The real answer is neither. Fuck all these proprietary launchers and app stores. There are other answers.... personally I feel like these platforms need to be run and controlled by a nonprofit, with a charter that holds customers' and business' needs equally without a primary duty to greedy shareholders. Either that or sideloading
edit- and I think most folks are OK with living under a good , just king. Steam is this, and many argue that Apple was this at some point in their past. Since we are all apparently too stupid to handle a truly distributed method of installing software like sideloading or old-school brick and mortar retail, we have to learn to live with a store of some kind, with all that entails. And in that case, we're OK if the platform is fair and just
> because they'd either have been capriciously rejected, or because their developers can't make the terms work to their satisfaction
edit2- this never really happened with Steam, amazingly enough. Surely there are edge cases, and there are certainly reports of Steam staff working with devs to ensure a positive release (which is a nice way of saying they have probably forced developers to alter their product), and Valve has certainly made some bad decisions (which they thankfully backed down on). But Steam was such an improvement over the old distribution model that its downsides were almost unfairly outweighed by its upsides. And now they own the market with such a large competitive moat that Epic has to give away boatloads of free games (and good ones too!) and a PR campaign of trashing competitors just to seed their userbase.
App Store has a natural monopoly on the iDevices. (And I would love to see this broken, a jailbroken iPhone in the old days was a wondrous thing) This is because Apple owns the platform and are heavily incentivized to use that integration to maximize their own profit and growth.
There are no such incentives on an open platform like Windows. Steam had to be better than the status quo and it seems they took that to heart, so much that entire ecosystems have built up around Valve's generosity -- ecosystems that compete with Steam itself -- and that Valve could pull the plug on tomorrow. But I bet they won't, because they seem to be interested in a vibrant and healthy ecosystem, and because their attitude of good stewardship is apparently quite rare these days, giving them a significant competitive advantage with mindshare.
It's a totally different ballgame. Google uses anticompetitive dealmaking and sheer force of will to try and achieve a semblance of what App Store does, and up until recently their success in that area was mixed at best. Google Play is closer to Steam in that regard, but their execution sucks.
But even if Steam was as vertically integrated as Apple something tells me they would be a lot more permissive and generous in how others sell on their platform. Steam offers a ton of value-add and, while I don't hang out in gamedev circles, the only bitching about price and Steam's 30% cut I've seen comes from Tim Sweeney and noone else
That is how it was several years back with Steam and everything was just fine. The new stores that popped up are, with the exception of GoG and Itch.io, in the service of large companies.
PC gaming wasn't a dystopia 5 years ago.
Absolutely agreed, but consider what would happen if only one of those game stores you mention were allowed to be installed on your gaming PC. Then you'd have to go through a single gatekeeper, and I bet you a bunch of the games you like just wouldn't be available at all, because they'd either have been capriciously rejected, or because their developers can't make the terms work to their satisfaction. But because this mythical single game store is the only game in town (heh), there's no recourse.
Or maybe most, or even all, of those games you play might be available on this single app store. But expect them to be worse, because their developers have to pay a middleman a larger fee for distribution, which leaves less money to build the game itself. Expect them to be missing features, because this gatekeeper makes it harder to build some features, even if it's through well-meaning policies.
It absolutely floors me that people on a site called Hacker News are praising the role of a gatekeeping corporation that locks down devices they own to the point that they don't even really own them.