this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
73 points (100.0% liked)

PC Gaming

106 readers
2 users here now

Discuss Games, Hardware and News on PC Gaming **Discord** https://discord.gg/4bxJgkY **Mastodon** https://cupoftea.social **Donate** https://ko-fi.com/cupofteasocial **Wiki** https://www.pcgamingwiki.com

founded 1 year ago
73
Weekend PC game deals (www.neowin.net)
submitted 1 year ago by tangelo@kbin.social to c/PCGaming@kbin.social
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tangelo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

With Steam you're essentially paying a (sometimes) premium for a whole suite of features: Steamworks (drop-in support for matchmaking and multiplayer lobbies), numerous edge servers on a global CDN (faster downloads), Steam input (plethora of configuration options for any controller or HID), remote play (play local games with a remote player), shared shader caching, upstream contributions to the Wine, Vulkan, DXVK et al stacks, a highly open and permissive API, streaming video of your game while you play it, Steam cache servers (build a local fileserver to cache game downloads), the list goes on. And if you find a bug, you can report it on their bug tracker and someone will actually investigate it. It is a no-brainer.

Other services just give you a desktop shortcut at best. People say, "I don't need these features, I just want games." If they've ever launched a game on Steam, they've probably benefited from these features and more without realizing it.