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Steam, Epic Games, GOG galaxy. They offer non game apps and they need to promote that


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I mean they have epic games store that competes with steam on windows. They likely want to be able to the same thing on phones.

The sort of games present in App stores (itunes, google play, microsoft, facebook) cater to an entirely different audience than Steam.

And funny enough, Steam has some competition, namely GoG.

Speaking of game stores, how about an "alternate iOS app store" that only has hand curated pay once games? Might entice me to actually check mobile games again and even buy some.


But there’s no Steam on Android either even though they do support third party app stores.

No, Steam was never doing a good job of selling apps outside gaming, and still doesn't.

Steam is an optional app store. The rest are not.

Give them a choice between a web app, a desktop app (which can be on Steam or the Windows Store too), or mobile apps.

The second you can have competing app stores I see Steam opening shop and mobile gaming blowing up.

Every other app store has games, too - with the reasonable assumption that Windows' app store would too, Microsoft established themselves as a competitor to Steam a year ago.

Steam doesn’t distribute apps on Android either? Is it even something they’d want to do?

More examples:

- Steam for games

- Google Play Store for Android


The issue seems to me that app stores don't let other apps be app stores, maybe that should change.

I don't think Steam allow other game marketplaces to upload their software either, maybe that should change too.


Where would you say that Steam currently falls short as a desktop app store? Didn't they roll out general purpose apps for Windows a while back?

I really really really wish amazon would just develop a vendor neutral app store already. Valve seems unwilling to branch into apps outside the sphere of the gaming community. Apple and Microsoft seem to not care about the features that would make their stores more attractive to both buyers and sellers.

steam isn't an open 'app store' though. It is entirely curated through valve. Valve chooses the games to list and if they aren't happy, they will not ask you to list with them. They could easily refuse to sell games if you did that.

This is a similar reason as to why I am done paying for apps/games for phones. The phone I have can run the app or game and I upgrade the OS and I find that because no one was buying the game anymore it just was never signed for the new OS and will not run. It could run just fine, but it has been abandoned because the developer went on to something new.

Services like Steam do a way better job of keeping games running than the typical app store does for games and apps.


I'd welcome competition, steam can get a lot better (it's one of the worse apps I use) but I'm not going to use a facebook game thing.

Already have steam, gog galaxy, origin, and uplay for various things. I use only the former 2 as much as I can.


They will likely be exclusive to Microsoft’s so-called Microsoft Store. Microsoft (and the other game vendors) really needs to stop pretending to have an App Store. Valve owns this space on the PC and it belongs to them. Microsoft does not get to have one.

It probably will look like the windows game stores, everyone could create one and sell games.

But so far we only got:

EA, UBISOFT, GOG, STEAM, epic and windows store.

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