Mind you the USERS don't even want a lot of Steam's competition. The GOG downloader is...okay? Origin is almost universally hated and every time one of these big companies announces $NewNotSteam the collective community rolls their eyes and groans, dreading the new application that has to be installed, and kept running so it can update, to accomplish the exact same thing that Steam, GOG, Origin, and uPlay already accomplish because $NewNotSteam's parent company has an executive somewhere that is tired of giving Valve money and had sufficient pull to change it.
The best thing Steam has ever done was allowing(but not requiring) importing of other games to it. We (as in myself and other users) will voluntarily move to Steam in many cases, just to avoid dealing with whatever download site the game had before, or to get the automatic updates. I've done that with KSP and Elite Dangerous (which has a non-shitty site).
And then Steam added VR - a very good implementation at that, which also supports Oculus Rift.
Updates just work flawlessly, download speeds are good in general, one can move games around, you can backup them if needed, etc.
Other competitors would not only have to match that, but do it better. And still most people wouldn't bother, because of their existing friends and libraries.
The article is spot on.
(Also, Origin is garbage, the only good thing is the name)
I just wish the interface was better for browsing. It's at the point where I'd rather use my browser than their official apps (on both phone and desktop) since at least that way I can open a bunch of recommendations in different tabs.
I dunno, not a huge fan of those. I'd rather spend $60 on a game I actually want (or likely a lot less via Steam) than just get a ton of games I don't even play.
It's not avoiding Steam, because plenty of games there are given as Steam keys, but I have a $12/mo Humble Monthly subscription. It's literally more games than I could ever play, but there are some really good gems every month. They also have the "Trove", which is a bunch of DRM-free downloads that cycle in and out over time.
I also use GOG when the GOG-tuned Dosbox version of a game is better than the Steam one. I don't use their downloader app.
Blizzard's client is pretty but has its own drawbacks. I uninstalled it recently after it tabbed me out of a competitive match with a UAC prompt to update itself. The Bnet forums are full of people complaining about that particular issue.
Just Gog. I find it interesting that it's basically killed a lot of the old abandonware rings that were out there. I played a lot of stuff I discovered on abandonia or homeoftheunderdogs back when I had an old computer that couldn't handle what was on the shelves in stores
Don't wanna be that guy, but you really should. It's quite awesome and you don't need to deal with Origin hardly at all, just let it run in the background and it's 99% fine.
