For me it's both and heavily skewed in favor of buying games
on specific shops for a few reasons:
Platform home (Steam/Epic/GoG...)
Disk+DRM clash (Epic/Microsoft)
Fast access for online/offline play
Data vault supremacy (Do I want to see this game in my library?)
Collaborative efforts in small groups where the game is good but along the vein of a seasonal fad
When I open Steam, there are a number of expectations and comforts that have me coming back to it. First and foremost is always going to be the store itself but always waiting for me is a very LARGE and trouble-free library immediately populated with tons of medium/high rank games that I can enjoy online or offline. I don't keep any bad games here (unless they're hilarious) and for the most part, I tend to keep
everything installed. More importantly, I do tend to play some of these once in a while.
In current standing, 1.86TB of Steam isn't something that just happens overnight even when slammed with 30GB of Destiny updates here, 7GB of Maiden updates there and so on. I have a number of apps, games, jobs, friends and streams constantly vying for my attention and Steam is sort of a primary comfort to untangle. Yes that sounds completely insane but at the end of the day I trust Steam to deliver and it always does. Thanks Valve.
When I open Epic, I am in a completely separate headspace. Maybe there's some free D class junk that gets pushed to a free period on a Thursday morning or some kind of Genshin/Wuthering gacha that hits the front page but my library reflects something else going on.
Immediately I am reminded of the failure of leadership, fumbling of the baton/beacon and absolute nutfuckery of pulling Unreal Tournament from the library. It was the game that put them on the map. Yet it still sits there,
Unavailable. I will reach deep into my ISO library of antiques, install, patch and play Unreal once in a while as it is the great FPS that just won't die. Failing that, I will launch it from Steam because I can still do that. Early Internet culture and total platform adoption probably has a lot to do with this but the game is still very much active and good. It even registers my play time in Epic but I'm sure the time filter is based on local install period of the app and not sync'd with the back end. It looks like I don't play any of these titles and for the most part I really don't. Epic is useful in grabbing whatever I can to try out or stage games for future collabs where I don't want to be waiting forever to download/patch a game so I can hit the ground running the moment we're scheduled. Scuff is not part of my identity. It's either S class workflow or total disaster. It doesn't make sense to normal gamers but neither does loading up the library with games that are stuck there permanently. I cannot remove games from my Epic library. I can delete the binaries but I cannot remove the listings of bad or
unwanted games and trust me there are plenty. It's an actual problem and a reason I won't spend a dime in there.
Now truth be known, I don't actually have access to Microsoft Store on this workstation and had to remote into my Surface just to open the app. This is what I see in today's nightmare and it's synonymous with the Xbox app as it runs on the same infra with another coat of paint:
How many of these titles look interesting to me? None. Wasn't the case when I got a code from my Ryzen purchase a few years ago but I wasn't exactly into gaming/streaming at the time either. Bloodstained was pretty fun for the brief few days I got around to playing it so I wishlisted it on Steam and bought it. The Microsoft Store has its own ecosystem for games and similar to my 360 that sees action maybe once a year, it's not a high priority for any kind of gamer nor should it be. It has a history of problems just getting the Xbox app to play nice, Major OS version lockout, Partition block size issues (you MUST use the default 4K) and general DRM issues that have people looking for ways to migrate their Xbox saves to and from the app. Even without my current situation with the app, it's a blight on mainstream computing and deserves total destruction. Maybe Microsoft has cleaned up their act and gotten the app to behave a little better but I would be none the wiser for it. If I install any of these games, they're getting the APPX backed up to NAS and the install portion is going on a separate partition of the VHD variety.
At the moment I still have key codes purchased early on to start the subscription again if I ever need to do so. It makes sense to have full access to the sub only titles again if the library gets interesting enough to demo but you have to be WWI general strategic about it to get ahead. MS Store/Xbox is really good for trying games and maybe buying them at a discount if you are that deeply tied to the store but having instant access to fad/collab/party games to play with others seems to be the best selling point and I'd rather find the games on Steam at a discount than fighting a bad cloud system. Every once in a while there is a gem that appears in the store. It's fun to try out a very big fully featured game here and that's very useful in personal and professional gaming territories. Use the Microsoft stuff for access to good games and access to friends in scheduled collabs. ✔
I was going to put something here about GoG, Ubisoft, Rockstar and others but I don't actually use any of them, meaning I don't need them. Which means you probably don't need them either.