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People love a launcher. People hate multiple launchers. People despise launchers they use for a single game.
That said, it probably wasn't the launcher that killed sales, other than the fact that it wasn't on Steam for some random discovery sales. People who wanted to play the new COD bought it, and then found out what the launcher was, not the other way around.
I agree, but certainly not all launchers are at the same maturity. I love Steam because it's so much greater than the sum of its parts -- community controller layouts, cloudsaves, Workshop, forums and community content, a marketplace. I do have other launchers with a fair share of games (GOG for example), but still it's not nearly the experience of Steam.
As a couch gamer, my setup is wholly reliant on Steam. Big Picture mode makes it viable to navigate using only a gamepad, every other launcher requires a mouse.
Maybe I'm the odd one out but I like the individual game launchers. Having everything grouped into steam, epic, ubisoft, etc can be convenient but then you run into issues when those services have downtime. Not to mention they include lots of bloat (if I want a program to download and run 1 specific game, I don't want to download an entire store, library, forums, and social network along with it).
The issue is when the launcher for that one game is also a launcher for a bunch of other games you don't want, is otherwise unnecessarily bloated, and full of ads....
May as well just Steam....
Edit: I don't mind a launcher for a game, if it's just for the one game. Do me some updates and news about happenings in game while it installs? Cool, I can dig.
Try and shove 7 other games down my throat and sell me a bunch of shit, have a launcher that's unnecessarily large for basically being a download/install manager? Get fucked.
steam, epic, ubisoft, etc you run into issues when those services have downtime.
I don't think lumping steam in with epic and ubi is valid. I can't recall any significant downtime on steam in the years and years I've used it. Even if my internet is down, my locally installed games are still functional.
they include lots of bloat (if I want a program to download and run 1 specific game, I don’t want to download an entire store, library, forums, and social network along with it).
Steam is actually just a web browser. The store and forums and such are just web pages. You're not downloading anything proprietary to steam. You can do the same in firefox or whatever.
I'm a little confused at your perception of things. I don't see things that way at all.
you run into issues when those services have downtime.
Of course it didn't. Nobody wants to use an entire separate launcher for one or two games only. Maybe they were hoping that users would have many games to choose from on battle.net... eventually, so that it would be worth to use, but I don't think that happened.
I hope this means we eventually see other Battle.net games come to Steam, even as a showing of good faith. I'd love to see some of the older Blizzard games on Steam.
A bit of context why Microsoft's lawyers are saying this stuff:
Sony recently expressed concerns about Microsoft's attempt to buy Activision/Blizzard. Specifically they (Sony) mentioned the fact that Microsoft control's over popular franchise, such as Call of Duty, could unfairly damage Playstation's business by making them exclusive to Xbox/Windows.
...basically it's their way to say "see? it's not even convenient for us to make CoD exclusive to us!". Of course, they will make all Blizzard/Bethesda/whatever popular product exclusive to Microsoft's platform to assets their monopoly in the gaming industry (I am not saying they are succeeding, they are just trying)
Well yeah... I mean I still use bo3 on steam and love it because of all the custom shit built in. I never even touch cold war because there is no custom shit and id rather have the 50+gb of space than the 4 zombies maps and "outbreak" it provides. Meanwhile battlenet never updates itself, nor diablo properly either.
What a strange case of forcing unedited titles leading to misinforming the readers.
For those saying things like "of course it was", or balking at the audacity of Activision for expecting players to download Battle.net: this headline is intentionally misleading. It very rapidly explains that this is the argument made by Microsoft and Blizzard in an attempt to prove to the FTC that the ongoing acquisition suit will not cause a notable monopoly in the marketplace. The article continues to explain that, while battle.net user numbers were stagnant over the release of exclusive-to-b.net CoD titles, this is not because users were unwilling to download a new launcher for the title. Instead, Blizzards own titles lost millions of users during these years - pre D4, pre Dragonflight, mid Overwatch 2 shitshow - while CoD brought a similiar number of millions of users to the platform. CoDs ability to monopolize and determine where its users are was a resounding success; they simply couldn't outpace Blizzards inability to produce decent games.
Information is being misrepresented in the court because it helps the case to allow the acquisition to go through. The headlines quotes the lie being spread in the court room and then quickly debunks it. Read articles, not headlines.