Though this puts some people like me, who try to disassociate from Steam as much as possible, in a compromising position. That said, thankfully I can just play the XO version for more or less the same type of support. 

I really wish Bethesda would use their own launcher to distribute games. I bet many pirates would stop if they had a non Steam distributor... 

ow would piracy stop if Steam stopped selling games?. Before Steam arrived, piracy was rampant. Even with the likes of Battle.net, GoG, Origin, Uplay, Steam and Bethesda.net clients, piracy is still around.

Piracy has been around longer than the games industry. It's not going to vanish any time soon. 

Yeah I have no idea why Gryffnn thinks that, if anything piracy would go up. Because Steam offers the best service, and the worse the service the higher the rate of piracy, and people like centralization, if someone mainly/only uses steam and a game isn't available on steam they'd probably be more likely to pirate it.

You'd be right. I mean Gaben did cite it as a service issue. If it's ahrder to get, piracy becomes a chosen route. THat's why I love having all those other options, including sites like GMG which have different fofers, rather than say half a decade ago or more where I would only have 1-2, maybe 3 options in total to buy from.

In an ideal situation there'd be some application that can connect to servers and stores from all these different distributors, then you could have the benefits of a single library and application without the inherent problems of a monopolized market.

Just a simple application that connects to your Steam, Origin, Uplay, GoG accounts, list and sorts all the games you own on these serivices into one library, and all downloads and updates are handled by the applicable services servers.

That'd be ideal, but probably something competely impossible because of licensing issues, even with the other companies support.

Sad T_T

I can't rememebr the name of it, but there is an actual application that acts as a single library. it merges all your game libraries into a single one and it looks quite clean at that. i think it also handles your multiple friend lists as well. I'll eventually roll with it sometime in the future. 

You know what we really need though?, we need flash sales to come back to Steam as well as daily deals. Origin/Uplay to actually compete since they have their own stores/clients, they hardly compete at the same rate that Steam does, let alone the other key sites like GMG do.

Wow great, I bet it probably can only list titles you currently have downloaded but if it handles friends lists that's cool.

And yeah I've also felt Steam Sales have been a little lacking recently, even the big holiday ones since they removed the time-limited deals. I understand why they wouldn't want games that are already discounted to temporarily be even more heavily discounted during there big sales, but now it feels like instead of the games selling at -50% and then jumping up to -75% for 6-24 hours they just say at -50% all the time, so the sales are actually worse value.

Stops people buying a game, then getting mad when next day it's at an even bigger discount I suppose, but I'd still like it back.

Yeah, dailies and flash sales actually got me spending more cash each day. Now all we have are fixed price rates from start to finish, which in turn makes the whole event quite predictable and boring. I actually turn to the likes of GMG when Steam sales show up, mostly because I'll find a better deal there and grab my keys. Valve doesn't seem to care since they make tons of cash selling hats for TF2 and knife/glove skins for CSGO, skins/voicepacks for Dota 2.

Platinum/Sega recently put up an amazing deal for Vanquish PC, by slapping on a discount for those that own Bayonetta on Steam, meaning it goes from £15 to £11.24 and it's the deluxe edition. If Arkane/Bethesda hadn't been so hush hush with the PC version of Prey and offered a decent promotional discount, I'd have leapt on that too, but instead I'm giving my money to Sega/Platinum (3 times if I count buying two mates a copy each).

No. It would be less prevalent if Steam wasn't the only available channel. 

Steam isn't the only channel out there though.