It’s because steam is 100% an aberration in our modern world. The closest comparison is, maybe, Costco?
And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.
The “do nothing and win” strategy has served Valve well. The fact is every publisher wants their own launcher on start-up running all the time collecting data, updating all the time, throwing popups at the user.
The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.
I have Ubisoft Connect launching because one game (Trackmania). And it is most annoying piece of software on my computer. Popping up sometimes even in middle of gameplay... And it can not even correctly close itself, but instead threw an error...
And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.