![]() The frequent sales, the community features, and the ease of finding interesting, new games have all caused me to continually spend my money on Steam.ĭespite all these pros, Steam does have some glaring issues. I’ve been using Steam for around 4-5 years now, and I own almost a hundred games on the platform. In terms of pure variety, convenience, and user interface, I still believe Steam is the best platform. Even as someone who enjoys these older titles, I can see how a more casual consumer who mainly enjoys mainstream titles like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed could be off-put by GOG’s catalog.įinally, there’s the question of whether these competitors stack up to the still-reigning king of the PC market: Steam. The store does offer many triple A titles like The Witcher 3, but the vast majority of games sold on GOG are old or niche. ![]() While GOG’s DRM-free model is great, the platform does suffer from one glaring issue: limited selection of games. The fact that I’ve been able to backup those games on an external drive and quickly transfer them to separate computers has saved so much time and bandwidth that could be wasted on multiple downloads. While I haven’t used GOG extensively, I’ve purchased a couple of games on the platform. Opposition to DRM has been GOG’s main selling point, and it seems to be working. The use of DRM on digital video games has been controversial because testing has shown that DRM can negatively affect the performance of games. For example, if you’ve ever bought a digital movie or e-book, you might’ve noticed that there’s a limit on what devices you could transfer it to. ![]() For those who don’t know, DRM is any kind of software applied to digital media that controls the use or distribution of the files. In contrast to Epic Games Store and Steam, GOG has built their brand on DRM-free (Digital Rights Management free) distribution. Recently, GOG has started to distribute newer, big-budget titles like Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, and Baldur’s Gate 3. In its early years, GOG primarily sold updated versions of old games that were incompatible with modern hardware. Owned by CD Projekt Red (developer of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 ), GOG (originally “Good Old Games”) has been around for almost as long as Steam, but the platform has only become serious competition in recent years. The store’s selection of games is also lacking compared to other platforms, and community features (reviews, gifting games, etc.) are almost completely non-existent.Īnother digital distribution platform that’s gained popularity in recent years is GOG.com. While it’s certainly improved, it took Epic almost 3 years to implement basic features like a wishlist. The layout and features of the Epic Games Store are fairly lacking as well. The fact that this exclusivity affected some highly-anticipated games like Shenmue III, Control, and Kingdom Hearts earned some criticism from gamers who refuse to use the Epic Games Store. In other words, Epic Games has often given money to developers in exchange for developers digitally releasing their games exclusively on Epic’s platform. ![]() I own about a couple dozen games on the Epic Games Store, and I haven’t paid for a single one of them.ĭespite this, controversy surrounds the Epic Games store for their tactic of paying for exclusive games. While Epic Games Store is far from my favorite platform, I do admit that their frequent free games practice is appealing. Their primary draw consists of giving out free games regularly (including big titles like Grand Theft Auto V and HITMAN ) as well as their timed exclusivity deals. Best known for developing the hit multiplayer game Fortnite, Epic Games has employed plenty of marketing to make their platform look attractive. Out of all the new digital distribution platforms, the Epic Games Store has probably made the most aggressive effort to break into the market. On top of needlessly taking up disk space, these stores make it a pain to track your collection and most of the games they offer are already available on other platforms. While it makes sense for publishers to eliminate the middle-man by setting up their own digital store, these publisher-exclusive platforms are practically useless to consumers. EA’s Origin store, Ubisoft’s Uplay store, and Rockstar’s Rockstar Game Launcher are all examples of this. For almost twenty years, Valve’s online store Steam has dominated digital distribution of PC games, but in recent years, rivals have started to gain traction.įor big third-party publishers, the practice of creating a store or launcher which only sells or hosts that specific publisher’s games has become commonplace. Industry giants such as Sony and Microsoft have even begun to port their console-exclusive games to PC. With the increasing ease of accessibility to high-end PCs, the PC gaming market is starting to get more and more competitive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |