At the same time giveaways mean very little for existing Steam audience. Piracy was always easy on PC and gamers choose Steam over piracy not jusf because of law or moral reasons, but because Steam is more convinient and offer tons of features.
EGS is simply lacking a lot of niche, but importanf features. Most people likely only ever 5% of Steam features, but you soon find how useful are some of them when you try other platform.
I'm sure the rest of the code is top notch as well :D :D
Thanks, Unity CEO.
A games launcher is a lot more complicated. A few publishers have tried their hand at it (EA Origin, Ubisoft Uplay) and for the most part they suck.
You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know?
It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.
Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them.
While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.