Games

GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I'm getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren't required to report that, so I can't tell if a multiplayer game I'm buying is built to last if the developer didn't think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don't get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they're familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I'm in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn't improved the situation in at least 15 years.