I’ve been PC gaming since like '98. There’s been at least two dozen digital storefronts competing with steam. A few before Steam became more than a Valve game store/launcher too. Everyone else screwed up. Stardock sold Impulse and everyone that has owned that did nothing with it. Desura existed. Amazon digital game purchase and library management has barely changed in the last 15-20 years. EA downloader became Origin and that was solid but barely any games released on it for I imagine one reason being it didn’t have some easy self publishing. UPlay has sucked for 15-20 years now and gave birth to always online single player game DRM. Battle.net was nothing but Blizzard until COD started showing up. EGS didn’t have self publishing until like 2 or 3 years ago. Direct2Drive never changed. GamersGate, GreenManGaming, etc never evolved. Humble Bundle was born off Steam keys and has barely changed. Bethesda and Rockstar Social Club were trash from day one and never changed. Games for Windows Live tried to get us to pay to play online multiplayer even when it would be player self hosted servers or peer to peer or a third party publishers servers. Also install limits and an overlay that would crash your game. Windows 8+ Store used to make your storage unreclaimable without formatting the drive. Itch.io wants to be the indie devs ideal store by taking practically no cut but then it’s also the least enticing platform out there for users. Desura was more enticing. There’s now that indie game gamepass like launcher now. Android games as Google tried to get people to play Android games on PCs now through their Android VM/emulator for games thing. Probably way more I’m forgetting or never heard of. I used to actively seek Steam alternatives but now I’m like whatever happens happens
There’s what devs have been able to do since the 90s, sell on your own website. It was terribly painful to do in the 90s and early 2000s before payment processers and AWS matured as services for digital first companies. It’s easier now but still a pain if you want to be legit and have customer service and account your expenses to anticipate charge backs, refunds, stolen credit card purchases. Barely anyones going to be early Minecraft, League of Legends
Plus PC gaming is in competition with consoles and mobile. Especially consoles though. They mostly have the same games being sold. They compete for players. Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo are equivalent to PC as a whole platform, not just PC OS with Steam on it. Consoles just you can’t bypass the console maker. A PlayStation key off Amazon or Gamestop is always a code to redeem in PSN whereas PC it’s now usually either Steam, GOG, EGS, or distant fourth Amazon or Microsoft/Xbox
Really what people want but won’t build even though it’s what they effectively always espouse is to form a non-profit that develops a store with public finances and some cap on profitability. Enough to continue developing and maintaining and a rainy year(s) fund. You need a legit organization to handle bank accounts in all the countries/currencies served. Legal entity to handle all that liability. Seems like all the people capable of doing that do not have interest in coming together to jumpstart it and get the legal stuff in order. You have stuff like Flathub (games there too) which has announced a year or two ago that they’ll be incorporating the ability to charge for software or at least take donations on store pages and it’s been over a year since they formed some legal entity to handle that and it’s still not rolled out. I think we idealist are bad at effective collective action
I’ve been PC gaming since like '98. There’s been at least two dozen digital storefronts competing with steam. A few before Steam became more than a Valve game store/launcher too. Everyone else screwed up. Stardock sold Impulse and everyone that has owned that did nothing with it. Desura existed. Amazon digital game purchase and library management has barely changed in the last 15-20 years. EA downloader became Origin and that was solid but barely any games released on it for I imagine one reason being it didn’t have some easy self publishing. UPlay has sucked for 15-20 years now and gave birth to always online single player game DRM. Battle.net was nothing but Blizzard until COD started showing up. EGS didn’t have self publishing until like 2 or 3 years ago. Direct2Drive never changed. GamersGate, GreenManGaming, etc never evolved. Humble Bundle was born off Steam keys and has barely changed. Bethesda and Rockstar Social Club were trash from day one and never changed. Games for Windows Live tried to get us to pay to play online multiplayer even when it would be player self hosted servers or peer to peer or a third party publishers servers. Also install limits and an overlay that would crash your game. Windows 8+ Store used to make your storage unreclaimable without formatting the drive. Itch.io wants to be the indie devs ideal store by taking practically no cut but then it’s also the least enticing platform out there for users. Desura was more enticing. There’s now that indie game gamepass like launcher now. Android games as Google tried to get people to play Android games on PCs now through their Android VM/emulator for games thing. Probably way more I’m forgetting or never heard of. I used to actively seek Steam alternatives but now I’m like whatever happens happens
There’s what devs have been able to do since the 90s, sell on your own website. It was terribly painful to do in the 90s and early 2000s before payment processers and AWS matured as services for digital first companies. It’s easier now but still a pain if you want to be legit and have customer service and account your expenses to anticipate charge backs, refunds, stolen credit card purchases. Barely anyones going to be early Minecraft, League of Legends
Plus PC gaming is in competition with consoles and mobile. Especially consoles though. They mostly have the same games being sold. They compete for players. Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo are equivalent to PC as a whole platform, not just PC OS with Steam on it. Consoles just you can’t bypass the console maker. A PlayStation key off Amazon or Gamestop is always a code to redeem in PSN whereas PC it’s now usually either Steam, GOG, EGS, or distant fourth Amazon or Microsoft/Xbox
Really what people want but won’t build even though it’s what they effectively always espouse is to form a non-profit that develops a store with public finances and some cap on profitability. Enough to continue developing and maintaining and a rainy year(s) fund. You need a legit organization to handle bank accounts in all the countries/currencies served. Legal entity to handle all that liability. Seems like all the people capable of doing that do not have interest in coming together to jumpstart it and get the legal stuff in order. You have stuff like Flathub (games there too) which has announced a year or two ago that they’ll be incorporating the ability to charge for software or at least take donations on store pages and it’s been over a year since they formed some legal entity to handle that and it’s still not rolled out. I think we idealist are bad at effective collective action