The difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful.

IMHO:

GFWL: awful and hated, dead now

UPlay: awful and hated

Steam: best in class and loved

GoG: second best in class and accepted

Origin: good and tolerated

Blizzard: good and tolerated

Epic: awful and hated

I'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.

I prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers

I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader

People hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?

At least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too.

The Steam library update had been years in the making.

>UPlay: awful and hated

What's so bad about uplay?

* Reliability (both servers and client). Everytime I try to a play a uplay game I've had to screw around with getting a fresh installation of the uplay client.

* Client performance

* Similar to Origin, part of the motivation is so the games don't have to compete with the price of games on Steam, so end up being more expensive.

In my experience, I'm unlikely to be able to play games due to issues with their auth servers.

It's not Steam. /s

Battlefront 2 is a bad example, as it's a MP game which can't be effectively pirated.