All of the competition has missed either one or more of the features, making them feel like only a cash grab trying to avoid Valve's cut for providing these features.
We really did have a far better shot at it than even most insiders appreciated (to the point rival companies would tell me to my face how confused they were by the apparent failure to execute), however, the core team were more interested in fighting over who would take credit for it when it succeeded than ever ensuring that it would.
Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to launch their games, what was the real crime? Not enabling gambling on their platform like steam?
To me, this was the crime. Me and my friends played mass effect 3 multiplayer around launch, which was an EA Origin exclusive. It was a total pain! All of us needed to download and install the launcher, then buy & download the game through it. Then add each other as "EA origin friends". The whole process was riddled with bugs at the time - including payment problems and download problems. Origin would crash sometimes. Sometimes we couldn't see each other in multiplayer, and needed to restart origin to fix it. Sometimes another of our friends would join us - and it was always "oh god, what do I have to do to make this work??".
I really love mass effect 3. But the experience was traumatic enough that I never bought or played anything through EA Origin ever since then. The quality of Steam is table stakes now. And there's so many good games coming out that game exclusivity usually isn't enough to get you over that initial hump.
The biggest gripe I have with the origin launcher (and to a lesser extent, the epic launcher) other than "why does it exist at all?" is how laggy all UI actions are. Game developers can render a 3d world at 120+fps. Why on earth does it take multiple seconds for the UI to respond to a button press sometimes? Its completely inexcusable. The blizzard launcher is (IMO) the best launcher by this metric. You can tell competent people made it, because everything responds instantly. (The EA launcher might be good now, I wouldn't know. I mostly only play games that release on steam.)
At the same time Steam had polished a lot of the rough edges like this for their catalog and other publishers so there's really no excuse. I've never had to open support tickets with any other storefront because the DLC map pack for a game would stop loading while the base game kept working.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire and has shown no particular need to enshittify his brand just to extract more profit. May he blessed with health and a long life.
