I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.
I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.