Just look at the PC platform Epic is coming from. It used to be just buying retail boxes, then Steam came along. Now it's Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay. Personally, I hate keeping track of the separate apps and which games were purchased with each. So I avoid most of them even for games I want to play. Its one of the things that makes me prefer consoles.
The current situation seems more anti-business than anti-consumer (it is both). Pro-consumer would be requiring any purchase be decoupled from that distribution platform.
You seem to prefer giving people less option, because multiple stores are an inconvenience to YOU.
You know what would be a better solution for that? The same one that happens with some applications now on Android: publishing an app in multiple stores. Many apps are simultaneously published in Play Store and other stores.
For example, you could have a game published on the publisher's store. If you buy it there, the price is X. Simultaneously, you could have the same app published on Apple store for $X + 30%.
Then, you let the market decide. Increasing competition is better for consumers.
If you prefer the convenience of buying from just one store, it's OK, you can buy everything from the Apple store, and pay the premium for that. But that would also let the door open for people who want to choose where else to buy their stuff.
Because that's how the market works for buying anything.
It's like saying: how is it better to have multiple supermarkets to buy the stuff i want, if they offer the same product at different prices? Well... it's an option, nobody forces you to do it. You can always go to the same place, and know that there's going to be times when you pay more, and times when you pay less.
But you also have the chance to check on other store's offers and buy there if you want.
> How is having to navigate N stores
You don't "have to". In the end, more offer = better for consumers. It's up to each individual person to decide if they want to find better prices or just go to their default place.
> Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store.
Yes they do? Steam, GoG, and Itch don't coordinate their sales with each other. They offer different games at different prices at different times. Even Epic's weekly free game is designed to make people check in on the Epic store regularly instead of just buying those same games immediately on Steam.
There are a ton of PC games that are available in multiple stores, and comparison shopping will often give you different prices.
It doesn't just sound lovely, it's the reality of the PC market right now and you can either take advantage of it if you're willing to comparison shop, or ignore it and buy all of your games on Steam if comparison shopping is too much work for you. It's really not theoretical, it's how the PC market works right now.
Yes, there are some exclusives, but even that is fine, because a lot of the games that are exclusive to stores like GoG, Itch, and even Epic, flat out wouldn't have been made in the first place unless storefronts were competing with each other.
This is something that devs try to get across to gamers occasionally with Epic -- having someone step in and fully fund your game with the only restriction being that it's temporarily exclusive to a store is an unbelievably good deal, and it frees devs up to make more creative, interesting, risky games and passion projects that push boundaries and appeal to more niche audiences.
Not only are a huge portion of PC games not exclusive to specific stores, even where exclusives are concerned competition between different storefronts -- each trying to build the more attractive offering of games -- is still better than having one store owned by one company that only funds a small subset of games. PC gaming is better today than it was when only giant companies like Walmart could distribute games.
I have to admit, you've convinced me. I'm not a gamer, so I didn't have much experience with this.
My frame of reference was streaming services, where more platforms meant fever content on each, and having to pay more to watch everything you wanted. But if it is indeed this was with games, maybe multiple appstores could be the way to go.
The vast majority of games are not store exclusives. And the alternative is not a single mandatory store that magically has everything. There's a lot of apps that would otherwise launch on iPhone but don't because the developers don't want to or can't deal with Apple's fees and restrictions. (See anything that only works on jailbroken devices, or open source projects that only release on Android.)
You might want to check out GoG Galaxy. It has integrations to Steam/Epic/Origin/Uplay/etc and provides a single user interface to manage your purchases across these platforms.
Also, consoles have exclusives too. I choose PC over console anyday.
I really like the idea of a purchase being decoupled from the distribution. GOG(completely) and HumbleBundle (limited extent) seems to be the only option at the moment.
The new GoG galaxy is wonderful (even though some times it loses my steam integration and I have to log in again), it will make your life so much easier, you can really manage everything from 1 place.
Playnite is another software offering something similar, and is also quite good.
The big difference is that the platform is completely decoupled from app store.
On Windows, publishers can choose to which store they would publish, and you can choose from where you want to buy it.
On iOS you are completely at the mercy of Apple; not only won't they allow specific apps or content on the store, they seem to make exceptions for some apps/publishers. There is no way to install and use something that Apple doesn't like.
Android is quite different, since it allows to load a different store, like the Amazon one, or FDroid for open source projects (you are still more or less tied to having Google Play Services on the device, since majority of Android apps use it, but the situation is a LOT better than on iOS.)
I think it's going to be pretty hard for you to argue that the proliferation of app stores for the PC is bad for consumers.
A lot of people credit Steam (I think justifiably) with kickstarting a huge portion of the modern indie gaming scene -- precisely because they got rid of the crazy rules, agreements, and contracts of the retail boxes, which acted as a massive barrier to entry for game developers. If Steam had never been built, I don't think modern games would be even half as diverse or creative as they are.
Then we move on to storefronts like Humble and GoG, which I think have been hugely influential in pushing DRM-free games as the norm for indies. There are a lot of games that flat-out would not have DRM-free releases if GoG didn't exist. Heck, there are a lot of games that would not run on modern Windows if GoG didn't exist.
Then we move on to Epic's store, which I know gamers hate, but trust me when I say a lot of indie developers are thrilled right now to see someone forcing Steam to lower their splits. Epic has done some serious good for the indie scene. I don't like that they're encouraging exclusives, I think that's bad for gamers. But I'm not going to pretend that as a developer I'm not happy to see someone breaking Steam's stranglehold on the mainstream PC marketplace.
So yeah, there are a lot of PC stores. This has been a massive boon to the industry, there are a lot of excellent games that (I think) would not exist today if not for the diversity of marketplaces. And a lot of these marketplaces fill different niches. GoG focuses on older games, Steam offers mainstream AA titles, Uplay/Origin offer corporate AAA titles, Itch has all the really weird, creative "true-indy" stuff.
No single PC store is expansive enough to cover all of the niches of the entire market.
Even on the console side of things, the diversity of games on the PC has pushed console manufacturers to offer much wider selections of games. Are you happy that basically every indie developer and their dog is releasing their game for the Switch? A big part of that is Nintendo opening up the development process, and they did that because after the Wii U they realized that they needed to pull indie devs away from the PC to stay competitive.
And on PC, what's actually the problem with this? You can basically ignore all of the other platforms and just download your games from Steam. You can opt out of all of the complexity that you dislike.
Sure, you'll miss out on a few exclusives if you do. But you would have missed out on many of those exclusives with a unified storefront anyway, because a lot of those games just wouldn't have been created if there weren't stores that were a good fit for them to sell on. You'll miss out on just as many games if you decide to stick with curated console storefronts.
Excuse my ignorance, but why does there even need to be centralized stores at all? I understand that in the past the primary means of distribution was retail boxes, so studios had to have publishers to at least handle the physical aspect of putting games out in the market. Due to the wide availability of a fast internet connection, the mechanics of a game release is different today, and the primary means of distribution is digital.
Steam and its alternatives brought conveniences to the developers by providing easy advertisement, a streamlined way of delivering patches, an actual digital store to perform transactions, and also more recently started to serve as a major platform for the communities of many games.
I am not a game developer, but I guess that nothing that these stores provide is essential to publish a game and keep it alive, and any developer might simply put a site online, sell the game there, and allow me to pay directly to them. This is probably a niche opinion right now, but given any transaction involving digital goods such as e-books, music, software, games, etc. I am delighted whenever I see the content creator do this.
You may argue that this would limit the discoverability of games by a huge factor compared to them simply being advertised on the front page of some online store, and I agree, but I think if Steam had not grown to be as massive as it is today, that job would simply be delegated to the gaming magazines, forums, and many other independent platforms where the creators would more freely have a chance to promote their content.
> but why does there even need to be centralized stores at all?
Well, discoverability is a big problem. Yes, in theory we could do discoverability a different way, but in practice we haven't built that kind of infrastructure (yet).
There are other problems regarding payment processors and transactions/refunds, tracking where users came from for tax purposes... there's just a lot of infrastructure.
Now, that's not to say we couldn't ever get rid of centralized stores. It would just be a lot of work to build a lot of open infrastructure, get some better payment processors that are easier to sign up for, build the kind of systems and lists you're talking about around discoverability.
I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world with fewer centralized stores and more self-hosted games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that world might be nice to live in. I just think that world is far away and that getting there would be a lot of work.
Currently, I can set up an Itch account from scratch and be selling a real game to real people for real money in, like, an hour? Maybe 2? And it'll handle stuff like archiving all of my old versions, and I won't need to set up accounts for my users, and there's a nice integrated blogging platform, and people can comment, and currency conversion is just not an issue. Plus as a user, I don't need to provide my name/address to each developer either, only Itch needs to know where/who I am. So that neatly bypasses the privacy problem of payment systems like Paypal.
Again, none of that is impossible for us to provide in a decentralized way. But the decentralized tools aren't comparable right now; if you want to sell directly it's going to be a lot more work.
Discoverability is a big one. There are indies who do have their own stores, and they ask their fans to buy through them, but majority of their sales still come from Steam.
There are some indies who are quite open with their numbers you can google around and find the details. Steam sales are also huge for old games.
But even distribution is still an issue. Even indi games today are multiple GB in size. And on the first few days of release (or sales or bundles etc.) you have huge download spikes spikes.
Sure you can put it on aws, but better make sure to read you CDN fineprint so you don't end up with astronomical aws bill. In addition steam out of the box support partial updates,which again you can implement on your own, but that too takes time.
Payment. You can google around for problems indies who tried to roll their own store had. Today you have more options some of them explicitly catering to indies but its still an issue. Aditionaly steam supports charging in foreighen currencies, you can lower price in poorer countries etc.
Additionally steam offers their SDK that includes matchmaking and netwrking and host of other feautures, that are used by a lot of games.
Then there is in game chat, friendliest integration, cheat prevention, cloud saves and steam workshop integration, forums (which suck but are still there and have some auto moderation for spam) ...
Sure you could do all of that on your own, but some of it requires quite a bit of effort.
They exist because there is value in what they do:
They put eyeballs in front of games = sales
They handle logistics and payment = do game devs want to be a gaming company or a logistics / customer service company?
They provide quality vetting, curation and discovery for customers with a reasonable degree of impartiality.
None of these are 'hard' but they take man hours and money to do well.
Would you want same in real world also ? Walmart and Costco stores where the company decides what things are best for customer's experience. If you don't want it you can always leave and go to other companies town.
I don't think the real world works very well for these metaphors (like the parent's OEM metaphor). What if Walmart required you to generate a username and password, confirm your email, and store your payment info before you shopped? When you wanted to make a cake you had to remember which store you purchased flour or chocolate chips from.
I'm not saying Apple is in the right with how it behaves, but as a user more stores have made things like playing PC games, streaming video, and even PC apps suck more.
These are billion dollar companies fighting each other for their benefit. I'm a bit skeptical about what users get.
If there were only 2 physical stores in the US, yeah, I absolutely would want the same thing. I think anyone would.
Imagine if Walmart and Costco were the only two feasible places for most people to buy groceries. Is there anyone who doesn't think that would be a giant problem for both consumers and producers?
One difference is (at least with alternate app stores on Android, and I assume it'd hypothetically be the case on iOS), regardless of where you install a mobile app from, it appears on your app drawer/home screen. You don't have to go through a specific launcher for each store/platform as you do with Steam/Origin etc. (I think... been a while since I've used any of them). So in most senses, it may not "matter" where you bought it from (assuming all app stores can do auto-updates or notify you of available updates etc.)
I don't see how consoles fix the issue, aren't they just another choice you have to make? There's three major ones and exclusivity is blocked behind a $400 paywall and having to use entirely different hardware.
The vast majority of games are available just on steam, if having choice bothers you just pick steam or maybe epic (but steam probably has more) and ignore the rest.
This is a bizarre argument to me. Can you imagine if there was only one supermarket brand, or only one department store. Don't you think that might turn out badly?
If it's really DRM that bothers you then the only big option is GOG.
The current situation seems more anti-business than anti-consumer (it is both). Pro-consumer would be requiring any purchase be decoupled from that distribution platform.