What a strange case of forcing unedited titles leading to misinforming the readers.
For those saying things like “of course it was”, or balking at the audacity of Activision for expecting players to download Battle.net: this headline is intentionally misleading. It very rapidly explains that this is the argument made by Microsoft and Blizzard in an attempt to prove to the FTC that the ongoing acquisition suit will not cause a notable monopoly in the marketplace. The article continues to explain that, while battle.net user numbers were stagnant over the release of exclusive-to-b.net CoD titles, this is not because users were unwilling to download a new launcher for the title. Instead, Blizzards own titles lost millions of users during these years - pre D4, pre Dragonflight, mid Overwatch 2 shitshow - while CoD brought a similiar number of millions of users to the platform. CoDs ability to monopolize and determine where its users are was a resounding success; they simply couldn’t outpace Blizzards inability to produce decent games.
Information is being misrepresented in the court because it helps the case to allow the acquisition to go through. The headlines quotes the lie being spread in the court room and then quickly debunks it. Read articles, not headlines.
People love a launcher. People hate multiple launchers. People despise launchers they use for a single game.
That said, it probably wasn’t the launcher that killed sales, other than the fact that it wasn’t on Steam for some random discovery sales. People who wanted to play the new COD bought it, and then found out what the launcher was, not the other way around.
Maybe I’m the odd one out but I like the individual game launchers. Having everything grouped into steam, epic, ubisoft, etc can be convenient but then you run into issues when those services have downtime. Not to mention they include lots of bloat (if I want a program to download and run 1 specific game, I don’t want to download an entire store, library, forums, and social network along with it).
I agree, but certainly not all launchers are at the same maturity. I love Steam because it’s so much greater than the sum of its parts – community controller layouts, cloudsaves, Workshop, forums and community content, a marketplace. I do have other launchers with a fair share of games (GOG for example), but still it’s not nearly the experience of Steam.
As a couch gamer, my setup is wholly reliant on Steam. Big Picture mode makes it viable to navigate using only a gamepad, every other launcher requires a mouse.
