Players have spoken and a LOT of them prefer Steam.
Not only with proton or the controller db, but save-game sync, multiplayer invites, their server browser, and everything being tied to my login.
Even managing my game library on steam is pleasant! And the social features they have are.. actually pretty useful. Having a friends list of people who I game with is nice, as is the ability to have low friction conversations.
I’ve even gone to the steam discussion forums for games that are on Steam but I own elsewhere.
This is like the famous Dropbox comment
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
I've used the file verification and repair feature many times. It's also a convenient place to enumerate the games I have access to so I can download them on a new PC.
I'm sure this isn't the absolute best timeline, but it sure beats a land where Origin and UPlay successfully beatup Steam and we're all forced back onto walled gardens. And it seems sustainable, the second largest platform (IMO) out there is GOG which is owned and operated by CD Projekt Red - it seems like game studios see a lot of utility from owning a mostly open platform like this.
Downloading games off Steam is easier than pirating them. If that's not progress, I don't know what is. Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.
It actually is, it's just called "streaming" instead of downloading*.
For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline. Now all the old media companies (who have even bigger god complexes than game studios) are doing the exact same thing everyone in this thread is discussing with alternate launchers, and creating their own streaming services. And piracy is suddenly back on the rise. Only time will tell whether this will play out the same way as the OP, or whether the flexibility afforded by inherently streamable format will allow them to succeed in splintering where game studios failed.
*Two notes on this:
1) it's a benefit afforded by having a much more linear data format
2) despite what HN commenters may believe, it's only a small percentage of users that care about owning content rather than being able to conveniently access it)
In the US, maybe? Because here in Europe Netflix or any other streaming service has never been the go-to place for _any_ movie. You get to watch what they offer today, but if you want a specific movie, tough luck.
Steam is the place to be for 99.9% of PC gaming, anywhere in the world. This is why gaming piracy is pretty much dead while people are still downloading movies and tv shows to this day.
What's the better way?
Centralized software install/update, with a good CDN behind it, is a pretty huge advantage. Even if you don't care about any of the other features of the Steam launcher, that one alone is worth it. Having every publisher run their own download servers means they're much more subject to getting overloaded under heavy demand, or becoming permanently unavailable if the publisher goes out of business.
The most important services are of course the first two, and in this sense, you can think of them as basically something like apt, but built with software that requires you provide proof purchase before downloading it. This helps explain why having to use multiple launchers provokes such frustration among users--it means you basically have two package managers running on your system.
Maybe if software update were a part of standard OS services, it wouldn't be such an issue, but as it isn't [on desktops], another platform providing such services becoming popular for doing so shouldn't be surprising.
And generally I think Steam staying alive is much more likely than random places serving stuff. Even if it were DRM free. Just looking at history quite many services have come and gone on PC.