The problem is more inherently with people needing to use Steam to play games at all, or rather with Steam being tied to a store. When Steam keys are sold at other websites, it results in, you know, more people using Steam. An application that when started, the first thing the user sees is the Steam store. And gives pop ups of deals on Steam. Making it so that when someone buys a game that uses Steam on another store, that that someone will still be more likely to buy other games on Steam in the future.
I mean, it's not like when people buy a game on Steam it'll encourage people to buy games from a different store.
Yes I know that EGS has the same problem requiring people to use it to download and in some cases play games.
What? Yeah? Of course.
I'm not seeing the problem here. Valve provides a ton of development work, free services, support, and bandwidth. Of course they want you to use their service and buy more games on it. Valve is a business. They need to make money.
And how else would you download the game? There is no service in existence where you can just download the game without using the service, whether it's Google play, Amazon, Apple store, eShop, PSN, Xbox, Steam, GOG, or Epic. I can't imagine an alternate scenario, except direct downloads from a website.
Publishers/developers don't have to use Steam. They could let you download games from their websites like the bad old days. They can provide them on their own launchers, like Ubisoft. But having a central service is part of what made/makes Steam attractive in the first place.
What is the alternative scenario here? Valve does all this work and provides all these services for nothing at all? Valve doesn't exist? Because you're describing a scenario where there is no central service, not a launcher and not even a downloader. That doesn't make sense, unless the alternative is simply "not Steam" (e.g. Amazon downloads) or the developer's own website.
