I talked about the

substantial enough to need an installer

line. Like what makes a game substantial enough to need an installer ? Steam and every other game launcher with install capabilities is more or less just a fancy installer. There is no more effort needed for a publisher to generate a new installer binary than it is to generate a new steam patch. Even if gog installers are offline it’s more or less an archive with a binary stub to unpack it and the install script. This one is on the publisher and not on gog. And for the version difference, do you have an example where the gog and steam versions differ ?

I don’t get that installer thing ? Steam downloads the game executable as well as all of the required libraries and assets into the steamapps directory and runs install scripts. It also runs potentially needed dependency installers like c++ visual studio redistributables or directx installers. The same thing does the gog installer. And the games I own on gog have always had version parity with the steam versions. I thought this would be the standard if a publisher publishes on both stores.

So what’s the problem about using third party clients like heroic game launcher ? Or did I understand the first line of your post wrong ?

Tbh, I’ve never worked in such an environment. I know somebody who told me similar things and I would love to hear more about this to form my own opinion on this. But it’s just not that deep. When I say corporate, I mean it’s full of GUIDs and only machine-readable names, commands and configs. It’s also most of the time not designed with the flexibility in mind and covers only the most commonly (used by the company supporting it) use cases. It just doesn’t have the free spirit which most of the open source tools, which are designed with humans in mind, have. If you need to supply a parameter to get output from a command that is often run manually while you could also have one to deactivate output for script usage. This seems like the wrong way to go.

But this is some Docker shit. For myself Docker always feels a little corporate. It’s just not very conventional with these multiline commands just to run a command inside a container. Especially the obligatory “-it” to fucking see anything. It’s not really straight forward. But if you get used to it and you can make a lot of aliases to use it more easily.