[lowkj]

When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came.

I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would then not allow me to play my own game because I hadn’t authenticated recently enough for them. Or I would try to play and Steam would say, oh first you need to download some huge update before you’re allowed to play your single player entirely offline game.

I know theoretically GoG is supposed to solve this issue but no Mac game I wanted was available there. Finally Cyperpunk 2077 launched on multiple stores and I bought on GoG. Even then, the default option became to use the GoG launcher. If I wanted DRM free download, there was some immediately complicated off putting set of instructions, downloading something like 20+ files, etc.

App Store experience, I click download, it downloads. I open it, it opens the app and not some launcher. Everything just works.

[acomjean]

I’ve been a long time iOS user. A fair amount of my purchased software won’t run anymore as it wasn’t updated from 32->63 bit change. I had some Mac software in the same boat. App Stores have some ease of use advantages, but it “just works” till at some point it doesn’t. I’ll angree it’s annoying to have be internet connected to use the software. FWIW the steam deck seems to work with games offline, so maybe they fixed some of those issues?

[talldan]

I guess that's true, though I don't think you have to launch games through the steam app, but they try to make it convenient to do so.

You can also right-click the game and 'Browse local files' and the game's regular executable is usually right there.

I'm currently playing the Oblivion remake, and launch that through a mod manager rather than Steam (though on Windows), even though the game was installed via Steam.

[bilkow]

> though I don't think you have to launch games through the steam app, but they try to make it convenient to do so.

It depends on the game, they do offer some kind of DRM, which requires Steam to be open when launching the game, but it's optional for the developer to use it or not. See https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Digital_rights_management_...

PCGamingWiki also usually has information on whether the game is DRM-free or not, e.g.: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hades#Availability

[bigyabai]

Surely this isn't your policy for all software. I've known many people that defend the App Store on iOS this way, but nobody that uses a Mac exclusively for App Store software.

[latexr]

That doesn’t matter. We’re not discussing “all software”, we’re discussing games. You can simultaneously dislike the Mac App Store and still prefer it over Steam. Those ideas aren’t contradicting.