Ready to launch

Age of the Geek Column: Once upon a time, in the wild west of the PC gaming market, there was a little developer called Valve that specialized in making popular first-person shooters. Looking for a way to better manage the online distribution of their games, they developed a client that would let users buy their games and automatically keep them updated to the latest version. Ever fond of wordplay, they called this client "Steam."
The advantages of the game client for both developer and customer were immediately obvious. Digital distribution meant that developers no longer had to invest in packaging mass produced CDs to physically ship out to retail stores. Likewise, players no longer had to keep boxes of CDs or be fearful that a misplaced activation code would render their games unplayable. Instead, installing and playing a game would be a simple matter of logging into a game client.
Initially designed just to support Valve's own games, the Steam client soon expanded its offerings, adding third-party games to their storefront. First from other PC developers, then larger publishers. Appropriately, Steam quickly gained steam and within a few years Valve stopped being a video game developer with a client that sells games and became the de facto gatekeeper of the PC market that occasionally releases their own titles.
For more than a decade now, Valve has held a near-monopoly on the PC gaming market. With few exceptions, if you don't sell your PC game through Steam, it may as well not exist. Only the largest and most prolific developers have dared to circumvent Steam.
Blizzard, for example, has their Battle.net launcher, which is what players use to get into their favorite Blizzard titles like "World of Warcraft" and "Overwatch." However, to say that the Blizzard launcher is a competitor to Steam would be a bit of a stretch.
As opposed to Steam, where literally dozens of games are released every week, there are a grand total of ten games you can buy from Battle.net. Granted, these are some of the most prolific games on the market, but Blizzard seems content to limit Battle.net to their own products and a couple of titles from their partner company, Activision.
Other large publishers like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft have created launchers of their own, however most of their offerings can still be found on Steam. The market presence of Steam is so large that even industry giants are reluctant to cut themselves off from that potential customer base, even if it means undercutting their own platforms.
However, that is starting to change.
You may have not heard of Epic Games, but you've definitely heard of their most popular game, a little title called "Fortnite."
"Fortnite" cannot be found on Steam. Instead, you download it through the Epic Games launcher. While many PC gamers have become accustomed to operating exclusively through Steam, this minor inconvenience did not stop "Fortnite" from becoming popular beyond anybody's expectations.
Epic Games has since begun to capitalize on this opportunity. Realizing that they had millions of eyeballs on their launcher every day, Epic Games converted their launcher into a bona fide storefront last December. Inviting third-party developers to sell games on their platform, Epic took a direct shot at Steam by declaring that their cut of game sales would be less than half of what Valve takes.
That, however, has only been the start of it. Epic seems determined to take a bite out of Steam's market dominance. Every two weeks (or, every fortnight) they encourage people to return to their storefront with the promise of a free game, because if there's anything that attracts a gamer's attention, it's the notion of increasing their library of random games they'll probably never get around to playing anyway.
More aggressively though, Epic recently entered into a deal with publisher Deep Silver for a one year exclusivity agreement for the upcoming "Metro Exodus."
Exclusivity deals like this are typically seen on the console market, with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft paying developers to keep high profile games off of their competitor's systems. It's a controversial practice as it inevitably results in gamers being locked out of playing certain games due to not owning the correct system.
That particular issue doesn't really apply to PC. Unlike consoles, game launchers are free. Everybody mad about "Metro Exodus" not being on Steam, and there are many that are, is only a small download away from having access to it through the Epic launcher.
That said, there are downsides to having the PC market split between multiple launchers. It's very convenient to have all of your games on one launcher. Every new launcher is a new account to make, a new password to remember, a new friends list to keep track of, and a new games library to manage. In the course of writing this column, I discovered that a game I'd been looking to buy on Steam was one I already owned on a different platform and had forgotten about.
On the other hand, Valve's dominance over the PC market hasn't always been great for the industry. The larger they get, the slower they are to improve their services. A little bit of healthy competition will be beneficial for everybody, even if it does mean having to keep better track of which games are where.
It will be interesting to see where things go from here. Steam was a game changer for the industry and we may be on the cusp of seeing another monumental shift in how this industry operates.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is going to need a launcher to keep track of his launchers.