That's cumbersome. The main benefit of platforms is comfort. Steam takes care of installation and updating, while often also offers some access with the community. Open internet has more choice and liberty, but for the price of more work and annoyance.
That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.
Then how come epic games store is not able to get a foothold for years despite offering literally free games? Not even children which are most likely to use it because of Fortnite use it for anything but that. Steam is objectively the better store and game launcher regardless or price or "sunk cost".
Nothing cumbersome about it. No one who wants to do this is going to fail at it, or even be inconvenienced.
> That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
The value of the platform, in this case, is that people know where it is, but they don't know where openTTD is.