Back on the exact same topic as before, it’s really coming down to something between not just bribery, potentially false advertising, and the general apparent lack of integrity of publishers, but also platform exclusion. At least with this latest case involving the new Borderlands, not only did they skip the step of acting like it was coming to Steam in the first place, but the exclusivity period is half of the usual. Better, but still not good. Of course a CEO type at 2K (the publisher) had to go with the usual bullshit of “HEY PC GAMERS, you’re super cool, that’s why we’re going to be exclusive to that store you hate for six months!”
Exclusives are what sell consoles, but these are just different storefronts on the same platform, and even platforms that exclude other types of PCs such as Mac and Linux for lack of caring. The way Windows has been going, unless Windows 11 is a great one, the PC gaming landscape needs to continue to expand into Mac and Linux territories. Mac has been increasing in scope, at least, and even the Epic Game Store supports it, but not Linux. Valve wanted to headline into Linux gaming, a good move, but seem to have dialed it back. Meanwhile several other major platforms don’t seem to even want to consider Linux at the moment, despite several major engines including support for it out of the box. Google’s weird streaming Stadia platform is apparently Linux-based to some degree at the data centers, which would be a good thing for building Linux support mentality, but there might be a lot of very specific code required to get things to run on that which wouldn’t work on even some of the most common distros, or even if it would work, they might not care anyway.
Linux is a more complex system to the average user, but there are approaches to make it more approachable for less tech-savvy types, as well as considering the core userbase who has been tweaking and fiddling for years and would know how to get a lot of things to run. I’ve been here and there messing with it on a few instances. Still, I know that Unity and even Unreal can build to it, among other engines, whether it works or not on a specific install is another story, but that’s the PC landscape. And apparently the divisions that existed weren’t deep enough.
It’s no surprise that Epic wants to keep bribing and buying out games from Steam because that’s just what they do now. Say that they somehow succeed in their mastermind plan, now they’re just the one big store everything releases on. Nothing would really have changed overall. Steam at the moment still has a lot of things on it because that’s just where everyone put their games before because it was convenient for the most part. Companies having large shares of any market though isn’t exactly the best thing, of course. I’m not really sure what’s up with satellite radio for one thing, they had two companies going at it and now it’s just one, yet somehow it doesn’t cost $600 a month at the moment. Hopefully the phone market doesn’t get a lot worse. YouTube is always worse. And I’d at least like to keep being able to play PC games as long as the hardware holds out. At least there’s still several storefronts existing, and the more quality indie stuff they feature, the better, but openness to anyone wanting to get a weird idea out there that’s not just a blatant cash-in is also good. I’m especially open to the idea of quality phone games, not just “quality” ones.