See also how it took Epic like five years before they implemented adding more than one item to your cart at a time. And how they have no forums, no reviews, barely a friends' list, terrible game integration (always-on unmutable voice chat lol), etc etc. Their product just sucks, simple as that.

I used Epic Launcher for a while, and very seriously used their store. Their free games did bring me over initially but I was happy to spend money..

Except that the experience just sucked. It was mediocre. My biggest gripe is that launching games was really slow, the store was kind of painful in lots of little ways and it was sort of annoying to deal with them in general.

Maybe they fixed those issues but it was too late to retain me. I literally repurchased the games I was still playing on steam which didn't have those issues.

At some point, in the early days, Steam was a bit rough. I remember a summer where occasionally steam would stop launching and you had to reinstall it (back when it was a blocky dark green app). But Steam got over those teething pains and has been really high quality since.

Itch.io is great, I don't use their launcher (just haven't tried it) but I use them and enjoy them. Their checkout experience is fairly sane. It's not as if I refuse to use other platforms.

But Epic just lowkey was not a great platform.

There's a relevant point that Valve dogfooded Steam for 2 years (2005-7?) before adding third party titles. Two years is a lot of polish.

There's a little more to it than "just a launcher." My Steam account dates back to the release of Half-Life 2. Loads of games, thousands of dollars spent, and a service that's been reliable for over 20 years. Why would I use a different service? I'm not unique, everyone else using Steam is in the same boat, just with less time invested.

They've undoubtedly locked us all in, but they've shown themselves to be trustworthy and reliable.

> PC Gamers literally just don't want to use a second launcher

Is that true? And if it is true, why is that?

Pointing to free games on Epic and non usage tells you that people don’t want Epic. Doesn’t tell you why. Nor does it tell you whether people continue to stick with Valve. And that is the point in my original comment.

If Valve isn’t good, you can’t just say people won’t go for another better option “just because”.

It's not that they don't want to, it's that they can't. They would lose their library by switching clients.

No reason why both can’t exist

They both exists, most people would only pick one.

This is trivially false to anyone who has ever played a video game.

One doesn't "switch" clients like they do operating systems.

You can install more than one at once. They're not mutually exclusive.

People don't like more than one, they want one for everything. Isn't this hacker news where technically inclined people gather? Feature creep is the thing that most users want. They want a tool to do everything, that includes a single client!

This need is being filled by launchers that integrate multiple libraries, so this is not a sufficient explanation.

Which is why I in a early comment said that it should be mandated to be protocol agnostic that every store implements. Kinda of USB for stores (btw, this could also be used in mobile stores as bonus points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346862

What point are you trying to make here?

I want a million dollars and a DGX Spark. That's not a point, that's just a personal desire or opinion, which isn't an argument.

I know for me personally, I don't want a second launcher. Steam does everything I need it to. I can't think of a single feature that would make me switch, there's simply no reason to.

If 50% of the games I want to play in the future decided to move to a different store front and launcher that was incompatible with Steam that would honestly be a worst-case scenario.

>And if it is true, why is that?

Because they already have 100+ games in Steam because of the early head start.

> If Valve isn’t good, you can’t just say people won’t go for another better option “just because”.

Never said that, I said people don't want the hassle of running 2 game launcher apps with fragmented libraries.