Let us make the hypothesis that a worst case scenario occurs, resulting in every electronic device being "fried" by EMPs/CMEs, universally, on a worldwide scale.

Nobody would be able to download, decrypt, authenticate or even use any software, and honestly, it would not be of any immediate concern, if such a scenario ever occurred, but all CD-DVD (tapes, disuettes and other non-digital means of data storage) copies of software would remain intact and readily functional if unencrypted. They could be preserved in a way akin to history relics.

However extreme that may be, if we even consider for a second the implications of the remote possibility of a grid down scenario (loss of power and Internet connection, Starlink and satellite excluded), maybe those basic means of raw data storage would be the only cultural vaults of the sprawling digitized human evolution (and anything shielded by such phenomena).

My point being that reliance on commodities offered outside the scope of being manipulated by the end user (clients, encrypted software, online authentication, cloud storage) can only go so far, when concerns about self-sufficiency, futureproofing and security need to be addressed.

Depends on your outlook. If you're extremely proactive in your consumption habits and actively seek out what you will anticipate, than yes, being limited to certain platforms can feel constraining.

On the other hand, if you are happy mostly focusing on what comes out on the platforms you use, then this is at worst a minimal issue.

Its the same for movie streaming platforms. People complain with the number of platforms there are and how expensive it is getting. I just don't pay attention unless it is being released on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Problem solved.

Its not like I'm getting starved out of quality content to consume. There is more coming out than I can manage. Its not so much about the fact that they are monopolistic as the fact that their business model is deeply offensive to my core sensibilities.

Paying good money to get what they are offering in return would make me resentful and angry, so I just don't go there.

I don't have anything against rental. I grew up mostly playing video games I rented at the video store. However, the video store was honest about what it was and I paid a fraction of the retail price for it (like less than 10% of the retail value of the game for a weekend rental).

I value fairness and honesty and this ain't fair or honest.

There could be an oligarchy of 5+ stores following that model and I wouldn't like it any more.

The dart thing kind of makes sense. They hit the "We need any old school FPS games we can get" zone then Operation Body Count, and Corridor 7 make the cut. I don't hate the games but GOG already has so many better games of that style I never understood why GOG's curators thought they needed these.

Will you have a working DVD or BluRay player in 100 years? Your DVDs and BlueRays are useless without a device that can play them.

Digital in this context means that it is free from the shackles of the medium (and related hardware, like a DVD player), so it doesn't matter anymore how "durable" the medium is because you can easily transfer and copy it to any other medium, several even.

Like my MS-DOS floppy games from the early 90s: I am pretty sure the floppies wouldn't work anymore and even if they did, I don't have a floppy drive anymore... but it doesn't matter because I copied the installed games from those floppies and keep them even today on hard drive(s). They've lived on for 30 years with no sweat, being transferred several times to newer medium (originally on floppy disks as ARJ compressed files, then Iomega ZIP drive disks, then moved to CD-Rs, then DVD-Rs, then various hard disks, in the future I will transfer them to nuclear data crystals that are supposed to last 1-2 million years, or thereabouts...).

Now, of course it is possible that somewhere in the distant future I will have no suitable media player software (like VLC) that can play those Robocop movie files that I have (I think they are MPEG-2 in a .MKV container)... but it is very probable there will be such media player software around for decades to come especially for a once-popular format like MPEG-2, and if there wasn't, it should be possible to convert the video files to another format, even raw video format (which takes lots of space but doesn't affect the quality due to re-encoding, and the ability to play raw video files will probably be possible "forever").

Digital content is much more future-proof and portable, than content tied to certain media and hardware. How do we play NES games today? Not on the original NES consoles, most of which are broken beyond repair by now, but with digital ROM files on various NES emulators.

Yeah in general I agree with that, but I must admit different gamers are in different situations.

I personally don't care much what others are playing, so for me it is easy to just pick something, no matter how old or quirky, as long as I get some enjoyment out of it. Yesterday I e.g. played Star Wars Dark Forces 2 (which has pretty crummy graphics and gameplay by today's standards), or back when I kept playing some freeware games like the Wizball remake or Rolling Madness 3D (a Marble Madness remake) or those simple and great freeware Star Wars shooters that some guy made years ago.

However, if you are some 12 year old kid, you probably have much more pressure and interest to play the same hot games that all your friends are playing at school, and talking about all the time. If others are playing GTA VI and talking all the time about it at school, you don't want to play GTA2 freeware version because you would just look silly talking about it at school.

It is like having sex: when you were a kid, you wanted to have sex only with the same supermodels that everyone dreamed about, but nowadays any old crummy twat will do.

The reason users are often okay with the Steam monopoly is because it's convenient and limits use of PC system resources. There is a certain convenience associated with having a single game launcher on your PC that handles ALL of your games. And having 10 different launchers open on your PC takes computer system resources away from providing optimal performance as well.

This may seem inconsequential to you if you're a PC gamer with a mid-high end PC capable of running a billion different apps at once while running the latest new-release games on ultra settings simultaneously, but if you have a low-end PC that only barely meets the requirements to play a certain video game, it might become a more important consideration.

I would suggest that GOG Galaxy and Steam both have their unique uses that make them worth installing on your PC. They both have unique roles, services, and uses that they provide the gamer that justify their use of system resources.

But why should we also have the EA Origin app or the Activision-Blizzard Battle.net app, the Ubisoft app, and the Epic Games app? These apps provide nothing to the consumer that Steam/GOG doesn't already provide in a more convenient and effective way.

The only reason Origin/Battle.net/EpicGames apps get installed is because they are REQUIRED to play games exclusive to those platforms. And the only reason they are required is because the corporations that own them realize they can make more money selling games exclusively on their own platforms than if they publish on Steam/GOG and allow these companies to take a cut of each sale.

So the result is the consumer is harmed: they are inconvenienced and their PC system resources are unjustifiably drained away from more important tasks for no other reason than to make more money for EA/Activision/Epic shareholders and executives. And that justifiably angers PC game consumers.

EGS provides numerous free games, many of very high quality, to consumers, in a much more generous and frequent way than Steam and/or GOG does.

That's a pretty big "something" unique that EGS brings to the table.

^ Steam is no different to Origin / Battle.net / EpicGames though. Eg, try playing Portal 2 (DRM'd with CEG) without it. The real "I don't want client bloat" issue was originally caused by Valve in 2004 making clients compulsory in the first place for Half Life 2 then a year later for 3rd party games in 2005. Everything else since is just an extension to that. People today often make fanboy based "special exceptions" for Steam because they've become part of a captive audience but want to project the blame elsewhere (ie, "I have so many games on Steam that I only ever shop on Steam because I want all my games in one place, but blame only EA & Ubisoft for client bloat" is a far less honest appraisal of the situation than "Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, etc, are all collectively equally to blame for making clients compulsory"). And "limits system resources" are literally the last words I'd use to describe Steam with a simple 'launcher' often using 4x the RAM than a full blown video streaming app.

Naturally that will end at some point, just like it did earlier for e.g. EA Origin.

You can already see it with EGS as well, more often than not the free games are some pretty cheap indie games, and/or include only the base game and not any DLCs. Then once in a while, increasingly rarely, they surprise everyone by offering GTA V or some Aliens game for free.

Yup. The pinnacle of a debloated system is "No DRM, No Client". Steam is just a different "flavour" of compulsory bloat saturated in special pleading.

Well, I can't really stop how others think, but I prefer buying from GOG. I like that it has no Drm and I can just install the game straight from the installers without the hassle of using a client. I think it's important to make visual points if you wish to get people onboard. I realize that there are some people who might like it but are unable to see the benefits.

No, the market isn't free, because of two things:
- The market limits your choice to what is offered.
- Doesn't apply as much to game stores (the technical point of entry is rather low, though there is the social challenge of convincing developers to release their games in your store if you don't have some momentum), but in some industries, setup cost is prohibitive enough (or sometimes just impossible when key resources are already taken) that the industry will naturally converge toward a monopoly or oligarchies where customer selection is either few (with colluding interest narrowing customer choice) or one.

I wouldn't go as far as some who call it evil (I think the market is ultimately one of many tools we have to accomplish things socially and it is a good solution for some kinds of problems), but it is a far cry from democracy.

Yes and no. There are fundamental differences in values that need to be accounted for, that is true.

However, when you can agree on some end goal (and often, you can), not all roads are equal. Some are efficient and some are masochistic.

Strategy matters.

That being said, for social order, the value of respect is important and you must respect other people, always, even when their opinions work against their objectives.

I'm not sure an iron-grip monopoly is possible in gaming, because the barrier of entry (both for creation and distribution) is pretty low.

However, you can have a dishonest situation where if at least some of the customers (especially the ones with the biggest collections) really internalized what was happening, they'd probably go a different way.

For example, with Steam, you have that misconception that 'it will last forever' (probably because many gamers aren't old enough to have seen many industry juggernauts collapse) or that 'they will somehow unlock the games if they shut down' (legally, they should be brought to task on that claim, but probably won't).

And of course, there is the implication of 'ownership' with the way the store operates in its financial transactions model with the notion of license living in the small prints of eulas (if we're gonna get technical, GOG games are licensed too and revokable, though from a practical standpoint, it is impossible to enforce because of the way the games are distributed).

And eventually (could be in 3 months, 3 years, 3 decades, but it will happen), Steam will shut down, a lot of people will lose their games, it will be a complete mess and people will be wiser, for about half a generation maybe.

The above is not so much because of a crushing monopoly as much as operational hypocrisy that is not legally being taken to task.

Why is Epic games so bad at social marketplace.

Why are europeans and asians so bad at social tech apps.

I have never used steam for anything at any time.
One of the biggest reasons is it's running roughshod over consumer law as if it's some sort of sovereign citizen as the police terminology goes.
I don't get how people view the wholesale loss of their moneys value when dealing with steam is not a bigger issue; but then again most people think privacy & security are moot points 'until it happens to them'.

Why don't people care about it being a monopsony? because cheap dopamine hits; while ignoring your consumer rights and facilitating a more open market is an act of negative reinforcement to your stuipid lizard brains.
Think about it?
You don't like the monopoly so you have to make a decision every time a decent title comes out, that is the negatively associated with the let down of not being able to access the gaming market due to principles.
You have to be aware of companies that operate only with gated markets like steam and epic so you don't get excited over things you won't be able to buy anyways.

The free market theory is all well and good, but when you consider how psychologically crippled the average human being is, it is indeed a fair thing to expect stronger leadership from government intervention to see justice then the manipulated masses to grass roots change.

With Steam, you get relatively non-intrusive Steamworks DRM to satisfy both consumers & publishers, and you get a whole list of features that players value: instant messaging, voice chat, player reviews on the Steam store, DRM disclosure on the Steam store (even if it is perhaps imperfect), Steam achievements, Steam community features, Steam forums, social features like ability to see what friends are playing and join their games, the Steam overlay and web browsing during games, automatic game updates, organization of your video game library, and organization/installation and management of your game DLCs. Origin, Epic Games, Ubisoft's game launcher, and battle.net are all lacking in some if not all of these features.

So with these other game launchers, I get less features, the prices are often just as high or higher than Steam (glares at Activision), the clients are often shoddy, my friends don't even play there, etc. I get a worse overall experience, and the suits in corporate management make a lot more money.

You mention that you get some free games from Epic Games, Origin, whatever. Okay, great for you. So YOU have a reason to like those platforms -- not me. I am really not interested in Fortnite or the games they tend to give away free, so I get nothing from that platform. And that's the answer to the thread (why I like Steam, why I'm okay with Steam, etc): because Steam provides a lot of features the other launchers don't, and people don't want to install new launchers for no reason other than to make more money for corporations.

You didn't disprove this reasonining which is entirely valid. The question of the thread is why are some people okay with Steam's monopoly (i.e. why they don't want to use other launchers). And I answered it in pointing out the many unique features Steam has that justify installing it that other launchers lack.

If YOU get free games from Epic that make it worth it to install that launcher FOR YOU, that's great. But it doesn't negate my original point that many other players like me don't see much (if any value) in that for ourselves because we don't want the games (it's actually pretty rare that Epic offers a game that appeals to me for free, and I've been watching them for a few months now).

The only launchers I'm happy using are the ones that have a good set of features that appeal to me, and that is basically just Steam and GOG. Everything else is just corporate bloatware shoved down my throat to increase their profits by inconveniencing me.

So it isn't so much that people are "okay with the Steam monopoly" as the OP states. The issue is that consumers see value in Steam and perhaps GOG, and not in many other launchers, so they don't want to install those other launchers.

Thanks for the gushing sales pitch but as I said, in response to your comment "The only reason Origin/Battle.net/EpicGames apps get installed is because they are REQUIRED to play games exclusive to those platforms", there's still zero objective difference in needing Steam to play Portal 2 vs needing uPlay to play Far Cry 5. Honestly though I just stopped reading at "Steam are wonderful because they disclose DRM" as the first DRM Steam deliberately hides is their own two layers of DRM (Steamworks + CEG). The rest is just cheerleading the same pro storefront tribalism that fragmented the PC industry into what it is in the first place...