Comment by delaminator 2 days ago
Going to a website's hardly massive friction is it ?
I've got tens of games through GoG and it's always my first port of call if I want a game. Because it keeps out of the way.
If it's got value to people, fair enough, it's got value to people. That's just my opinion. All I want you to do is sell me games. But we all know about enshittification and MBAs trying to round the wagons.
It is if you have games from multiple stores and don't remember which game is from where. I don't have all the games I own installed and installed.
I agree with you. I'm still a greybeard who organizes my games in a folder and finds the exe to click. At best I'll keep a handy folder of shortcuts for games I play often on my desktop. I even keep my startup programs to a bare minimum of my communication lines (if I wanna boot up steam, I'll type it in the search bar or wait for the launched game that requires it).
But we're in this hyper optimized world where kids are literally being auto scrolled through short form content. Attention spans have been utterly shot. So yes, there's a large number of people out there that see "going into a website and finding a game" as too much friction. That's a larger societal issue that I can't do much about in times where my country needs to debate the merits of citizens being shot on the streets by federal agents. Maybe one day we can get back to a point where proper educational and parental supprt resources is, say, a top 20 issue?
Maybe it's you and me, mate. I'm from the world before Steam. I'm from the world before computers, in fact. Atari 2600 was my first console, when it was new.
> tens of games
I have 500+ games on GOG and 1000+ in Steam. I still do regular backups of GOG installers to a local hard drive with lgogdownloader, but at any given point in time I am likely to have somewhere around 30 games installed (some of which I play maybe once a month, some are just sitting there so that I don't forget to get around to them). A lot of those games have been released fairly recently and are still getting patches, and I want to have those patches, because it's fairly normal for games to release in a broken state. Given all that, having launchers is kind of a necessity (and playtime, achievements, cloud saves, wine prefix management and social features are a nice bonus to all that).