There’s a reason people love Steam. It may not be all that dependable, it may not be goddamn perfect, but it’s sleek, it’s nice and it keeps ALL of your games nicely prepped up for playing. There’s a reason people don’t love Origin. Do you know what that is? It’s not a bad service per se, not by a long shot. It’s nice, they’ve got sales and all that. But the thing is – it’s not Steam. It forces me to have a split library, to run multiple storefronts and to log in into two wholly different programs just to play all of my games whenever I want to. That is, it WOULD force me to do all of that if I actually bothered with the damned thing. See, ever since EA introduced their “no new games on Steam” policy, I simply stopped giving them my money. I’ve got other games to play. As much as I’d like to go postal over the new Dragon Age or the upcoming Mirror’s Edge – I refuse to. I’m well aware of the fact that not every game has to be on Steam or anything like that, but since I’ve got almost 500 games there, I’ve grown fond of the bugger and would really love for every upcoming title to be released there. So you see, I’ll start paying for and playing EA games as soon as they decide to release them on my favourite storefront. It’s not about principles, it’s not about me being lazy. It’s about keeping things simple and fast.
And now what happens? Ubisoft is seemingly doing the same thing with their Uplay storefront. And what next? Welp, no more Ubisoft titles for me (and I do greatly enjoy their Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and Assassin’s Creed games), that’s what happens. You may not share my sentiment, but do you really want every developer/publisher under this sun to have their games locked to their own software? The one and only thing that united PC gaming when it was supposedly “dying” about seven years ago is the rapid growth of Steam as a unified gaming platform. Do we want the platform to deteriorate again into a bunch of small houses fighting in-between themselves? Because that’s what will happen if this trend of Uplay/Origin fragmentation continues.
I won’t be spending money nor playing neither Ubisoft nor EA games until they finally start releasing them back on Steam. What’s your opinion on this matter?
