xa_chan: Yeah, Bethesda made sure its card game about The Elder Scrolls only launches through a proprietary launcher. A dick move, as far as I'm concerned.
It wasn't so long ago that this kind of fragmentation was what people wished for. Two sayings come to mind: "be careful what you wish for" and "you reap what you sow".
Not being funny, but if you use Steam, Uplay or Origin - platforms that were brought into existence in the first place to power and distribute the operator's own games (Half Life 2, Assassin's Creed 2 and Battlefield 3 respectively) - you don't really have much right to complain when a publisher tries to establish their own platform to compete. The fragmentation was an obvious consequence, and digital distribution was always supposed to be about developers and publishers distributing their own stuff. It's really only a matter of time until Activision reappropriates Battle.net as its main digital distribution platform, Take 2 reappropriates R* Social Club for its digital distribution efforts and CDPR just stops distributing on Steam altogether and relies solely on GOG. Eventually Steam will be little more than a platform for F2P crap and assorted other shovelware.
This isn't a go at your comment or yourself specifically, just pointing out that this widespread idea of publishers branching away from Steam to form their own platforms is no more of a "dick move" than Valve requiring the installation and use of Steam to install and run Half-Life 2 back in 2004.