Game launchers (with the possible exception of GOG, which at least lets you download game installers for offline use independent of the launcher) are hideous.Case in point, in 2021 I purchased Star Wars: Squadrons through Epic Games (who was having a sale at the time). To install and launch the game, Epic's launcher launches the EA app in order to access the game from my library on the EA side.A few years pass, the pandemic takes its toll, I don't feel much like gaming, so don't revisit the game until this week. Now, upon trying to launch the game, I find that when I try to launch the game from Epic, I'm met with a completely empty library in EA app. If I search for say "squadrons", the game icon comes up, and I can click it to install, but guess what, after that, NOTHING happens. After several online chats and email support with Epic and EA both, the problem remains unsolved, and I am thoroughly disillusioned with this situation. I'm out $39.99 for an enjoyable game thanks to things being mired in the technical debt of these needless, bloated third-party launchers which EAs various money-hungry management thought was a good idea.That, on top of AAA gaming's pay-to-play, always on, loot box and DLC shenanigans makes me extremely hesitant to bother purchasing a game whose media I can't own. Largely gone are the days when big game studios enabled you to actually download and own the digital media that makes up your purchase. You have to play by their rules, and if things change over time that disrupts the brittle mechanisms and partnerships between launcher mongers as is the case here, things break, and customers leave bad reviews.Incidentally, with Epic Games, I found that some years back they decided a username I set in the past was "offensive", prompting them to change it to some default, "Userblahblahblah", whatever. The software developer in me thinks that this is a contributing factor to my woes with the Epic => EA launcher when trying to play the game, because maybe whatever references to the Epic username I had at the time, that the EA app then was configured for, became orphaned so that now the EA app has no basis to know that yes, I am in fact a valid user.This is the kind of nonsense that happens when profit driven corporations make like slavedrivers to their "rock star" and other technical staff, prompting them to deploy stuff that may've been run past a best practice or few but not actually been developed to implement any strongly or thoroughly.
