The Current state of Multi PC Game Markets/Launchers

Gaming
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The TLDR: Publishers believe the following:

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The Longer Version

The current state of pc gaming is where we have multiply launchers and stores for our games. Battle. net , Origin, Uplay, GOG Galaxy, Steam, Epic Launcher, Windows Store, and the individual launchers for all those mmo games.

PC Gamers have a lot to manage. You make an account and password for each of these. Also you turn on 2FA because if you play on pc you really should turn that on for all your launchers.

How did we reach this point?

The multi launchers has been normal for MMO players for awhile. Look as MMO player I played more than one. I got use to the idea of having a launcher for each game. It makes sense for mmos. For most games on GOG the GOG Galaxy launcher is optional and the games are DRM free.

For this discussion, I’m leaving out Battle. net.

Let me make on thing clear:

NO BRAND OR COMPANY IS YOUR FRIEND.

Valve’s Steam has come a long way from it’s humble beginnings. The problem with Steam right now is it is a giant dumpster in desperate need of a revamp and overhaul. It may have a mass quantity of games but not all of them are good or even work. Good Indie games get buried and the only way to find out about them is by a reviewer or someone tells you.

Steam Sales are great deals on good games but Steam does take a slice out of every purchase. EA launching Origin was all about getting every penny for the games they made. Origin was terrible when it first launched but it is stable now. If you want to buy the Latest EA games then you buy them on Origin. People got use to the idea of having two launchers for games.

Uplay - At first it was just Ubisoft adding another layer of DRM. Uplay was terrible when it first launched. Thankful it isn’t that bad anymore. I only have a few games that I play by Ubisoft. It looks like I’ll have to buy any future Ubisoft game directly from them which I don’t have an issue with. I can understand why others would and do.

GOG - DRM FREEDOM . GOG started with a simple premise of Good Old Games DRM free. They have moved pasted the Good Old Games era but still sell the games DRM free. However they do sell games that have online multiplayer and those require the GOG Galaxy. I don’t mind the optional launcher because it gives me a simple interface to interact with.

Windows Store - … No one should buy a game on there. Microsoft needs a serious overhaul when it comes to pc gaming. They have made a good step with bringing the Halo MCC to steam and I hope it means we’ll see more from them.

Epic Store/Launcher - Epic has made some early misteps with the Epic Store. Before I get into that, I want to bring two things to everyone’s attention. The publishers that publish on Epic have an option to not have DRM on the game. Also the normal 5% fee for using Unreal Engine [Epic’s Engine] is waved. Metro Exodus being allowed to be preordered for months before 2 weeks prior to release, gets announced to be a 1 year exclusive on pc. Look that move creates a lot of bad well and mistrust. Then there is the story that Epic may be spying on your steam folder/friend list [rumor]. The concerns surrounding the Epic store are valid in my opinion and Epic can work on addressing and fixing those concerns. The store lacks many basic features but they do have a road map . Epic isn’t going away. A large amount of games are made with the Unreal Engine. If Epic addresses the concerns and makes the store better is a wait and see.

What do you think of the current state of pc game marketplaces/launchers?

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Pinned till 3/30/2019

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I want my games DRM free and in my hands, as that’s a pipe dream I use playnite and just collate them in one spot.

Epic is just following in Valves footsteps tbh. Valve did everything Epic is doing, just way before twitter was around. I don’t like it but someone needs to hold valves feet to the fire, they have been lazy.

P.S.
Itch.io also has a launcher, no love for the little guy? :frowning:

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Game companies would be a lot better if they fired a few of their lawyers and hired some open source developers.

Licensing is the issue in my eyes, not greed. Promotional deals with hardware manufacturers that have technical implications (use this rendering stack because it’s optimized for us!).

Licensing content. Do we really need a sixteenth game in the franchise? I think it’s still possible to create new content, but game companies seem to disagree.

Why open source developers, even though the games themselves won’t be open source until Hell freezes over?

Cross-company collaboration, reusable code, comformance to standards, reduction of effort duplication.

libgames should be a thing. Common frameworks should be a thing. Mods should have common distribution systems. Unlocked achievements should be ActivityPub events.

Games are such a weird player experience because game development is unlike any other kind of software development. It’s like they’re cranking out the best code that could have come out of the MPAA in 2000.

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Copyright law is so up its own ass, I am suprised no company has sued themself yet.

The launchers… little leachers that each hog 120MB and some CPU cycles doing nothing. I hate everyone of them except for GoG because GoG does a lot right by not doing it.

The future looks so dark, becoming an author/reader only seems like a good idea…

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I don’t mind Steam that much since it is a decent option to get games from. Would rather get a game from GoG though since it’s DRM free. Generally my go-to store for PC games at this point if it’s an option over Steam. But Steam has plenty of it’s benefits to the PC platform to this day, but not without some issues.

Steam does take a slice out of every purchase but I mean software developers already make more off of a single game on Steam (assuming the same price of course) than on consoles anyways.

Uplay I never had the chance to even try, Ubisoft publishing games on their platform isn’t that bad if they don’t get too crazy with BS like DRM.

As for Epic Store goes, they have some strikes against them for their privacy issues that they are already giving users. I can’t say I trust that store to have respect for it’s consumers. I know the developers get paid more on their platform but I don’t see what’s wrong with how they were paid before. If it was a problem before everyone would be up and arms about it. And like I said, even with the 30% cut they still make more money selling it off of Steam or GoG per purchase than they do on consoles so if that was somehow an issue then I don’t see how they managed at all.

I definitely agree with Steam’s need to have some level of quality control and why they aren’t helping in that regard. If they want to keep the edge they have in PC gaming they need to try moderating it properly. Their moderation is pretty poor and they even allow games like Active Shooter or a game about raping women (forgot the name) and those games exist for no other reason than to just push boundaries like the punk ass devs they are. I would be more than inclined to consider them toxic to the store’s health. Those two games both got taken down but only because of public outcry did they respond. And it’s not just controversial games that have no purpose of existing, it’s those asset flipped games that also have no purpose of existing. (I am not against Asset Flipping but if you can’t display creativity nor inspiration, then what’s the point of that “game”)

I seen quite a few of these low effort games as of late on their page and it’s not good for them to be showing that off when they could be showing off proper Indie games or proper games in general since there are plenty of good ones to go around. Honestly a revision in their store is within their power, it’s just a matter if they will smarten up and do it or not.

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Eh, I would generally consider greed an issue though with all the stuff that goes on with some of the AAA developers but that’s more of a societal issue that has a bigger scope than just gaming.

Still, I understand what you mean about the horrid licensing issues.

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I am a bigger fan of " mmo client launchers because of the fact they often have tools to help with dialing in your game for your system" or repair file corruption ect…

Steam / Epic / Origin do often data mine and privacy invade to also inflict DRM on to top if it.

GoG lack DRM but you have to research specific settings and make adjustment to make the old games run… Not terrible but not noob friendly per say.

In the end… I am a bigger fan of the mmo client launchers but that can be abused in the same manner as the rest of it.

Its a nightmare gaming industry these days just trying to remember all the login passwords.

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I don’t care. I double-click an icon, the game starts, doesn’t matter what launcher it uses.

I also don’t care about store exclusives. What Epic did with Metro: Exodus, cutting it out of Steam just because launch, was pretty crappy, but they had their mea culpas and said they wouldn’t do that again.

If it bugs you not knowing which service you bought a game on, install Playnite. It consolidates all the launchers into one meta-launcher.

https://playnite.link/

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That is literally not true for launching games… Older pc games on say something like GoG.

Or even for some of client launchers.

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Playnite fully supports GOG.

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Something to look at and consider… Nice concept.

25 days old. We will see.

Glyph does not exist to it… I bet I can find a few more odd balls.

It does hit the popular basics.

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Playnite is nice. I use it, super easy and clean

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Shugs… but misses stuff. Most of my library is not locked into the steam origin epic gog thing.

To me, it needs more work. Clean maybe but I will never really care for the google.ms design style.

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You can grab non-client games too, both manually and automatically. You can in app download emulators which is nice.

As for looks, you can fix that if you want (or find skins). It can do lists like most clients, or covers, or just bare bones details. There is a built in modern or classic look, classic is better imo

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I think Steam is here for the long haul. They are the OG and they really are more of a store then a developer at this point. They are reliable, haven’t dumped anyones games due to a migration or move to a new business model. I think steam as a whole is taken for granted.

Microsoft store will be here forever because microsoft makes enough money to not care about things losing money. There is no guarantee it won’t change completely and dump your games or downloads because of policy changes.

Uplay is ok. Not the best or worst. It started out as DRM and now is moving to its own storefront model. Might stick around in the long haul.

Window store is meant to be a copy of the App store or Android store. Its pretty unreliable due to windows 10 updates favoring the lates versionbs and the possibility of account corruption affecting the ability to download your games from update to update. It will be around a long time but maybe not in this form. Microsoft makes enough money on OS and Office licensing, it can afford to toss money on its continue development.

Epic store - Don’t have any epic games, don’t use it. Can’t really comment.

Physical media is nice but not feasable in the long run. Unless people maintain pcs from different eras the ability to play those games will be dimished or lost completely over time. With GoG and to a lesser degree Steam we do see release s that make an effort to update things for a new platform but this often comes at a cost. I think GoG and Steam are Ok for now and probably for the long run. I don’t trust a lot of other Developers or Publishers to keep the gamer in mind and do the right thing.

I believe that regardless of people’s feelings on phyical media, it will die out and digital ownership or “software as a service” is the future. Older physical media will either be traded or pirated as a digital copy or will rise in price due to scarcity. Hold on to those discs boys.

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Playnite fully supports GOG.

Thanks for sharing this, I’ve just installed it and it is really clean.

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My situation is I want to sandbox each launcher in it’s own Windows VM. Before I felt confident to just having a 120GB qcow2 image for Steam and BattleNet cause that’s all I really use, but now I have to make several images, for Steam + BattleNet, Epic Games Store, Origin, Uplay. What would have been a 120GB qcow2 image is now 4x 100GB images that I have to now get a secondary SSD to store the images on rather than partition my main drive with just Steam + BattleNet.

Sandboxing the launchers is a pain now, because of the spying allegations.