Are you a gamer? Cause I am. And one of the most intriguing things to me has been watching the way the video game industry has both tried to bring us together and tear us apart through various ways to gate keep how games are acquired. Now in the case of Xbox and PlayStation gamers this is mostly a simple means of going to the local Best Buy or Wal-Mart and grabbing a physical copy of whatever game you want to play. Heck maybe you even go onto the respective in console online stores and purchase the games that way. Where things start to get complicated is when you step into the realm of PC gaming. I myself am of the PC gamer variety, having evolved during the pandemic to build a gaming PC after my humble beginnings as a console gamer. Originally there was the Steam platform for purchasing games and downloading them to your computer. That was the way things were for a long time. Fast forward to today and much like the barrage of streaming services diluting where we can get our content from, many companies have created their own online stores to source their PC games from.
where you buy your games says a lot about you… pic.twitter.com/y299zr37WG
— Linus Tech Tips (@LinusTech) November 14, 2022
This can create a plethora of problems. Most notably is the issue of crossplay. Often when you purchase a game on one platform you will be locked to playing with other people that also bought that game from that particular store. The console equivalent of this was when PlayStation and Xbox gamers could not play with each other but only members of their same console. Nothing irks me more than sitting down to play a new game and finding out that someone bought it on the wrong store because it was available at a cheaper price and thus our planned time of experiencing the brand new world of said game is ruined. This is no different than streaming services. Once upon a time we had Netflix. The stalwart of the streaming community and the be all end all death call to cable. Then what happened? Every company said “wow we should copy this” and voila, we are back to the exact same problem we started with. So fellow gamers, we may see some relief on the horizon as more games get crossplay. But until then, which store do you most often buy your games from?