I held off on trusting discord for years buy finally they won me over. Now look where we are.
Never again.
Valve has been around since 1996, Steam since 2003
Discord has been around since 2015 and was funded on VC money.
Kind of different situations lmao.
Sure, but once Gabe passes the torch it’s just a matter of if the person(s) getting it gets a big enough blank check to walk away from it
That’s true, but we’re not at that point yet so… What is your point? They’ve managed to thrive as a private corporation up to this point, clearly everyone working there is making bank too and treated well. (From all accounts I’ve read) so I’d hope the incentive is higher to keep with the same philosophy for whoever comes after. Of course hard to say, can’t undercut the greed some people have for making more money then they literally could ever spend.
I have decided to bite the sour apple, as we say in Sweden, and overpay for the last two hard drives for my NAS build to complete it, then I will grab every offline installer for my games I can find and keep a local copy.
32TB of storage that can loose two drives before any data loss, a solid start for backups, media and software.
I buy based on trust, and at this time, steam hasn’t lost it.
They’ve made their drm more lax over the years while Sony and microslop have worsened theirs. Like how you couldn’t easily play your games offline before steam deck.
Still buying my games from GOG first though.