this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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At the same time people on here are defending the centralization of PC gaming on Steam so even fediverse users don't understand decentralization
How do you imagine decentralized gaming? Every game comes with it's own launcher?
Every game tied to it's own console.
Unironically I would buy a UFO 50 console
My friend down the street had an LX back in '83. It was an amazing device but sadly way too ahead of its time.
My fantasy is that PC games become similar to roms, where it's a single file. Maybe encoded is the system specs, OS, etc.
Then the "emulator" just works.
Of course, no financial incentives and a lot of work just to exist. Not to mention, it'll be impossible to do for modern games. But maybe every game that's older than 10 years old gets this treatment.
Also I'm not a OS engineer and maybe this is what Proton is doing with Linux.
Then pure decentralized gaming on any OS - computer, browser, raspberry pi, "smart Fridge", whatever has the specs. And the game just works.
The idea is for games to be launcher independent/compatible with many launchers. If I wanna play a game I got on gog I could use the official launcher, heroic, mini galaxy, or I could even use no launcher and just download the game installers directly
And how would a launcher identify you've actually purchased the game? You still need a central source for that. Hypothetically I guess there could be an activitypub like protocol that all storefronts could use to sync purchases, but that opens up a whole other can of worms, such as account linking, purchase duplications, refunds. The main questions with this hypothetical are
As for going completely launcherless, how do you solve updating the game? Steam was originally made to solve the patching problem, because each patch would effectively shut the entire game community down while everyone waited for everyone else to patch their game.
I think will be something more like gog or itch io
What makes either of those decentralized?
I think people just prefer Steam to Epic or EA's store fronts. Whenever GoG gets brought up, the only major complaint is is that there's no official Linux launcher, even when there are Linux binaries for the games.
GOG's Windows launcher is bad so it's not really a big loss. Heroic Launcher is excellent and supports more than just GOG
It's not very good, but does the job. I mainly used the Mac version before jumping ship entirely. I was surprised that they made a Mac version, but no lINUX version. If you ever wanted to know true pain though, the Mac version of the Epic launch was true trash. Nothing worth playing on that anyway though since they discontinued Unreal Tournament.
Heroic launch has been pretty good for any of the modern games I've tried it it. Eventually, I want to get some of the old Star Wars games running though.