Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper
No, it doesn’t even get that far.
Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.
A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display at that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.
ICastFist@programming.dev 18 hours ago
I’m frankly amazed that companies still insist on creating their own launchers, despite every company getting well deserved flak whenever they do it.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
Everyone of them has an asshole in marketing thinking like
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Launchers are also trackers that motor where users interact with the software. Owlcat wants the telemetry data to sell as a side hustle. It’s like they don’t make games to be fun anymore; games are marketing tools.
ICastFist@programming.dev 17 hours ago
Even that dumb argument of theirs falls flat once you see that plenty of games use the main menu screen as a little ad space for their own store or similar games.