One huge difference people often forget: Steam gives you (essentially) unlimited keys to sell elsewhere. Steam still pays for the infrastructure and everything, but they get a 0% cut because someone bought the game on GreenManGaming and then added that key to steam.
Just imagine, alternative app stores, you keep almost all the convenience of the apple one, for free.
You can also give keys away, but if you do that too much, they do apparently limit you ;)
Another thing: The store app is not a disaster. Compare it with Windows, Epic… Those are all horrible apps that mostly behave like browsers, but then differ in some ways (in addition to the often bad performance). Hell, for a long time, the back button did not work in the Epic store. Steam managed to have their store not be a disaster pretty much since its existence.
And Windows/Epic are not even the worst examples.
I remember when Origin started, they had no language setting and forced you into whatever GeoIP decided. I don’t even remember what my issue with UPlay was, but the experience was bad enough that I would never again play a game that uses it.
Just imagine, alternative app stores, you keep almost all the convenience of the apple one, for free.
You can also give keys away, but if you do that too much, they do apparently limit you ;)
Another thing: The store app is not a disaster. Compare it with Windows, Epic… Those are all horrible apps that mostly behave like browsers, but then differ in some ways (in addition to the often bad performance). Hell, for a long time, the back button did not work in the Epic store. Steam managed to have their store not be a disaster pretty much since its existence.
And Windows/Epic are not even the worst examples. I remember when Origin started, they had no language setting and forced you into whatever GeoIP decided. I don’t even remember what my issue with UPlay was, but the experience was bad enough that I would never again play a game that uses it.