You're talking like Steam were some kind of NGO when it's actually the same as the rest, only with a bigger marketshare. I don't recall seeing any Valve games on any of the other platforms. Maybe it's because they don't want to share their money with them either?

Valve/Steam is no saint, it only lanched first and became the biggest one, making it look better.

And Ubi wants you to use their own client, so what? Install it, use it only when you want to play some Ubi games you bought from wherever you wanted, and then close it. It's simple as that. Or are you going to tell me that your SSD/HDD doesn't have room for it? And the same goes with EA, which I'm surprised you don't use as an example as they're worse than Ubi, but since they make so little interesting games it's not a real problem.

NGO?. Come again?.

They operate a storefront, like everyone else, that doesn't make them special, but what they do with that storefront actually does make them stand out. Oh, the "I don't like to share money" thing is now releasable to just Valve now?. Are we supposed to look past and forgive everyone else or something?. I know you're going to say no, but this "let's focus back on Valve" thing gets really old when you don't put it on anyone else. 

No, Valve aren't saints, they aren't the holy damn gospel, but dear god, EA and Ubisoft are absolutely nowhere near to what Valve is or has done, so why even bother trying to drag them up to Valver's level or Valve down to theirs?, what purpose, what logic does that actually even begin to serve?.

So what?, there it is again, as if it holds some meaning (it doesn't). What I want to see is them selling to other storefronts and not demanding you use another layer of god damn DRM, when they have also been proven to using multiple types of DRM on top of Steam and their own client, that's so what. Don't come back at me with some insipid excuse s to why they are allowed to do what they do or how Valve did something like it". stop deflecting from the crap the other storefronts and companies pull and just making it a thing about Valve. I already know they aren't a saint, but Jesus Christ is it getting irksome to see people pulling up EA and Ubisoft like they are equals to Valve, or how pro consumer they are (they aren't).

If you like Ubisoft or EA, tell me and I can acknowledge and throw that past me for future discussions, because I get the feeling like you have some form of emotional attachment to either of them. I like Blizzard's games, but their client is absolute crap, but I have no emotional attachment to them,, like I have none to Steam, thus I don't ened to bring up Steam like a scratching post when I could just bring up the competition that actually does nothing to try vying for my attention/money. 

Wow. Why all that rage? Why do you take it as if I'm attacking Valve/Steam? I'm just taking away all the romanticism around it and bringing it to the same level as the other stores, because that's what all of them are: simple stores owned by companies that want to make money. Nothing more, nothing less.

And yes, Steam is a better client overall, but a big part of that comes from the fact that they are the oldest of them all, giving them time to improve and evolve. Look at the amazing Workshop, for example, that came out almost 10 years after the launch of Steam itself. Besides GOG, that pursues a different goal, what other store out there has 10 years?

And just to make it clear, I don't have any kind of feelings regarding Steam or any of the other stores. Sure, some are more annoying than the others, like UPlay, but that's about it.

Rage?. You must be attaching emotions to what I'm typing, rather than me as a person, but alright I'll indulge that part of you.

I don't see it as an "attack" on Valve. I am fully well aware of what each and every company has done up to this point in time, and so far, Valve aren't voted "Worst company in the world" twice, which should tell you something when comparing one company to another.

You see, whenever you bring something down to the level of others, you also have to bring the others to a whole new level, otherwise you're simply taking away the positives of the one you're bringing down, while leaving everyone else to contain their pros and cons, neither raising nor lowering them to another level entirely. You claim to remove "romanticism", but I've never had any to begin with. When a feature exists, it exists, there is nothing romantic about acknowledging and praising a feature that exists to benefit the consumer. When another store lacks what the other has, they are not seen nor treated as equals, and guess what?, we have plenty of those differences outside of this industry alone and have done for centuries.

The general belief that they are all the same is amusing, if not narrow minded and purposely simplistic. If you want to simplify everything to it's core, then every business around the globe needs money to exist, but that acknowledgement doesn't add to anything nor give much to roll with in terms of this discussion. 

No, age doesn't have much to do with it, it does play a part, but not a core major role, because if we apply time to the other clients, then time has done zilch for Uplay, Origin and Battlenet (the network and the client separately) . The changes in the market and the responses from other clients are what played a part, as well as general talks with and outside of Steam, as well as Valve itself. Things like the refund system were introduced thanks to a form of competition and word of mouth from Origin's refund system. It wasn't based solely on "time" telling Valve what to do, no, time doesn't do that, people and actions do.

The workshop is an amalgamation of ideals and concepts, rolled into a single workshop, and yes, time will have played a role with that, but so has modding in general, but again, without the modding and mod support pushes and talks, we'd just have "time" to count, so really it's the modding community at it's core that gets the kudos and the thanks, not time.

What other store bothers with something like the Steam workshop?, no one, do you know why? (and I'd hazard a guess that you do).

I don't hold any feelings between any of the storefronts and clients, but that isn't going to stop me from pointing out what client is anti consumer, what company is the most anti consumer, what company wants more money and what client is absolute crap, and so far, that isn't Steam at the top of the list for those points previously mentioned. I find half of PCGamers authors to being half wits and people who would rather cast us into yet another dark age for PC gaming by going for the likes of Origin, led by an anti-consumer company, and again, yes Steam has done some shit, but Valve hasn't butchered C&C, Dungeon keeper, Theme Hospital, Star Wars, and countless studios that held promise and made great games. When you do all sorts of unspeakable crap like that, it becomes a joke to try comparing Valve to a company like EA, they are nothing alike and nowhere near each other. So anyone that thinks it's better to support EA over Steam will get nothing but contempt from me, because I'd rather we not go to a horrible and cancerous age like that. 

I hope for a Diablo 1 and 2 Remastered.
Blizzard did a brilliant job with StarCraft+Brood Wars, I want more.

Hence. It was fragmented. You would buy a game on Disc, put your CD key in, blah blah blah. And hope you didn't loose it later.

But we most certainly did have digital distribution before Steam, Stardock was actually an early innovator with Stardock Central.
Drengin.net was a subscription based service.
And before Origin and uPlay... EA and Ubisoft would allow you to buy games and download them via FTP.

But before that we had dozens of online services like Zone.com, Battle.net... And so on. Online gaming was a thing even as far back as the Early 90's on PC.
Steam put all of them in the one spot for the most part.

Ubisofts uDontPlay is catastrophically terrible.
I actually asked Ubisoft to close my accounts and had a heap of their games removed from my Steam account. - Why? Because it never worked.
I won't even pick up a Ubisoft game even if it was for free.

The difference with Valve compared to EA or Ubisoft is simple.
Valve is a private company, they are not beholden to public shareholders that demand the maximization of profits at the expense of the consumer.

Are they perfect? Hell no.

How's Two Point Hospital developing?
Might get rid of my Theme Hospital itch.

For their games never working, they sure sell a lot of them.

https://semiaccurate.com/2018/08/07/intel-has-no-chance-in-servers-and-they-know-it/

Pretty nice read. A bit self gratulatory but interesting. Intel is gonna have a lot of fun in the coming years.

Yeah, Charlie always likes to lick his own balls.

Great that AMD bitchslapped Intel with Ryzen and EPYC, if only they could do that to nVidia as well.

Feels more like Intel fucked up big time somewhere in the past 5 years. For AMD to go anywhere in the GPU market Nvidia would need to do the same. Also it's help if AMD actually had GPU products.