Over the last few years, and more importantly, the last few months, the introduction of a staggering amount of new gaming stores and platforms. Though Epic Game Store is the largest potential threat to Steams monopoly, the introduction of Rockstar Games, Bethesda Launcher, the Xbox PC Launcher, Twitch, and Discord. Combine those with the slightly more established Digital Stores like; Humble, Itch.io, GoG, Origin, Battlenet, Uplay, and the Microsoft Store, and you get a well-established, large scale PC “Gaming Store War”.
A store war shouldn't even be a thing. It's stupid and splits the entire PC community. It ruins what made PC gaming so great in the first place.
Competition is good for the consumer. Steams been lazy for too long
Yes it can be just not with Epic leading the war.
These articles always make me laugh …
How can you have a war when Steam has the nukes, satellites, submarines, tanks, missiles, drones, and more …
While Epic and MS has a BB gun, 2 cups and a string between the both of them ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
To be honest, I don't particularly care that much where I buy games from. It can be annoying trusting a bunch of random companies with my personal and bank / credit card / paypal details, but I can just about tolerate it. What I don't like is dividing my games all over different platforms. I also don't like dividing my friends, achievements, and everything else that comes with them. This is the problem we have right now. With EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Valve, Bathesda and others creating their own launchers, and only one of them actually creating a launcher that I like ( Steam ) it's just become a mess. Convenience is key, and it feels like that convenience has been taken away in some ways.
What would be ideal is a unified platform that handles everything like your games collection, achievements, friends list, forum, etc, but doesn't have a games store of their own so they can't demand a percentage of sales from the publishers. For example, you buy a game from Steam or Epic, and instead of the game being attached to their launcher, it is attached to your Steam or Epic account which is then linked to the unified platform that handles all of the extra features that comes with gaming of today.
I know it's complete fantasy talk though, asking the gaming industry to come together and actually help create something like this would be like asking for a miracle. All they care about is feeding off our bank accounts.