this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Not if you own a Steam Deck, or want cloud saving, or have hundreds of games and don’t want to hope you remember your login and password for this one game 10 years from now and that the website still exists, or worry about keeping a local backup of the game if you want to play it in the future.
DRM-free direct downloads are a great option, but better than Steam? That’s subjective. For me, I want all of those things I listed so a non-Steam PC game for me is a last resort, pretty much only reserved for games that I really want to play.
I don’t know why people find this so difficult to understand, I have to assume they’re being wilfully obtuse. Would you download a separate app and create an account for every song you wanted to listen to or every movie you wanted to watch? Of course not. So why would games be any different?
Can you not add non-Steam games to a steam deck? It's DRM free so the idea for most of concerns you have is to back it up yourself since you can.
You can, but it requires going through the desktop interface to install them, if they use another launcher you have to set up that, frequently some trial and error, and then adding them into the Steam interface so they can launch easily with proper input support.
Do all that and set them up correctly, and they’ll run, but without one of the primary Steam Deck benefits which is that Valve does pre-compilation of shaders. That only works for native Steam titles, and it can be the difference between a game being playable and a stuttery mess, especially for more graphically intense titles.
For some games, there are also hardcoded patches in Proton that look for the SteamID of the game to apply them. Those also won’t have those fixes applied when adding them as non-Steam games.
How is any of this the fault of the World of Goo devs? How come Valve shouldn't be expected to implement features to make these things simpler/work?
Because they have a very simple solution: offer their game through their storefront. Why is it Valve’s problem that the World of Goo developers want to forgo their popular storefront because they partnered with a company that forbids it as a requirement of funding?
The real answer of course is that nobody is obligated to help the other with their product. The issue comes down to consumers and what they want to support. I think Valve is being perfectly fair here and Epic is not. The Steam Deck is an open system, if Epic wanted to build a storefront for it, they could. They choose not to, because they don’t want to promote Steam Deck sales.
Isn’t it funny that the “run your own marketplace and keep all revenue” option that Epic took Apple to court over is already available on the Steam Deck from Day 1 and Epic chooses not to take advantage of it. It’s almost like company using a pile of cash to artificially tip the scales in their favour is perfectly fine as long as its them.
Everyone made their business choices here, and they have to live with the consequences.