possibly spicy take: I think what it would take to dislodge steam at this point would be a fundamental change to, not store apps, but the windows OS, because the fundamental problem is a combination of two things:
- Steam presents your library in a useful and organized way with a ton of info that is a huge pain to extract from the windows UI otherwise
- Steam provides a number of basic usability features that windows bafflingly lacks or makes incredibly hard to access
When you look at the reasons people are reluctant to use other stores, usually it's because every store needs to duplicate these features (or have them glaringly lacking) individually, which means you're running tons of very heavy apps that are all individually reinventing the wheel, and many of which have completely different ideas on concepts like library organization. It's just fundamentally a bad user experience to be torn across a ton of fragmented places like this.
But I don't think the problem can be solved with "just make a better app than steam" or "just get used to forgetting where half your games are installed from". I think the key is that steam needs to have less of a stranglehold on screenspace and featurespace. If steam didn't need to provide these features because the OS already provided them? The problems dramatically lessen.
Think about the comparison to phone app stores. They may be monopolies but they don't actually provide much of use to you. I can easily imagine myself using multiple stores on my phone because concepts like "launching the game" or "cloud saves" etc don't require me to use the store directly for that. No matter what I do, the central OS of my phone home screen is the hub, not the store
I feel like a world in which we can have multiple successful stores on windows would need that approach - if I could get the kind of info I do through my steam library directly - do patching, etc as well - from the start menu or something equivalent,
- I'd probably never look at the steam UI again except to buy games
- Pretty much every new store on windows would be in a vastly superior position to now because it doesn't have to waste time reinventing the wheel on 20 different basic features everyone wants
Is microsoft ever likely to do any of this?
looks at the microsoft store
no. but we can dream, right?
On a similar wavelength: it’s baffling to watch Microsoft all but ignore the handheld PC push. Like, Phil Spencer’s hinted that an Xbox handheld might be coming, but the fact is that there are almost a dozen different handheld PCs from major manufacturers out right now, right this second, and the major complaint with all of them is “Windows just isn’t built for this.” The more time they spend without a suitable, handheld-friendly OS, the more it feels like they’re setting themselves up for another Windows Phone vs. iOS/Android debacle: too little, too late, these companies are all using something other than Windows.
