On iOS there is no choice.
I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would then not allow me to play my own game because I hadn’t authenticated recently enough for them. Or I would try to play and Steam would say, oh first you need to download some huge update before you’re allowed to play your single player entirely offline game.
I know theoretically GoG is supposed to solve this issue but no Mac game I wanted was available there. Finally Cyperpunk 2077 launched on multiple stores and I bought on GoG. Even then, the default option became to use the GoG launcher. If I wanted DRM free download, there was some immediately complicated off putting set of instructions, downloading something like 20+ files, etc.
App Store experience, I click download, it downloads. I open it, it opens the app and not some launcher. Everything just works.
You can also right-click the game and 'Browse local files' and the game's regular executable is usually right there.
I'm currently playing the Oblivion remake, and launch that through a mod manager rather than Steam (though on Windows), even though the game was installed via Steam.
It depends on the game, they do offer some kind of DRM, which requires Steam to be open when launching the game, but it's optional for the developer to use it or not. See https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Digital_rights_management_...
PCGamingWiki also usually has information on whether the game is DRM-free or not, e.g.: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hades#Availability
Two things people think can't be done, but are:
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/play
Save the Xbox one to home screen for full screen experience, turning your iPhone or even iPad 13" into a Logitech gCloud if you add https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7CHHB42
* Steam is constantly updating, every time you open it, and until recently videos would almost always fail to play on my Mac.
* The Epic Games launcher is so atrocious that calling it “feature-rich” feels like a bad joke. I find it so bad that I don’t even open it to get the free games, opting instead for the website, and even then I am super selective about any game I get (fewer than 10%) because I always think I’ll have to deal with that app. In its current state, there is zero chance I’ll ever by a game on there, all because of the app. My “favourite feature” is how if you queue a bunch of games to install and then set a few others to uninstall, those are added to the same queue and you have to wait for the installs to finish before the uninstalls get a chance. So if you are low on disk space, now you have to, one by one, cancel each of the installs and tell them to start again, so they are added to the bottom of the queue.
* GOG Galaxy was the biggest disappointment. I was expecting to like it but it only lasted an hour on my machine before I trashed it. It felt old and incomplete.
Compared to the MAS, Epic is a good launcher for games. Take a look at CP2077. On the MAS you can't just download the language you need, you have to get all of them. This increases the download by 60GB. No other platform has this issue. So it ends up being 160GB which is nuts and more than half the storage on a base model M4 Mac. It's insanely barebones and half assed for gaming.
