Can someone explain why it matters to the consumer which store you buy your game from?
WELL there's sort of 3 layers I guess.
Layer 1 is where I'm at which is I hate all this crap and would prefer to just straight up download my games directly and not have a little portal/account tied to them and the strings that come with it.
A good example of why I hate these things is just recently I lost access to my Origin account. I couldn't play any of my games on it until I was able to directly get ahold of someone in Origin's tech support and have them re-open my account. They claim someone attempted to hack it, I'm....skeptical of this. And on top of that because the giant Anthem cluster of a VIP release their support was backed up like 6 hours.
If my games were a handy downloadable file I could have just launched my games and not worried about the stupid account. But because I'm tied to a stupid client I'm stuck till the issue gets resolved.
Most people aren't me and don't care about this. I could go way deeper in this but I'll leave it here for now
2. Brand loyalty
People seem to really dislike having separate game portals. All the little value add features like friends lists, mod integration, multiplayer tied to the distribution network.
It depends entirely on the game but some developers have said their sales are as high as 90% marketshare on Steam. The game is the same price on Origin or GOG, or Uplay or whatever. But people still buy it on Steam. Whether it's laziness or not wanting to have multiple client softwares, or as I was saying earlier if the prices are all going to be the same why not just buy it all at one place and save yourself the relatively minor hassle of having more than one client/account/password/place your credit card info is?
There's also a minor to major cult aspect to some Steam fans so I'd always take out-sized internet reactions with a grain of salt. Their brand loyalty to Valve/Steam is not completely unwarranted though. For example without Valve pushing it I'm not sure the option to refund games would have ever come about. Valve was also a bulwark (though an imperfect one) against some of the more draconian DRM measures like seccurom and such ~10-12 years ago and that built up a lot of that brand loyalty. Valve with their relatively unintrusive DRM scheme was a sensible alternative and grew big enough that they could swing their weight against publishers with things like this.
I think most of your moderate to hardcore PC gamer is in this category somewhere.
3. Say you aren't invested hardcore in the PC gaming community but just want to play a few games once in a while. No service is as easy to use as Steam. All the rest, even my own preferred alternatives, are simply more of a hassle. Mostly in small ways but not always. Their value add features built into their clients are all worse as well.
Sure there was some complaining a few years back when EA pushed Origin hard and now they are nearly exclusive there, and Ubi with UPlay (spit). But people have somewhat grown to accept them as well thats their own games in-house so it's okay they have their own platform.
But Metro being a major third party game being exclusive on a particular PC distribution is extremely unusual. Maybe people will accept it in a few years the same way they did the self published stuff.
I think maybe a decent comparison is the TV streaming situation, where now people feel like they need to have 5 streaming services just to replace the one (Netflix) they used to have before when everyone sold their stuff to Netflix.
