I remember PC gamers used to laugh about how consoles treat gamers like crap and fill their games with microtransactions, day one DLC that they get charged for, charge higher prices for games, and various other things like that...

But lately, if you look at the PC gaming market, I'm actually starting to think it's actually PC users who are taking it up the ass from large corporations the most these days. I mean just look at the sheer number of major game publishers that REQUIRE you to install their shitty launchers that aren't as good as GoG or Steam and do NOTHING for the game user aside from eat up more system resources and limit our choices for operating system (none of them are Linux-compatible). EA Origin, Ubisoft has their special launcher requirement now, Activision-Blizzard until recently required their battlenet launcher.

And if you think about it, between those 3 companies you have a very large % of the "AAA" titles that most PC gamers want to play like:
*Call of Duty
*Basically ALL of the modern Star Wars games (because they all came from EA up to this point)
*StarCraft franchise
*Assassin's Creed franchise
*Entire Mass Effect franchise
*Crysis franchise (with exception of the oldest ones which are on GOG, or the remastered which are on Steam)
*All the modern Dragon Age games
*All the Battlefield games
*All the Tom Clancy games
*Fortnite

The only exception among those games on the list is maaaybe Call of Duty which seems to have acquiesced a little bit in allowing the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) on Steam. And while you might say all the Crysis games are available without the Origin requirement now, that is something we had to wait like 7 years to get..

And now Lucasarts/Disney gave the Star Wars licensing to Ubisoft I've heard (which has an upcoming Star Wars game). I would bet money Ubisoft is going to use basically all future Star Wars games now to force us to install THEIR launcher just like EA was doing. The suits at Ubisoft are licking their lips at the prospect of shoving yet another unwanted garbage game launcher into our PCs.

And on VR games, Facebook/Oculus has walled off most of the AAA VR games on their Oculus platform now, which requires a Facebook account...

The corporate-ness of "big gaming" is ruining PC gaming. None of these games would require separate launchers if they weren't made by huge corporate publishers.

In contrast, what large game studios release games that don't require us to use install their launchers? The list seems kinda short. The only ones that come to mind for me are:
*Square Enix
*Rockstar
*Sony
*Capcom
*Microsoft

Most of which make games that don't appeal to me personally, with the exception of Square Enix (one of the best devs).

And now Doom Eternal is requiring an online account just to play the single player in that game lol. Maybe that will require another launcher soon.

AAA PC gaming in 10 years will require 10 different launchers, 50 different online accounts, and the games will essentially be rented instead owned by the players.

I think players should look for indie games that suit their tastes. Unless AAA developers realize they have serious competition they will continue treating their players like garbage.

My take is that these large studios and their AAA games are trash anyway. They're designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So I couldn't really care less about what these big corpos do; nothing that you refer to is ruined for me by them. (On the other hand, corpos did ruin a lot of things in the mid 2000s and we still haven't entirely recovered but that's something else.)

Yes, indies and smaller studios are the answer.

The best of games came out when the modern big game corpos with their ridiculous budget didn't exist at anywhere near the current scale.

Not really.
When you get down to it, all modern consoles are just computers with closed garden ecosystems and terrible UX.

It's easier to develop for consoles.
You don't have different hardware configurations, you have a reliable infrastructure/network for both multiplayer, achievements and community.
You have no people complaining about the mouse/keyboard support being bad.
You have a standardized structure for saving games and similar data.
There are no people complaining about DRM, modern consoles just don't work without, end of story.
You don't have to care if a game which you wrote in 2010 will still run in 2020, either there is a new console out where it won't run or people still have the old console where it will run.

Also it's easier to get console players to spend big money for their games, they are more used to it.

In short: You make more money developing for consoles than for PC


On the other side you need to pay Sony or Microsoft for getting a licence to program for their consoles.
You are very limited if you want to program strategy games, you need different controls for adventure games.
By porting a game to PC you can count on many players buying the game twice.
On PC it you do it right you get players to buy the same game in different PC stores as well.
You have communities that keep games alive which is great for service games, granting income sometimes over decades (best example: WoW. This would never work on consoles).


While most console games would work well on PC with a controller, PC players also want mouse/keyboard settings which often don't work well.
Games designed for PC games on consoles? Usually an impossible thing.

Thousands over thousands of Indie games? Try to explain to a PS5 buyer what indie means, he doesn't even know about it.


So are consoles treated better ? ... no, but differently, which is absolutely necessary.
They have different target audiences and different game types.

Has anything really changed, I doubt it.

The same benefits and flaws of each eco system still exist.

You get a closed shop scenario with consoles, but often your games play flawless, which can be a significant benefit.

With a PC you get more computing power and greater control, and aren't as reliant on certain aspects relating to a console. But some of that depends on where you buy your games. With GOG version games, DRM-Free, you potentially have the greatest control etc, but depending on your PC a game might not play flawless.

Many games don't work well with a controller or at all.
Prices can be significantly different too, especially overall price.

When I think about what I used to spend on consoles and console games for my kids, I shudder. I have never spent anywhere near that much on myself for a PC and PC games.

But how you fare will be down to your individual choice, especially in regard to AAA games or not. And in this age we are not short on variety or choice.

I still like consoles for ease-of-use...

... and PC for keeping games "alive" long after the general gaming public has lost interest.

As for the state of micro-transactions...

... it's a wash in my book.

DRM...

... I certainly hate the growing number of proprietary PC launchers. I'd prefer the death of all launchers TBH.

Beginning last gen many PC games (ultimately) came to console. But, seeing that consoles can't change (upgrade) output definition, PCs still have the edge IMO.

I still prefer PC over any other console. It's not a very accurate comparison but it's like Android phones over Apple: everyone loves iPhone because it's so... cool and expensive, but on Android phone I can install 3rd party apps and use it as my extra flash drive. PC is versatile, there are mods for games and emulators for even more games made for consoles.

Consoles are like: "you can play only particular list of games, they are more expensive than on PC, you can't modify anything, you will likely lose everything you bought in digital stores in 10 years, and don't forget to re-buy the same game you like in highest definition on the next generation console".

I think the answer depends on how you want to be treated, if you want selection and customization and don't mind putting in more work, PC is still the best, especially with Sony bringing a surprising number of their former exclusives over to PC lately. OTOH, some people like a guarantee that things will work.

Take a look at people who buy Jedi: Fallen Order or the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on Steam. Yeah, you get the option of using Steam if you want... but only if Steam first launches the EA launcher.

It's a launcher within a launcher that eventually launches the game lol. Case in point.

And why would people buy from Steam instead of directly from EA's garbage launcher (like EA wants to force us to do)? Because EA's Launcher is GARBAGE and it does absolutely nothing for the user. Steam, for all its flaws, offers a lot of features to the user. Obviously EA knows people would rather use Steam than their launcher, but EA forces them to use the unwanted EA launcher anyway. That's EA treating their customers like crap.

Not me, I avoid steam, bought the games on EA platform :)
If at all, I would have preordered Jedi Survivor on Epic, but not on Steam.

I would be ok with just one launcher, as long as it's not Steam. All these "features" are the reason I put all over launchers over Steam.

You call the EA launcher because it misses "features", but that's one of the reasons I use it:
I start it, select my game, press play, end of story. Never failed me so far. What would I need more?
Of course they try to include all that useless junk which Valve uses to bind their 'community', but so far they kept it quite simple. Mesa like.

I would not shed a tear if Steam with all it's "features" would be gone by tomorrow as launcher and the games would run without.

(btw, you forgot to mention Ubisoft, Rockstar and XBox live, basically everyone game developer with it's own publishing platform, they act the same as EA, GOG and Epic don't demand a launcher so far, but accounts, in Epics case only for multiplayer)

Imagine if I said I dislike driving faster than 45 mph, therefore I want a car that is incapable of going faster than 45 mph. Is that reasonable? Even if I don't want to go 70 mph today, there might be an unforeseen circumstance in the future where I need to get somewhere by a certain time... at which point it is potentially useful to have a car that has the capability of going 70 mph even if I am usually only interested in driving 45 mph.

I find myself in a somewhat similar situation today: if you had asked me 8 years ago if I wanted Steam to add a feature that would enable me to run my games on Linux, I would probably have been indifferent because I'm a Windows user and always have been. Fast forward 8 years, and with Microsoft having done some things lately to irritate me and make me feel motivated to switch to Linux, I'm delighted that Steam offers Proton to gamers simply because it gives me more options for my choice of computer operating system.

Linux support is the one good thing Steam has. Better Linux support is definitly something that Steam is leader for, but I stopped playing on Linux many years ago, and there's nothing that Steam does anyway, that could not be done manually. Heck, I don't even use the integrated scumm/dosbox runtimes that GOG offers. I like to fiddle around with games.

It's not as if I would not use Steam at all. I use it since Half Life 2. But I am so sick of it.

Having an overload of "features" neither makes the Steam client faster, better nor hotter for playing games. For chatbots and showoffs the Steam "features" might be of interst, but to play games, these features are nothing but useless junk.
And it really becomes a pain in the ass when they start overwriting control inputs. They label it like "XBox Controller Support", which sounds cool, right? But once you activate that, you can't press the left stick anymore without a virtual keyboard popping up. So games which use this button for running, become a mess. One of my controllers brought up Steam Fullscreen Mode (or whatever that crap is called) every time when pressing the Home button. Worst of all, this also happens when you don't even play Steam games and the client is open in background. So you have to disable all controller "support" in order to play games properly.
Also what I really can't stand is clients putting data in their subdirectories. And Steam puts about everything in there. What happened to operating system standards, where user data is supposed to go in the user directory? GOG managed to follow them, why not Valve? No wonder everyone believes he needs admin rights to run a software if Valve's software acts as if it was written in 1995.

One of the main problems (apart from the constant tracking and statistics about your hardware) with Steam is that it does way too much integrated in one software. Why not just keep it a launcher and let that be the end of it? All the rest should be separated pieces of software.
People who complain about forced clients obviously never played a game that uses SteamVR. Even if it's not a Steam game, the Steam client is needed to install Steam VR ... why not separate the VR runtime from the game launcher? Even Epic Online Services can be used without the Epic Game client.

If Steam had a feature to disable tracking for good ... now that would be something that would make me reconsider and use it more often. But we all know that ain't gonna happen. Valve collects data about your behaviour, your hardware, your playing habbits and they're not going to stop. EA and Uplay do the same of course, but only for a very limited collection of games.
So ... every other launcher is better suited for me. And I even tried the indiegala launcher just for the sake of it.

Regarding SteamVR, the advanced state of development of PC VR wouldn't even really exist without the massive contributions of Valve and Meta. The overwhelming majority of AAA game releases we have in PC VR is a result of either Valve or Meta. And between those two companies, Valve is obviously the much more consumer-friendly option. Whatever your complaints are about Valve's data collection, I'm sure Facebook/Meta will take that to a whole new level given the opportunity.... and even if that wasn't true, at least Valve doesn't require people to use a Valve headset to play Valve VR games like Half-Life: Alyx. That fact by itself makes Valve stand out in terms of being consumer-friendly relative to its serious competitors in the PC VR market.

With regard to forced clients... of course I'm aware Valve pushes Steam on people in much the same way EA pushes Origin on me. The difference is Valve compensates me for that annoyance by providing features that improve my gaming experience, such as Proton.

Regarding your claim about EA Origin and Uplay collecting similar data as Steam does, but for a smaller selection of games... the selection of games they collect user data for is probably only smaller because these are new launchers in their infancy. Do you honestly believe EA or Ubisoft care even slightly more about user privacy than Valve does? Given the opportunity to profit from doing so, they will collect every bit as much user data as Valve does because EA and Ubisoft are profit-seeking corporations. Thus, the only difference between the three that seems particularly interesting to me is Valve's strong support for Linux.

You mention that you wouldn't hate Steam so much if they weren't doing the privacy-violating data collection. But do you realize Microsoft does a lot of that as well if you're using Windows 10 or Windows 11? You might want to think about that since you say you left Linux to go back to Windows.

It's a wonderful thing if you have enough time on your hands that you can tinker with games like that to get them working, but most gamers don't have the time or interest to be doing things like that. Even if they did have the time and interest... there are probably better things they could be doing with their time.

Thus, it's hard to argue with the fact that Valve performs a tremendous service by making Linux gaming accessible and practical for a much greater number of people.

And what's the reasone that it won't run without Steam client?

That's why 'most' rely on the installers and wrappers provided by Steam and GOG and I don't.

Actually they do that since Windows 95. There were also early attempts in Windows 3.11.
I am well aware about that and I also know how to deactivate most of that crap, which in Steam I can't.
(Also, MS doesn't get money from me by creating targeted ads for me, Valve does)

Btw, before proton, there was Wine. Valve takes something existing, does a few tweaks, relabels it and now 'rewards' you. Good call.
(Of course they also support the development, after all they want to get independent from Windows, attempt 1 with SteamOS failed, now with their handheld they might have a chance).

I am the one to decide who I sell my soul to and it's definitly not a computer games vendor.

Really ... I am not trying to convince you to give up on Steam. I also won't try to buy from EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar or Microsoft. If you are happy with that monstrosity, so be it.
Me, I try to stay as far away as possible from it these days. In the first years I enjoyed it, but it became something I don't want to be involved with. Sometimes there is no way around, but I try. I already replaced about 290 of my 630 Steam games, so I am at a good point.

You have the choice to buy a game or not. That's the same on PC as console.

One thing is for sure, PC games are cheaper and you don't have to repurchase them when a new piece of hardware comes out.