It really is quite telling that to this day, none of the publisher centric clients have moved beyond the bare minimum of reliability or providing any benefits to customers from not having to give a 30% to a distributor. Yes it is perfectly fine for any dev / pub to create their own distribution / client system, but when they are so poor that they barely even function - and the only purpose is as a non-competitive system with no interest in actually supporting the services well - then no, it is not worth investing in such a service, even when that means missing any great game (especially when there is no recourse).
Funniest of all are so many in this thread purely here to shit on Valve and platform war with any excuse they have to let that out - in this case their "monstrosity" of a 30% cut (despite being one of the few distributors that get 0% for key generation, retail / third party sales). Lets not forget that other services (particularly consoles) still charge fees beyond 30% including additional royalty fees, service charges per feature, ad space etc etc
Steam simply put is in a league of its own, actually actively supporting the PC Gaming ecosystem and consistently evolving its service to be more supportive, whether to customers or devs. It has years of reliability behind it and has even got around its support issues, which were a consist black mark. Even with the many issues I have with it, these are all so minor by comparison to other services, and that list is ever shrinking.
"...But no half life 3 that I know of so fuck em"
Doesn't matter how much I enjoyed playing Doom 1, if they do this, I'll skip it.
And I really hope more people will do this, I don't want to have 10-20 launchers on my pc ...
I agree, but I wouldn't be too worried about multiple launchers, just simply incredibly poor ones with bare minimum features, poor support, reliability and absolutely no evidence of actually having a long term outlook for support the service and customers on PC.
