I don’t think most publishers (Remedy in this case) care. The ones that do are ones like Epic and Microsoft who were trying to promote their own stores.

Like, yes they want to diversify their platforms. But if you want to bring in revenue quickly and start paying off thr debt accumulated from 3-5 years of developing a AAA game. You have to choose whether to delay your game’s PC release entirely for a couple of months, or whether to release on Steam ASAP and collect the vast majority of revenue from that and just delay the other platforms that are an insignificant fraction.

Remember that marketing budgets are a huge factor too. I suspect Lemmy users are probably more ad-averse than average, but your average gaming consumer probably saw a lot of ads for this game leading up to launch and was riding that hype train. Delaying the PC release means that you either need to pay for those marketing costs for longer, or release without that benefit (a death sentence). Or you delay the console launch too, which means even more time spent with financing tied up in debt and accumulating interest, waiting for the revenue to come in.

And even if you DO decide to go ahead and delay… The vast majority of PC gamers are going to buy it on Steam anyways. Only a tiny fraction of people care about DRM. Personally, I avoid anything with Denuvo and a lot of the publisher-specific stuff like EA Play.

You are paying a premium to buy a launch day game anyways. The reason people want to buy games on launch… Some people do just really want their gratification and don’t want to wait to enjoy the game, but a LOT of it is about social status. These are people who want to read articles, watch videos, engage in discussions both online and offline. They want to ride the hype train. And for people who want to maximize that experience, Steam is the platform of choice. They blow Epic and GOG put of the water in terms of social features. They are way better than any of the consoles too.

As someone not socially motivated myself… Well, I absolutely loved Control and I have been gushing to people about it for a couple of years. I’m in absolutely no hurry to buy the sequel. I’ll wait until it goes on sale for some reasonable price, probably $25-$30. Then it will sit in my library with my ~700 other games until the time is right. My mood, my schedule, the weather, etc. And I will almost certainly buy it on Steam for the convenience of having it on the same platforms as my other games, including cloud features that let me switch between my Deck and PC seamlessly, and stream to basically every screen I own.