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Steam and Mastodon.
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The idea is for games to be launcher independent/compatible with many launchers. If I wanna play a game I got on gog I could use the official launcher, heroic, mini galaxy, or I could even use no launcher and just download the game installers directly
And how would a launcher identify you've actually purchased the game? You still need a central source for that. Hypothetically I guess there could be an activitypub like protocol that all storefronts could use to sync purchases, but that opens up a whole other can of worms, such as account linking, purchase duplications, refunds. The main questions with this hypothetical are
As for going completely launcherless, how do you solve updating the game? Steam was originally made to solve the patching problem, because each patch would effectively shut the entire game community down while everyone waited for everyone else to patch their game.