The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.

They could still compete on I don’t know, features, quality instead of anti-consumer practices.

But Steam didn’t kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.

And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.

Is this improving their product? These changes benefit users on non-Valve hardware playing any game on Linux (including non-Steam games). Like I’m glad Valve is funding talented free software developers to work on whatever they want but the benefit for Valve is very indirect.

Unfortunately GOG are very selective in the games they allow, you kind of already have to be a successful indie on Steam before they’ll consider you.

Right now it’s at the very top of gog.com

For what it’s worth Overwatch is in a decent state at the moment.

They don’t “provide hooks” though, Heroic’s Galaxy integration is reverse-engineered and could break at any point that GOG update how they do things. Providing a downloadable installer is nice for some people I’m sure, but most people just want to download the game quickly and easily with features like cloud saves available.

The realistic question is how would you enforce something like that, the recent push for age verification has been terrible for privacy and security.

The problem is GOG gatekeeping a lot of indies, he even mentions it as a good thing in this very article.

What profit? I can guarantee that Valve has spent far more in hiring hundreds of highly skilled full time contractors for 5+ years than they’ve made from the 3% of Steam’s users on Linux.

Obviously it’s a long term strategy for them to eventually make money but we’ve only gained from their investment.

The problem is these stores (Epic but also the Microsoft Store and Amazon’s PC game store) only come along because some executive says “hey what if instead of Valve taking a cut from most PC games, we took a cut from most PC games”, there’s 0 interest or intent for them to be competition (as seen by the exclusives) for Steam or improve the developer/user experience.

Any time these massive companies offer a cheaper subsidised alternative to any existing product it’s to push out the smaller players with less resources and build their own monopoly.

Well it’s not GAAS(yet), it has 0 mtx so far.

They use regional companies I think, for Europe they use French chocolate (la maison du chocolat).

Luckily for you, there’s more games without any loot boxes or micro transactions than you can play in your lifetime.

Pretty sure the latest update with a load of paid mod bs is what caused the bug lol