I have 2300-odd steam games that I have spent money on, and I have yet to play most of them. I don’t care enough about another game to go on the pile to go out of my way for it, free or no.
Ha, you guys never fail to surprise me. No thank you sir, really, I don’t want your free stuff. Got enough.
It reminds me of a browser toolbar. I already have one that does that they want, and does it very, very well, but nooooo, I have to install theirs too. It’s ridiculous. They could just give out Steam/Uplay/Origin keys and bypass the whole launcher stupidity. Or make it optional like GOG does. The fact that they’re forcing you into their new and untested ecosystem is just annoying as hell.
Let me answer for me, since it may not be valuable for any other person’s opinion.
The first part is the inconvenience/mental space factor I mentioned above: There’s just so many damned clients that it’s annoying and difficult to keep track of what goes where, what I need to start, or update, or login to, to play game X or Y. Another client just increases the minor but semi-constant annoyance associated with this facet.
Aside from that, I just sort of hate the idea of needing some always-online, DRM-via-background-presence launcher in order to play my games in the first place. One of these days, most of these services are gonna be gone, and we’ll be lucky to retain access to the digital goods licenses they’ve temporarily granted us the right to use. Nevermind that any individual service can just go down randomly to a DDOS or service update, or wig out and fuck w/ the particular combination of hardware and software on my computer at any given moment, or update its terms of use to become even more objectionable to me on a moral/legal level. . .
If I’ve got to endure that kinda crap, I’d at least like to centralize it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable to ask for. Having some new venture try to worm its way in via freebies is nice, I guess, but now we’ve just got another service for me to manage, remember, update, login to, etc., that could crash and burn without a moment’s notice, and that’s still not providing me any additional value in and of itself. The free games here are nice, again, I’m not gonna deny that, but unless they’re suddenly offering something I’m desperate to play and can’t afford otherwise, it’s just sort of digital noise. I only own about a 10th the games that malkav does, but I’ve still never played most of them. A couple more trickled in here and there doesn’t really strike me as a boon.
Look, I’m not gonna bedgrudge anyone logging in to get their freebies every month or whatever. It’s just not for me.
If it were on Steam I would add it just because - I basically guarantee I will never play Chivalry but for one click, why not? But setting up some whole other launcher? Nah, don’t care enough. (Though, to be fair, I don’t use or want to use Twitch. And I did set up Epic’s dumb proprietary launcher for free Shadow Complex and then never played it, so that was a waste.)
All right, nobody can say you don’t hold your convictions deeply, I’ve got to give you that. I can’t say I totally get where you’re all coming from, but thanks for at least trying to explain it to me.
Also I find the idea that you gain any meaningful value from getting free games that by your own admission you have not played and may never actually play equally baffling. I mean it’s not wrong or anything. Just weird.
Oh that’s easy. Just because I don’t want to play them today doesn’t mean I won’t want to someday. Taking advantage of free games gives me more options and I love options. I always download the Games with Gold on Xbox Live each month even if I’m not interested. Except that wrestling game because screw that noise.
Sure, if they’re just there in your path. But to me, the moment you have to jump through any hoops at all, that’s actual negative value that more than counters the notional positive value of the freebie. To put it another way, say you have a coupon for a free side of fries at a restaurant you don’t normally go to because it’s a bit far and you have no especial attachment to their food. Do you go there just because of that coupon?
I’m really confused how the discussion pivoted to the free Twitch Prime games when the original announcement was about buying games and redeeming in the Twitch launcher. Sure, I’ll redeem the freebies every month if I’m already on Twitch. But the odds of me ever installing their launcher and actually playing them are minimal.
It’s more than just having to use a different launcher for me, I like Steam and what it has to offer. I like having 70+ friends there that I can see what they are playing. I like having a games list where I can see everything ranked by how much I play it. Heck, I like achievements and trading cards. I want everything in one place. A game on a different platform loses all of that. I have Uplay and EA’s thing, but their games would have to be really good for me to buy a game through them.
I will definitely agree to this. Twitch being “another service” is not enough with Steam’s headstart…they will have to offer more -
Well, that’s where the analogy breaks down for me, because if I’m not hungry for fries right now then the coupon has no value. Who wants day old French fries?
If it’s more meaningful for you to talk about games you want to buy, then sure. In my case, launcher A is the same as launcher B, I have zero emotional attachment to Steam. But the free games are the hook in this case, since Steam is obviously the 500 pound gorilla in the room.
Absolutely - that’s where the free games come in.
Where’s the incentive to ever say a bad thing about a game ever if you’re a streamer? With this sort of thing, are all games great now? What happens when people get duped into buying something because the streamer knows he gets a cut of the sale? Are we all just barely paid or free salesmen for the games industry now?
Shadow Complex is exactly the example I was going to cite… It was one of the few 360 exclusives I always wanted to play. And even despite having been interested in that game for something like 5 years, I still couldn’t be bothered to install the Epic launcher just to get it for free. I want fewer user accounts in my life, not more.
(As a concrete example of why I hesitate to get things on non-Steam services, I do in-house streaming from my gaming PC to my desktop for anything best played with a mouse. Doing it for Doom was trivial, just like for every other game on Steam. Everything just worked. Doing it for Titanfall 2 took an hour of tweaking to work at all, and was a pain even after that. IIRC it required starting the Origin launcher through Steam, starting TF2 from Origin, then going to the local console and alt-tabbing over to TF2).
Say you are hungry, but not specifically for the thing the coupon is for, just generally hungry. Or it’s for some freebie item somewhere out of the way that you don’t particularly need right then.
I mean yeah, probably? I guess so. I just don’t see adding a new application and login as the onerous burden the rest of you do, is all.
We all made the same stink when Origin and Uplay launched, yet we begrudgingly deal with them too. It’s just annoying to be forced into a new ecosystem if you want a slice of the pie.