Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
I keep reminding people that we “gamers” used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don’t worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The “most Steam games are DRM-free” line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they’ll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it’s weak DRM… but it’s DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they’re pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren’t selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.
I keep reminding people that we “gamers” used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don’t worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The “most Steam games are DRM-free” line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they’ll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it’s weak DRM… but it’s DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they’re pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren’t selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.