There's too many marketplaces!

 Who get's our money?

Playing through Grand Theft Auto IV recently gave me the taste for grounded and muted action and the heightened sense of impact and believable consequence that they encourage, which sent me off searching for Watch_Dogs 1 again. Okay, to be fair I also had Watch_Dogs on the mind and wanted to see if the game set in my home town, Leigon, was finally a reasonable price; only to find the game was never released on Steam. Thus I checked my Steam Library and... it wasn't there. Odd, I thought; because though I played the game for the first time on Xbox, I had definitely done a PC playthrough at some point. I remembered combing through the game files to activate that one option which people said made the game as graphically impressive as the E3 demo. (It didn't.) So I looked on my Epic games collection instead, thinking it must have been one of the free games there. It wasn't. So was there a free weekend or something? Where was this stupid game? I even got desperate and checked Ubisoft Plus and- wait, there it is! Specifically listed- Watch_Dogs on Xbox and PC! But Ubisoft Plus acted like I didn't own the thing, tried to sell it to me again. Was it a free trial or... oh wait, I had to bring up, and then download, Ubisoft Connect in order to play the game I owned. What a rabbit hole...

It's back and forth chases like this which make me pull at my hair and rue the very day that multiple marketplaces descended upon the PC gaming world. Unfortunately, that day does predate my experience with PC gaming so I can only legitimately get so upset. But it's a total head ache and a half to try and balance the endless number of different marketplaces that we have to spread our game's library across just to enjoy games! Some services exist, like GOG Galaxy, to try and visualize our entire libraries for peace of mind, but that still requires the user to search down and turn in every errant marketplace they've ever bought a poxxy game on, because most of them require a stupid launcher in order to use. And what happens if that marketplace should ever shut down? Well we try not to think about the eventuality, but I'd imagine something similar to the death of Stadia awaits us all. So why do we put up with marketplace exclusivity anyway? 

Well firstly, we put up with it because diversity and competition is healthy for any ecosystem. If one company ruled completely unopposed it would be an open invitation for innovation to fall off, for developer and market rates to become exploitative and for a monopoly to grow into a dictatorship. Having competitors biting at your heel eager to take over the second you drop off is the driving force for many industries and one of the key founding principles of our brand of capitalism. And it works, a lot of the time. Morality is a false concept that withers in the face of hard economics, but competition has a way of forcing ideals that resemble morality in a bid to stay on the good side of consumers. Epic Games and it's ilk work in tandem to keep Steam in check, and that's the way we all like it.

Unfortunately, storefronts and game launchers are becoming far too easy to set up for any publisher with a little bit of a catalogue behind them. Epic Games want to make something of themselves, sure; and CDPR have a real philosophy behind their store front; but EA Origin? (Soon to change it's name into the EA app.) What about Ubisoft Connect? Bethesda.Net? Minecraft? Blizzard? Does every bloody game need it's own separate launcher and marketplace where you need to buy the game from? All tied to separate servers at the whims of companies who, sometimes, aren't quite prepared for the bandwidth challenges of running a launcher. (Thank you, Bethesda.Net for letting me down consistently.) We become inundated with all of these errant pieces of software that all feel the need to force launch themselves on the computer start-up, sucking up resources like bloody viruses. I truly hate the oversaturation of these storefronts!

Although, going back to the competitive balancing act of capitalism- having competitive pricing can work out into some great deals for consumers. As these various companies try to take pot-shots at one another to score a bit of sales buzz, their discount wars are usually a net positive for the little man who benefits as Epic chucks free games at people and the Humble Bundle wraps every CRPG masterpiece of the last twenty years and shoves it in a 20$ price bag. Only if those games aren't exclusives, that is. For some reason exclusivity seems to translate to these greedy wastrels as full written consent to try and bleed their consumers dry. Seventy dollar games might not be exclusive to first party games anymore, but exclusivity and a perceived since of premium ownership has certainly inflated the worth of some undeserving titles over the years.

And speaking of inflated worth; someone needs to impart upon all these publishers that just because they put a launcher together does not mean it's not an absolute train wreck to use. Lacking any standard of production, most all of these launchers not funded by a dedicated development team who have been working exclusively on this for years on end can end up being either lack lustre or downright horrifying. Anybody who was forced to use EA Origin back in the day is probably familiar with the shockingly regular issue in which the bottom right-hand side of your desktop screen would become unclickable because Origin decided to hold it hostage. This is the kind of trash implementation that this wild west of game launchers empowers; and it's an embarrassment to everybody. 

But, and this is a big one; publishers are better off in an ecosystem with multiple storefronts because that choice allows them to haggle over percentage cuts on certain platforms. Steam is big enough to strong-arm it's way into not being competitive over sales cuts, but any platform smaller than Steam has to be equitable and fair with companies that want to sell through else risk getting undercut by the wave; which means that developers and publishers are entitled to a greater part of the money they generate. And personally, I want as much of my money to touch the creator's as possible, the less that the middle man takes, the better for everybody in my humble opinion. So I'm going to call this another win for a diverse marketplace.

Ultimately, there's no real sensible way to whittle down every storefront into a narrow selection that doesn't destroy the careful balancing act of the industry. Although with how the spread of launchers and marketplaces currently stands, there's too many half-hearted publishers trying to ride high on their own personal launchers into to weasel out 100% cuts on sales without putting in any of the work to make the user's side of the experience equitable. I think there's needs to be a degree of separation between publishers' and purchasers which is best reached through third party marketplace launchers who commit themselves to the marketplace experience and not in pushing their own in-house developed games. Yes, I think first party launchers should be soundly abolished; for the health of the PC ecosystem