It sounds like the real complaint is “the store needs to be running to use software I purchased from it.”

Which is much worse than the mobile environment. But you could still have more choice and not require the store to be running to use.

Imagine being able to go to epic games website and click “download game” and get a phone pop up “do you want to install X?”

There’s positively no need for a “store” at all.

This. So much this. It kills me that people are no longer familiar with simply buying and downloading games.

GOG and Humble Bundle work like this on Linux (though GOG has an optional Galaxy app). You login to a website, buy and download.

Humble Bundle works like this on Android too. You just need to enable apps from unknown sources.

You could do that if Epic wanted you to be able to do that. Nothing on Android prevents it; in fact, that's how you install the Epic Game Store: you go to their website and download an APK. You'll have to click through some permission screens, and then you're done: the APK is installed on your phone and can be launched like any normal app, no Play store required.

Epic chooses not to do that, because they want you to run their store. But Google doesn't prevent you from doing it; Epic just chooses not to allow you to.

I'm pretty sure fortnite's inclusion in the play store is relatively recent. For a while it was available only as a sideloaded so on Android devices.

(No pass for the racueteering play store/app store implied)

Yep, this is basically a complaint about DRM. Do apps typically have their own DRM setups or are they using software baked into the play store?

They could do DRM and all the other store stuff by linking against publisher-provided DLL. This is about an upsell opportunity - the store is there to ensure their offers are in your face whenever you want to play.

I agree 100%, although I will give Steam some credit: when it launched it was universally maligned, but with enough work it became probably the digital storefront people are most loyal to, and for some justifiable reasons; and it passes the most important test: many prefer it to piracy.

Go get is weird. I guess it’s still federated even with GOPROXY as a middleman, but I am still not sure how I feel about all of it. It makes sense from the perspective of ensuring things don’t maliciously break, but it feels less obvious what it’s doing than I’d hope, and that probably makes many uneasy.

There is GOG Galaxy[0], that is trying to gather all your games from different platforms in one place. However all platforms (except Steam) constantly disconnects from the Galaxy which is really annoying. I understand there can be a lot of reasons for this. But I like to think that those emerging platforms simply do not want being accessed from the Galaxy. For this reason I prefer buying games from GOG and Steam when possible.

Also, to install games from those 3rd party platforms one still needs to install and launch those platforms. So this limits usefulness of the Galaxy.

[0]: https://www.gog.com/galaxy

If there's one thing I don't understand about other PC gamers, it's why any of them want to use these stores in the first place.

Whenever possible, I buy from GoG, but not because I want to use Galaxy. With GoG, I just download an exe, run the installer, and my game appears in this wonderful launcher called The Freaking Start Menu. It's great.

What do I get from using a client? I don't want my games to be integrated into a social network, I just want to play them, and not be interrupted until I'm done.

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My second choice after GoG is usually itch.io, but my third choice is actually becoming EGS. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but a significant portion (maybe even a majority?) of EGS games don't actually need EGS to run. You can download them with an open-source tool like https://github.com/derrod/legendary, back up the files, and run them. I've personally done this with Journey, Beyond Two Souls, Control, and Detroit.

A handful of Steam games allow this too (one recent example is Ori and the Will of the Wisps), but it's much less common than on the Epic Store!

For me, most everything is run through Steam. Steam games, games from GoG/EGS/Origin/GamePass, emulators, all that.

Big picture mode, controller mapping, remote play, and remote play together are amazing.

Not sure what's so hard to understand. You mention downloading, installing, and revel that it's in your start menu. And don't mention updating. With launchers, there's one less step (installing), and updating is a passive thing (for better or worse). And yup, they're placed in the start menu as well.

Big Steam user here and I agree with you on the updates thing. However this aspect has more or less value depending on what you play and when.

Single player games purchased a year after release likely never need to be patched ever again.

Unfortunately AAA games with multiplayer et al seem to need to be patch immediately upon release...

For me the main reason has been the Linux support in Steam. If they later add a Linux port, you don't have to buy it again, just go install it on Linux.

Their work with the Proton compatibility is bringing a lot of my old Windows only games to Linux too. I'll probably continue buying exclusively from Steam for this reason.

> What do I get from using a client?

Recently I've started using OS search to launch apps on my Ubuntu workstation. One day I've tried the same with game launched. When you have extensive libraries on multiple platforms it definitely helps.

Also some clients support achievements. It adds incentives (or meaning, if you will) to play some good game even after completion of campaign or something like that. Yep, not for everyone.

BTW, you can download and install games from Steam using official console client [0]. Not sure if will allow to play [all] games, though. I had limited experience with that. I managed to download windows versions of doom and quake 2 for Oculus Quest from Ubuntu.

[0] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

> BTW, you can download and install games from Steam using official console client [0]. Not sure if will allow to play [all] games, though. I had limited experience with that.

Yeah, SteamCMD can download but usually not run games—my experience is the only games that run are the handful that can run without Steam in general.

Key reasons I use steam: 1. My payment information is there 2. Updates happen automatically in the background 3. I can stream games from my pc to laptops 4. I can uninstall and reinstall later without having to try to figure out where to re-download the game from

I don't have problems with disconnections on Galaxy, the only probem is that you still need the third-party stores at all on your computer.

Maybe the real reason of disconnects in my case is that I log in once a week or even less often.

It's just like technology standards.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Sometimes it looks like this. But in some sense unlike this new "standard" previous 14 standards don't really cover "all use cases".

Only the app from GOG shows games from other platforms, that's why I prefer to launch everything from there because when I launch my windows rig on weekends no chance I remember where I bought that game.

> “ If you play games on Windows you're familiar with this situation. They all want to run 24/7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher's one game.”

Yes, thank you! In fact Epic is one of the worst of these stupid stores about blasting you with corner-of-screen advertising even when you’re doing nothing with it.

> They don't use Steam because it's run by a direct competitor

Not sure about this. Does valve even make games anymore? /s

Not really, but their store competes with Epic's one :D