EuroGamer has some choice interviews with major players in the video gaming world about the Steam Juggernaut and it’s role in Digital Distribution. Steam has done a lot to assert it’s goodwill towards gamer’s with Get Games boss Graeme Struthers saying, “If I really wanted to take on Steam I’d have to go and find a colossal amount of money and buy them”. Sounds about right, why try and reinvent the wheel when you can just buy it. But Steam as being looked at as kind of a monopoly now, where as before it was just ValVe’s little pet project. So we feel that yes it is good we have stuff like GamersGate and Impulse to push Steam and give us gamer’s choices on where to buy our digital goodness.
EA’s Origin is a bit of a different situation, right now they only carry EA games. They have been offering different sets of discounts through the service to kind of jump start it and get people on it. Obviously Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic are going to be the 2 biggest draw as right now they are locked into running Origin anyway. If EA can court other publishers to sell games through it’s service and keep the sales going it could be the biggest competitor for Steam. But as it stands we’ll have to wait and see what shakes down.
GoG.com seems to fill a very specific niche and I like that they focus on making old PC games affordable and playable on new systems with no client, just download and go. However if they did one day add some kind of library like client with artwork, old reviews and magazine articles that could be really something, almost like a PC gaming time capsule.
Source Link: EuroGamer | Steam | Impulse | gog.com | Direct2Drive | GamersGate
