AB2012: Whilst I agree with you over the absurdity of store-front tribalism, the people
"creating divisions based on launchers" aren't the gamers who dislike clients, they are the stores who normalized arbitrarily tying 3rd party games to the intermediary's proprietary compulsory software launcher in the first place (the equivalent of Walmart demanding CD's sold via Walmart be specially mastered to require a Walmart CD player). Which was basically Valve during 2004-2005 on the back of Half Life 2. The +25 years of gaming prior to this (late 1970's to 2004) for both PC, consoles (both disc & cartridge) & 8-bit micro-computers (C64, ZX Spectrum, Atari, Amiga, etc), most gamers genuinely didn't care which store they bought a particular game from as the discs / tapes / cartridges were all the same and the stores that sold them (Gamestop, Electronic Boutique, Amazon, local high street store, mail order, etc) never locked anything to themselves.
tl:dr - Stores that forced walled gardens onto PC gamers in the first place are the cause of the "stupid subdivisions". Complaints about clients / "all my games in one place", etc, are merely the ongoing symptom of that original cause.
It's odd that LiquidOxygen80 seems not to grasp that all the tribalism problems have everything to do with the intentional divisions created by Steam in the first place. You can't actively be against the tribalism if you don't recognize just how toxic Steam has been to the gaming community in order to secure a maximum amount of profit and make it harder for games to sell outside the Steam infrastructure.
Just like with Macintosh Fanatics who don't understand that the entire structure of Apple's business model is the complete control of the market at the expense of personal liberties. Only a company like apple can get away with releasing an update that intentionally breaks phones that use third party digitizers (happens when you break your screen and don't go to the Apple Store to pay extra and get it fixed)... and Apple can do that because they've so greatly brainwashed their followers into believing everything Apple does is for the good of the customer, not for the good of Apple's profit.
Tribalism starts because people stop seeing corporate entities as these profit driven beasts and claim "well GoG is fighting for DRM free games" instead of "Well GoG is fighting to maximize its profit in a tough market dominated by Steam." But the reality is that it's the lack of any actual choice that starts the tribalism... after all, Apple hyped Macintosh for years as being the cool kid OS since the only other major consumer OS was Windows. If there was actual competition in the OS market, that "We're the cool kids and those are the old people" game wouldn't have worked.
It's the lack of consumer choice and the brainwashing that the individual platforms do to keep it that way that drives tribalism.
That's because Steam wasn't tried and true when it launched. Yes, they tied it directly to Half-Life 2, but there were a literal plethora of companies out there who could have looked at their model after and followed suit, and did not. Steam got where it is due to lack of competition from the selfsame companies who were bigger than Valve and chose instead to place their products on their platform. At its inception, there were many, MANY companies who could have taken a crack at it after Steam's success post HL2, with major properties they could have done the same with. Tribalism has existed long before Steam and it will exist long after. Before storefronts, it was consoles, before consoles, it was cars, before that, it was religion. Don't be foolish. It's in human nature to divide, but that doesn't mean something as ultimately meaningless as store choice should be one of them. What Apple does and has, however, is actively enforced, something that Valve doesn't do. Hell, comparatively speaking, Valve's approach is pretty hands-off.
Again, don't get me wrong. I despise Apple as a company and I don't purchase their products, primarily because you were spending exorbitant amounts of money for a brand, not a solid product. I'm not a Stan for Gabe, by any means, but Steam frequently suffers from the atypical "hate us 'cause they ain't us" mentality from those who don't like their hold on their market. Can Steam do things better? Absofuckinlutely. No one's perfect, and anyone viewing any corporation like it's an individual entity needs to stop and examine their lives.
What I've been saying all along seems to be getting missed: Do your research. Look at each store's EULAs, partners, owners, and pricing, extras, etc, and make your decisions based on what actually effects your individual user scenario. Wasting your time judging the people who shop Steam is like sitting outside of Kroger and yelling at people because they don't shop at Walmart, Giant Eagle, Piggly Wiggly, Meijers, Community Markets, or whatever other regional supermarkets you have. Ultimately, if what you're wanting is more people to take notice of and use GOG, don't you think that yelling at the people who are still customers here is going to result in them simply not bothering to engage, thus, sending more paying consumers to other platforms? That whole scenario lacks common sense and is counterproductive.
