A fractured landscape is a competitive one. Valve had several years of high margins (meaning more money to them, less to the people that made games) and stagnation of the Steam platform. I prefer this fracturing to the monoculture.
It would be nice if any of the game stores would actually compete instead of paying for exclusives. Steam has 1000x the features of any of the other stores. Origin has had probably a decade to catch up and yet its just falling further behind.
All this fracturing means for end users is more rootkit launchers to install and less games for linux users.
It's a chicken and an egg problem. Developers won't come until you have marketshare, and users won't come until you have games. Paying for exclusives is a way to bootstrap a chicken without an egg.
I understand that side of it but valve goes above and beyond so much that even if Epic or Origin had huge user counts I seriously doubt they would put the effort in to building features like "remote play together" which streams a game to other people and streams their controllers back to you so you can all play the same local coop game. Or Proton which allows playing games on linux.
Valve even has linux kernel devs around who fix bugs in drivers for gaming hardware.
Steam may have been a monopoly but it was a pretty good one for the end user.
EA has this with Origin Access (2 tiers, $5m/$30y and $15m/$100y), alongside Ubisoft with UPlay+ ($15m). And I guess platforms like Stadia would fall under this category.
Of course, the games are specific to the publisher or the partnerships the platform has.
Nonsense. Steam as a platform is head and shoulders above where it was a year ago.
All my Windows exclusive games appear side by side with my native Linux games. I no longer have to have wine installed and maintain a separate Windows (in wine) Steam installation.
