It's also a plus for me too.

It's more than just pushing for support. They have made a lot of windows only games just work on Linux.

They've changed it from "need to release and support Linux" to "zero effort other than not actively fuck up the compatibility layer". In user land, it's the same thing. For developers it's a vast difference.

For me it's the reason I started playing games again. Have been using Linux forever, didn't wanted a dual boot etc. So when games started to work on Linux I stared to buy and play more and more.

Although recently it has mostly been openRTC without steam.

I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that's why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.

What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That's why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.

So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there's no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.

If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.

Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as "In GabeN we trust" or "I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term". But the solution is regulation, not competition.

The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The "handheld" PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don't really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.

I’m not saying competition is bad, but as a consumer, managing a pile of clients sucks.

Or just let people download installers like GOG does, that way you don't need to make and maintain a game manager (which GOG does anyway, for some reason).

I really hate it when I launch a game from Steam and another launcher pops up (looking at you, Funcom)

RIP Comixology. I can access lower-quality versions of stuff I bought on kindle but the high quality stuff I paid for is gone.

It hasn't helped GOG? News to me.

But if I have to actually read the article then what is the headline for?? /s

They can't possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.

They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don't already own the PC platform. It's not that every competitor wouldn't like to match their feature set, it's that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously... you know, make games and stuff.