Except when it comes to competition, your actually supposed to 'compete'.

That means if a game company wants their own game client, then - SHOW ME THE MONEY

Is the game cheaper on Uplay than on Steam? Here is another saying 'Money talks and bullshit walks'

Literally the only reason I click on this thread is to yell "GHOSTBUSTERS!" and I find I've already been double-ninja'd by 2 months.
Phooey.

If there's a large price difference, sure.

But if it's only a small difference, I would imagine most would go with Steam as it's so entrenched and they probably already have a heap of Steam games.

Speaking of prices, Steam currently has The Witcher 3 GoTY for less than half the price GoG has it for.

The reality is that game developers will never undercut distributor pricing. Ubisoft know this, yet go ahead with Uplay regardless.

But i mean, anyone can start a game platform to compete with Steam, nothing wrong with that, where the problem comes in is where you start forcing people to install your game platform or you cannot have certain games.

Yes, Steam were probably the first to do this low life trick, but it is highly anti-competition behavior, so, its inevitable that this kind of thing will eventually be legislated to extinction if not already in some countries.

Actually that is why i prefer GoG over Steam. Any game on my wishlist that comes available on GoG gets instantly moved over even if i have to wait longer for an acceptable sale(and i am more inclined to pay more, since Steam is hard to undercut).

The main reason i am adverse to UPlay, apart from hearing it's serious bloatware, is that i think 2 clients is already too much. I accept that accounts are needed to facilitate digital purchases, but i'll oppose any business model that increases the number of installers/DRM validators by more than what i already got.

And yeah. I know of Valve's own underhandedness in there. I got my Steam account from buying the Orange box. That said, the client has become a lot more friendly than it was back then.

If they documented their protocols, or at least offered libraries for the required functions, people could build third-party clients supporting multiple stores, thereby likely decreasing resistance to using them due to extra required software. Similar to how multiple-protocol instant messaging clients like gAIM, Pidgin, Adium, and Trillian came to be - of course, the protocol libraries they use were reverse-engineered rather than released by the relevant companies themselves, but the effect is largely the same.

It took Steam over a decade to mature, when it was first released it was a disaster and would crash the OS and corrupt files.

Nah, that whole Ghostbusters died a serious death recently. If anything, for love of life, liberty, and things that go bump in the night don't contact them now.

Literally anything but Ghostbusters, even piers Morgan!

That's what you get when you try to penetrate deep into peoples OS.

I guess they must have refined the process these days?

That was when Steam was purely DRM and had no other use, it's come a long way since then.

One client I really hated was Games for Windows Live, only MS could do something that screwed up.

From memory, it would hash your saves to your account so you couldn't share and had to use them only on the account that created them.

Which reminds me, I still have a boxed version of Half Life that doesn't use Steam (it was released just prior).

Must be worth a bit, might check on eBay.