JTW wrote on Oct 8, 2024, 15:25:

FloorPie wrote on Oct 8, 2024, 14:23:

RogueSix wrote on Oct 8, 2024, 13:36:

LurkerLito wrote on Oct 8, 2024, 12:58:
Probably requires that social club nonsense too I reckon.

It will but the hypocrites don't care. Requiring an account or launcher is only wrong when Sony, Epic, Ubi or EA do it. When Rockstar or Blizzard require an account it is (mostly*) fine.


* yes, I have seen a few complaints about the Battle.net account linking on Steam but nothing major and by far none of the cry baby temper tantrum muppet shows we are always getting with other games these days (especially Sony as of late which really triggers the cry baby whiners super-hard for some reason). No review bombing either. Rockstar and Blizzard are immune to that thanks to their armies of cultist fanbois.

It probably has to do with the fact that people generally have less technical problems with Steam or Bnet. Not that I am a fan of linking those either and I haven't linked them. I already run bnet so it makes little sense to run one of their games thru steam and bnet. Rockstar's launcher is generally junk and I don't have that linked either because the games/codes I bought were cheaper for the Rockstar only version or only available on Epic/Rockstar for a month before the Steam version (RDR2 on PC launch).

And Battle.net predates Steam by a number of years. Unlike Ubishaft, EA, Sony, and similar launchers, they're established platforms that had a purpose all along - they aren't just random extra logins intended for better data tracking.

First, you are wrong about tracking as Steam already tracks everything. It is not even possible to top that as Valve has invested the most effort and time (21 years now) into turning Steam into the finest oiled sales/marketing/tracking/analysis platform in gaming. Aside from the sheer number of MAU, that is the no. 1 reason it is so popular with publishers. They get all the data they want from Steam.
As far as other "per game" data, publishers do not need their clients/launchers. They simply use in-game telemetry. Every game has in-game telemetry these days and very few games offer an opt out.

Secondly, as I said, Ubi and EA absolutely do have their purpose as they are, whether you like it or not, fully-fledged store clients but thanks for confirming my point about hypocrisy . I bet you haven't even ever looked at the Ubi or EA client or you'd know that they are stores and not trackers as your favorite conspiracy nutters on YouTube or TikTok have told you.