Also, steamtards look down upon any developer who releases anywhere else and/or his own website but not on Steam. Because... umm... durr I WUNT ALL MUH GAEMS IN TEH SAME DRM CLIENT!!!!1
The good old "I can take all my games with me in my mom's basement" argument. Steamtards have NO problem with clients. The love it and they want it. They just want to use the one they know and that's all. If Steam removed the client and sold the games on their own steamtards would have a fit.
So it's also bullshit to say how "PC gamers" totally don't like clients.
Yeah, maybe technically Steam doesn't pay developers for exclusives. But it's only because they don't have to, the retarded userbase makes sure that Steam has the most exclusives of any platform.
Oh yes, I totally remember the mass of people complaining that MineCraft, Dwarf Fortress, StarCraft II, League of Legends or any number of games like all of the MMOs that came with their own Launchers or the ones GOG dug out of history "were not on Steam". That's totally a thing that happened. I still remember the bloody riots that went off when people found out developers were selling games on their own websites, which Steam doesn't explicitly endorse and totally forbids.
This is obviously what it's about. Ignore that Facebook and Epic Games are the only two companies in gaming paying off developers to Exclusively publish solely on their "platform", it's only a "technicality" after all and doesn't set any bad precedent at all. It's all just the same. Console Exclusivity was always a GOOD thing after all, buying 3+ hardware machines every 5 or-so years weaker than a PC to play "Excl000sive" games makes sense and isn't a retarded practice at all. Also what I said was totally "
"PC gamers" totally don't like clients" and not "
PC gamers have also always hated and looked down upon the practice of "Excl000sives"". Which is totally the same thing and you didn't just choose to reinterpret for your hate-rant about your pet issue, everybody knows clients didn't exist before Steam after all and that's the only issue here, BECAUSE STEAM BAD!
Fuck all digital distribution....
Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?
I certainly know that without Digital Distribution I wouldn't own thousands of games, but maybe a few dozen or low hundreds at most. I still have a stack of game cartons like Planescape Torment, Sam & Max, Baldur's Gate, WarCraft II/III, Simon the Sorcerer, Kingdom O'Magic, Phantasmagoria and similar in the attic somewhere - it wouldn't have been feasible to buy all these games that way, and it certainly made installing and playing games a lot more convenient when you didn't have to dig out the disk medium or search for it for half an hour before you can install and play something by switching between 5-7 CDs first for the installation and then often between switching areas or chapters while playing in the game. Without Digital Distribution consoles would have certainly won out in the games race, there was a period there in the Mid-to-Late 00s where aside from Valve and Blizzard almost every major developer saw them as "the future of gaming" and had jumped ship to consoles (Epic included and being one of the major ones btw.) and they thought of the PC as a "dead" platform for games where even porting their games to wouldn't pay off before others proved them otherwise.
Without Digital Distribution a lot of the games being discussed especially in the RPG side of the forums likely wouldn't exist, a lot of them didn't even have a measurable Retail release and many of them wouldn't have been the kind of games to have taken "top spot" in Retail locations and wouldn't have sold at all that way or made shit numbers not worth of taking away shelf space in a shop and even the bit of a "KickStarter Renaissance" we had wouldn't have been a thing. Or do you think Age of Decadence, Banner Saga, Expeditions Conquistador, Underrail and Grimoire would have taken top spot at Walmart? Choice would have been great though.