Like two juggernauts at odds with one another since the dawn of time, two titans of the digital storefront landscape are locked in a battle of attrition to reign supreme in my Chrome browser’s autofill feature: Steam and Sony PlayStation. As both vacillate between first and second place, there’s no other contender that even comes close to competing against these two colossal video-game purveyors.
But how did we get here? How is it that we find ourselves on this gridiron of gaming? It’s simple really. Both online marketplaces begin with the word store (store.steampowered.com and store.playstation.com), so as soon as I type S followed by T, either one will immediately autofill the search bar. But which one is wholly dependent on which of the two sites I have visited the most times recently. And since I tend to browse both quite regularly, it can be an uphill battle to determine which will dominate the other.
For most of my digital game-buying career, PlayStation had free reign of my browser preferences. In fact, it wasn’t even until early last year that I even began playing a decent amount of PC games. But since first getting a gaming-capable PC (built from clay, as it were, by my partner Cali), and then later getting a dedicated gaming laptop, I have increased my Steam game consumption tenfold. And sure, I do frequent the Epic and GOG digital shops, but if you are at all familiar with either of those storefronts, you should already realize that neither start with the keyword store. So that means that, although these storefronts do play bit parts in this blood feud, they are tertiary at best.
I should point out that I don’t typically shop on Steam through the launcher itself, but through their web store, as most of the time I am browsing removed from my dedicated rig. I do not have the launcher installed on my work laptop, for example.
So once I started to visit Steam’s shop frequently, Sony started to feel a tug at its coattails; there was a new store keyword in town. And since my gaming PC had given me a whole new avenue of games to explore (and since my PlayStation library is already satisfactorily massive), I found myself visiting Steam a lot more often. And the more this happened, the more its prominence rose in my Chrome history.
So when the day finally came that I typed those magical two letters — S and T — and store.steampowered.com autofilled in my browser, I had to acknowledge that there was a new sheriff in town. And don’t think PlayStation didn’t notice. I mean, how could they not? For years, they dominated my search preferences; surely they thought they’d retain that stranglehold until the day I shuffled off this mortal coil. So it must’ve come as nothing short of a seismic shift beneath their feet when store.playstation.com no longer dominated the first slot in my browser’s autofill.
But Steam’s reign of supremacy would be short-lived, possibly due to a killer PlayStation sale, and Sony’s storefront would recapture the top spot.
And so it goes, the scales tipping between the two titans as killer sales and personal curiosity ebb and flow. In fact, on this very day, the power has shifted yet again from PlayStation to Steam, and I’m just waiting for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction. And thus will it be for the rest of eternity.
