News Lenovo announces Legion Game Store

If you're going to screen, don't half arse it: select only for fully completed and patched/bugfixed/updated games. That's a niche I haven't seen anyone fill yet (GoG getting somewhat close).

 

Never going to happen as it would exclude basically all the AAA shinies for like a year after their launch, at which point they may have been completed and patched, but are also getting discounted and have very slim profit margins.

 

Is this going to come with malware, or will the game devs be expected to install their own?

 

It would miss the launch spike, but could well become the favoured store for 'Long tail' (or 'Stegosaurus tail') volume sales. If you specialise in "buy the game here and it comes with all the patches integrated, all the fixes fixed, all the updates and DLCs bundles, you just buy The Thing and you get all the bits of The Thing in one go, job done" that competes favourable with "I can buy the base game for cheapest on Steam but that can't be used with the expansion packs which are cheapest through Origin and the version on GoG is DRM-free but didn't get the final update..." situation you run into today (generally after buying the 'wrong' version).

 

I feel that Steam, like Google, is so well established that going head to head is a bit pointless.

EXACTLY my thoughts.

 

Humble, GoG, Origin, and even the Windows and Mac app stores are all successful - you don't have to be as titanic as Valve to do well!

 

For gaming the Windows App store is not a success.

In fact it's almost the perfect opposite of a success, it's somehow more awkward than Game For Windows Live, senior developers at Microsoft have put a real effort into making it as bad as possible and the hard work shows. I tried to get Halo Wars 2 from it, as far as I'm concerned a release on the Windows Store is not a release at all.

I struggle to see how Lenovo plan to compete. EA got Origin off the ground because they had Battlefield 3, Fifa and Mass Effect 3 to kick it through the door, plus they gave a bunch of titles from their back catalogue away for free. Even then I have paid money to Origin three times in seven years (BF3, Crysis 3 and BF4) so it has hardly taken me away from Steam.

GOG has carved out a niche for itself, but it's not a niche I see Lenovo being willing to follow. Unless they have a seriously good unique selling point it's just another login and account to juggle.

 

Depends on what definition of successful you apply.
Are they making at least £0.01 profit? Based on that metric, yes they are a success.

However, look at it from a consumer perspective:
Steam is the only one that has refunds, user reviews forums and guides, mod support, auto patching, cloud saves etc all rolled into one easy to use software, no other game seller (regardless if physical or digital, PC or Console) comes even close to offering the same functionality.

 

Which is great, if you're not the type to immediately dig through the Steam settings and disable all the Social Media Bull$&%t immediately after install.
Is it a store? Can Money be exchanged for goods and services video games? Does it then aid in downloading said video games? If yes then it's competitive, and all other features are bumf for the digital hat crowd.

 

For one GOG and Origin both had refunds before Steam did.

 

The point was that no other game seller has all the things listed.
Good luck finding written user reviews to warn you of technical issues on Origin for example or simply hitting a check box on GOG to enable / disable a mod.