It seems like not requiring either one would be the more neutral, agreeable position to take.
It’s like putting an android apk file on your website for an app.
If you’re giving it away for free to friends, sure.
If not, how do you sell it? How do you stop people stealing it? How do people find out about it?
Obviously, you the answer is usually “you write your own installer / updater” and do your own marketing.
Maybe that’s fun, and there’s something to be said for owning the entire stack… but it’s a loooot of work and probably not a reasonable financial decision to make.
we solved that issue long ago: make the APK a thin client to the actual service you keep on a server. Devs don't care where you download your APKs anymore. that's what the 90+% piracy took from us: the idea of premium, offline games.
advertising is tricky, but if we're being honest with ourselves: google play has only been a hinderance to discovery these days. My ideal pipeline is uploading to F-droid and throwing an APK release on Github as well.
and as a last bit of irony, we're already seeing those backdoor deals being opened up as we see how there was a point to the price fixing argument Wolfire accused of. They could have just let Overgrowth sell on their website, and now Valve is playing a game of cat and mouse on whether they re getting mass arbitration or class action.
>and you don’t have to create yet another account or have another buggy pos launcher on your computer.
Steam is another account I don't care much for personally. And steam has always allowed for third party accounts to be needed. You think then GTA 6 launches in 2029 on PC or whatever that people are gonna complain about needing a Rockstar account?
A lot of that "discourse" is just turf wars and entitlement.
