On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.

Curated Stores

It seems that "curated" is the current buzzword for digital game retailers which aren't Steam.

Source: https://www.gog.com/about_gog

Source: https://www.humblebundle.com/about

Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

This is unsurprising, for two reasons. The first is that, while Valve Corporation's Steam can claim to have the most games, its competitors cannot, so the concept of curation is a wonderful way to present a smaller selection as a good thing for consumers. The second reason is that Steam has been criticized lately for its lack of curation. Valve's hands-off approach has allowed some controversial games onto its storefront, from school shooting simulators to visual novels prominently featuring rape. Of course any games which are controversial enough to attract media attention are promptly removed, but at that point the damage to the store's reputation is already done. Controversial games aside, there's also a general consensus that Steam's catalog includes a huge number of very low-quality games. It's true. It does. There are literally tens of thousands of games on Steam, so of course they're not all very good.

The quality of any given game, of course, is entirely subjective, but few people who have looked past the list of best-sellers would disagree that the Steam store contains a ton of shovelware. And, frankly, how could it not? It's the natural consequence of the store's "anything goes" policy, because Sturgeon's law has no exception for video games.

But does it matter?

Whenever I read complaints about how Steam isn't curated, or has no quality control in terms of the games it sells, I get the distinct impression that the complainers just have a bone to pick with Valve, or with PC as a game platform in general. Subjectively, one might think less of Valve for allowing cheap garbage on its store — and for the sake of argument we will assume that everyone agrees on the definition of "cheap garbage" — but, objectively, I don't think the platform's lack of curation is likely to have any negative effect on the average Steam user's experience. A store which sells only the greatest products, hand-picked just for you, sounds great if you're planning to buy every product in the store's catalog, or choose randomly from it. But nobody does that.

There could be a million cheap garbage games on Steam and you still wouldn't be forced to buy them. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn't even know they exist if you don't go looking for them. If a game is so bad (or, to be generous, so niche) that a manually curated store would be likely to reject it, then that game is too obscure to be found on the front page of the Steam store. Such a game is certainly not popular enough to be found in a list of top sellers or anything else which you'll find on Steam without doing a fairly narrow search. In a way, Steam is curated, in that the games most prominently featured on its main page are there because they're notable. The shovelware simply isn't on the surface. You have to dig for it, at least a bit.

Meanwhile, all the terrible games in the world don't negate the good ones, nor does an abundance of awful games make the good ones any harder to find when you can sort by popularity or review score. Of course, now I'm making an assumption about the popularity of "good" games, but I don't mean to imply that only the most wildly popular games in the top ten best sellers are any good. I'm only assuming that any game with an ounce of quality will have higher review scores, for example, than the shovelware about which Steam's critics so love to complain. Despite the nearly non-existent barrier to entry, not every game is equally visible. Moreover, the Steam store isn't just an unsorted list of games, so the idea that the good games are buried under piles of junk simply isn't true.

Statistically speaking, I'm sure there are a few hidden gems which might be deserving of praise but haven't gotten enough recognition to stand out from the rest of the practically endless catalog. So many games are released on Steam every month that, if nobody has ever heard of you and your game drops tomorrow, it might not get any attention at all. Unfortunately, it happens to be the case that quietly releasing your game on Steam simply cannot be your entire marketing strategy if you want your game to succeed. But if you're that inept at promoting your product, your game probably has no hope of being picked up by a hand-curated store with higher standards, so the fact that Steam is open to every other untalented hack of a developer isn't your problem. Marketing ineptitude aside, what constitutes a "hidden gem" is incredibly subjective, so if Steam were hand-curated, there's no guarantee that any hypothetical hidden gem would make the cut.

On that note, although the concept of curation is nice in general, I don't necessarily want a store doing that curation for me at all. I don't need someone to tell me what's good. I'd rather continue to ignore thousands of horrible games, playing only the ones I want, than even once find myself willing but unable to play a game because some company decided that it wasn't good enough to be featured on their store.

No matter how bad you think a game is, someone out there probably likes it. Maybe no one thinks that obscure, low-budget, independently developed game is the best game, aside from the developer's mother, but it probably kept someone entertained, at least for a short time — proportionally, no doubt, to the low price at which such games are typically sold. Small indie games are okay sometimes, if the price is right. Not every game needs to cost $60 and take 60 hours to finish. Sometimes, honestly, I'd rather spend $60 on 60 games that last one hour each.

I've impulsively purchased my fair share of stupidly cheap bundles of games from sites like Fanatical (formerly Bundle Stars), Humble Bundle, etc., and this results in a lot of really bad games in my Steam library, so I'm acutely aware of how many bad games there are out there. However, through these bundles, I've also found some fun games which I never would have played otherwise. It's important to emphasize that these games were fun enough to justify having spent chump change on the bundles from which they came, and I'm not saying I would ever pay $60 for any of them, but that doesn't matter because that's not the space they occupy in the PC game market.

Would I delete some games from Steam if I had a magical delete button? I admit, it would be hard to resist. But the games I would be most tempted to destroy are, I happen to know, very popular among other types of people. I don't understand why people like anime dating simulators, but they probably don't understand why I liked Neon Chrome and Lovely Planet. So if I woke up one day and found that my Steam account had been blessed with that magic delete button, I'd like to think I would refrain from forcibly "curating" the store to suit my own taste.

After all, those anime dating simulators aren't really hurting anyone.

The Sad State of This Blog Nobody Reads

Recently, I was playing video games, and I remembered that I have a blog about video games. I went online to check if it was still here, and sure enough, it's right here where I left it.

It seems that my most recent post was nearly two years ago, when I wrote about Alan Wake being removed from online stores in May 2017. The game went back on sale in October 2018, so my blog has been inactive for five months longer than the game's music license negotiations kept it off the digital shelves. Perhaps a more horrific indicator of this blog's absolute state of decay is that the last post was written before I was even married and, as of this post, I'll soon be a father. I also turned 30 years old.

On that note, perhaps there's no point in pretending this blog isn't completely and utterly dead. With a baby on the way and death by old age rapidly approaching, will I ever have time to play video games again, let alone write about them? But wait. Here's a better question: Even if I had all the time in the world and posted five times a week, would anyone read it? Of course not! This blog can't be dead, because it was never alive. Most of my page views probably come from Google's web crawler bots. And besides, who reads blogs anymore? That's right, nobody! It's all about podcasts and videos. Nobody reads words in <current year> — and so, as I can be sure that nobody will ever read this blog, I am free to write about my manchildish love for video games without fear of being judged by society.

So I guess what I'm trying to convey with this meandering clusterhump of a blog post is that, despite logic and reason, I'm going to start using this blog again instead of deleting it.

Alan Wake To Be Pulled From Stores

I don't often have an opportunity to mention on this blog that the music industry is awful. Well, an opportunity has presented itself, so here it goes: The music industry is awful.

Two days from now, Alan Wake will be removed from stores, because the licenses for music used in the game are expiring. People who already bought the game should not panic; it's highly unlikely that already-purchased copies will be taken away from customers in the near future, and I've seen no evidence that software updates will be removing any content from those existing copies. If you bought the game on Steam, for example, it will remain intact in your Steam library, likely for as long as Steam exists. Furthermore, the semi-canon sequel/spinoff Alan Wake's American Nightmare will remain in stores, so there's no rush to buy it. However, if you still haven't played the original Alan Wake, your time to purchase a legal copy of the game is running out.

In the meantime, it's 90% off (from $29.99 to $2.99):

Alan Wake sale on @steam_games 90% discount starting 5/13. Game will be removed from stores after 5/15 due to expiring music licenses. pic.twitter.com/y10DPgY8Q0

— Remedy Entertainment (@remedygames) May 12, 2017

I should clarify that Steam is not the only store with a 90% discount on Alan Wake. The tweet above mentions only the Steam store because, as explained in another tweet, it's the only store on which developer Remedy Entertainment can control the pricing of the game. However, other stores want to compete, and other stores also want to sell as many copies of Alan Wake as possible before they are no longer allowed to sell it.

I don't have time to check every online retailer, but I've personally checked two other great stores, GOG.com and The Humble Store, and both of them also have a 90% discount on Alan Wake. Furthermore, both of these stores are arguably better than Steam, because they both offer DRM-free copies. The Steam version (last time I checked) will launch only through the Steam client.

Another difference between the stores is that GOG.com and The Humble Store both have a 90% discount on American Nightmare (from $9.99 to $0.99), while the Steam store still has the game at full price (seemingly by accident) and won't be offering an equivalent 90% discount on American Nightmare until tomorrow. All three stores, however, already have a 90% discount on the series as a whole, so if you buy the Alan Wake Franchise pack on Steam (which is discounted from $39.99 to $3.99), you're effectively getting the 90% discount on American Nightmare as well. I can't strongly recommend American Nightmare, anyway, as my feelings about the game are mixed, but if you're intent on buying it, now is probably a good time.

I can't say this is the best time to buy either of the Alan Wake games, because they were once featured in a name-your-own-price Humble Bundle, which means smart shoppers could have acquired DRM-free copies of both games for only a few cents. But, without a time machine, the current deal is likely the best you'll ever see... unless, of course, you opt for piracy instead and download the game for free, which will be the only option after the game disappears from stores on May 15th.

Regarding piracy, there are times when it is morally (if not legally) justifiable. I went into detail about the pricing, in the paragraphs above, as a public service to those who wish to acquire a legal copy while they can. However, don't think I'm trying to convince you to spend money on the game. Two days from now, it will essentially be abandonware. I'm generally against piracy, but if a game cannot be acquired legally then I think piracy is not only harmless but also necessary for the historical preservation of the game in question. If the publisher doesn't want to sell it, you should not feel obligated to pay for it. The licensed music in the game is certainly not abandonware, but I have no sympathy for the music industry, so I honestly don't care. Nobody who illegally downloads Alan Wake will be doing so just for the music.

In any case, whether you pay for the game or not, I do recommend playing it. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger, though, which is more frustrating now than ever before, because this latest turn of events does not bode well for the anticipated sequel. I'm sure Remedy would like to continue the series someday, but it's probably not happening anytime soon if they can't even afford to keep the first game in digital stores. If I'm wrong and an Alan Wake 2 is in the works, they probably shouldn't release it while legally downloading the original game is impossible, because newcomers to the series might be less likely to buy the sequel if they can't easily play the original game first.

Fortunately, the current state of affairs is not necessarily permanent. If a proper sequel to Alan Wake is ever finished, I suspect they'll renew the music license at that time (or, if we're less lucky, they'll release an edited version with offending music removed). On the other hand, if the franchise has truly been laid to rest and plans for a sequel are permanently shelved, it might be a long time before any more copies of the original are sold. I doubt that Microsoft cares much about the franchise — they never did — so they'll probably be content to sit on the publishing rights while doing nothing with them for years to come.