Their hardware is really top notch, I have used a steam deck LCD for years and it was not until very recently that I had a single issue with a button that was easily fixable.
Probably the purchases went down due to some people buying the steam machine. I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention that.
Also, Valve could decide at any moment what happens with your game library. Unlike GOG, where you can download and save the .exe or .dmg file, Steam can just pull the plug and make you lose all your games and money.
Though I always assumed they didn't want to bother making a refund system till they had to, then they figured might as well unlock the floodgates (not that I know anyone at Valve).
I can't even picture gaben with a wispy moustache to twist evilly. I think that would look ridiculous on him. :)
Your "bad guys" are my "people are apparently and inexplicably mad that steam doesn't do their parenting for them" guys.
> I can't even picture gaben with a wispy moustache to twist evilly.
Add a 500m gigayacht to the picture, maybe it will make it easier. Or a fleet.
MapleStory and FIFA have that crown, though Valve certainly did their part to popularize them.
I mostly buy from gog because they give your the download to keep for life. Also I just like them. However getting their games to work on steam deck is more time consuming than just buying from steam
I'd be happy to find out that I've been misinformed but I'm pretty certain this is all true.
Edit: I think for steam key sales actually you're supposed to sell for the same price as Steam, but I can't seem to find the documentatiom stating either way
Edit 2: Ah, here is something stating it "You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." (https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys)
However, I know many games have steam keys indeed available for cheaper on other stores. Not sure how much valve actually cares, or if they have special permission or what.
The thing takes several seconds to start on my brand new gaming rig. Not insufferable but given its only usefulness is to list my games and start one, that's a lot.
I think there's a start-up popup you can turn off in the client settings. I've never seen ads other than their storefront, but I want ads there.
Presumably most potential buyers have PCs already that they use for gaming so it’s a luxury to spend that much on a Steam Deck.
I'm also a little nervous that maybe Valve works on getting the anti-cheat solution improved for Steam hardware, but the rest of Linux gets left behind. Steam has such a halo now, and this would but a subtle but serious tarnish that would never wash off. No massive up front damage but it would be the cusp, a point that would be hard to recover from.
Like the first point, there's also the general risk that someday Gabe isn't around to keep the ship pointed on the right direction. That they turn into a Nintendo, a company who never misses a chance to squander good will, to do the most MBA thing they can, that is as un-ppen as possible by design. See for example Nintendo's recent response to customers asking for some of the tariff refund money Nintendo is claiming.
Agree with the sentiment but let's not forget the awful fan noise issue impacting many users at launch.
Developers of AAA games for PC can only (or are willing to) do so much to make it run acceptably on what’s a very underpowered PC compared to their target market.
I won't buy another Xbox, the Series X was a massive disappointment and AAA games all suck. I found I was just playing decade+ old games on my Series X and while load times might have improved on the newer hardware, it wasn't enough to justify the upgrade. I regret my Series X purchase.
I feel like Nintendo is actually really well positioned for these component price increases, because now they benefit from having the weakest hardware. There is only so much most consumers are willing to pay for a gaming console, and now the Switch may be the only one in that price range.
When I rewrote/released an old shareware game to Steam some years ago I made just enough money to buy a Steam Deck. Since then OLED Decks came out and I'm jealous.
(With the prices of the new Steam Decks, I'm wondering now if there is instead a way to retrofit my old Deck with an OLED…)
If they want to increase or keep market share they need to eat costs somewhere in this. Maybe they are positioned to do that soon if they anticipate another doubling of ram prices like Microsoft does, we can’t know their plans for future price increases.
Reports I’ve seen suggest that they are making a roughly 10% profit per Gabe Cube right now, which is considerable.
Valve will cite the idea that Sony/nintendo/xbox can sell at a loss because they are bundling in the profit from sold games on their digital stores, but there’s no guarantee Cubers will do the same. But that’s bullshit, we all know 99% of cube users will be buying shit through steam, it’s a weak defense.
Sounds like thinly veiled self-righteous jealousy to me...
They could, but since its literally just a PC it would just be subsidising PCs for something they likely aren't gonna make their money back, unlike XBOX or PlayStation, which are locked down and you are forced to use their store where they make the money back.
Will they make some of the subsidisation back? Sure, there will be some gamers that will be able to buy it just from pure numbers, but I feel like a massive chunk would just end up as office PCs with Windows on them in some office if subsidised.
The deck might make more sense to subsidise, but to do it for the gabecube doesn't make sense in the world we live in.
As if that was a counterexample to him being a good guy? Who cares what he buys. It's his money and its legal. The "billionaire bad" brainwashing needs to stop.
No, not until the problem goes away.
"But it will always exist."
Noted.
Needless to say, people who have little or nothing to do with each other having different levels of wealth as a consequence of activities entirely unrelated to one another is not a "problem" that needs to be solved. People having their rights violated or opportunities artificially limited is a problem, but attempting to attribute that sort of problem to someone else, somewhere else, not being artificially transgressed against is disingenuous and fallacious.
After your post I reviewed the first page of your comment history and I was pretty sure I knew where you would stand on this issue.
> as much as I just initially gave you the benefit of the doubt
And I was proven correct in my assumption.
> Sadly, the doubt did not resolve in your favor.
Once you get off your soapbox, reality may find you surrounded by pitchforks.
> people who have little or nothing to do with each other having different levels of wealth as a consequence of activities entirely unrelated to one another
This is where our conversation ends, because we have a different interpretation of value creation and reality, and neither one of us will change the other's mind.
> People having their rights violated or opportunities artificially limited is a problem
The billionaire class have different rights and opportunities. They have different tools in the financial and political system. They have more sway in the political system, and they can greatly impact how things play out. Is it a representative government? Yes. But currently capital allocation and mechanisms see to it that the representation and opportunities are limited, which is the entire problem caused by having such wealth disparity. It is thorn in the side of democracy, and antithetical to freedom.
Yes, that seems reasonable. I try to root my positions in a baseline understanding of reality and a core set of underlying principles, rather than allow them to be unduly influenced by polemic and arguments from emotion (as is unfortunately all too common these days) so there should be a certain level of consistency in my stances on various issues. Thanks for recognizing this.
> Once you get off your soapbox, reality may find you surrounded by pitchforks.
Where I live, alligators are a bit more common, but perhaps a bit more rational in their actions than the allegorical pitchfork-bearers. The alligators may act to obtain food that's actually present, but the mob is usually reacting only to imaginary stimuli.
> This is where our conversation ends, because we have a different interpretation of value creation and reality, and neither one of us will change the other's mind.
I supposed not. But where empirical propositions are concerned, reality is what it is regardless of how you choose to interpret it, and things will play out as cause and effect entail, with people acting on the motivations that they actually have, irrespective of the normative opinions of uninvolved stranger.s
> The billionaire class have different rights and opportunities.
I thought you'd ended the conversation with the last paragraph. Nevertheless, I'll respond to point out that there is no such thing as a "billionaire class", or any other kind of class, as a causal entity in the world: it's all just people pursuing motivations deriving from fundamental human nature, as parsed through their individual reason.
The taxonomy you're engaging with exists in your own mind, not the world itself, and encompasses disparate people who are often at odds with each other as you suspect they are with you.
And no one has "different rights and opportunities"; the former are normative boundaries that are definitionally the same for everyone, and the latter are states of affairs that exist in the world at large. Indeed, the specific people we're talking about here did not start out as billionaires, but acquired their wealth by pursuing opportunities that already existed.
> They have more sway in the political system, and they can greatly impact how things play out.
This is a defect of the political system, not the broader world in which the political system exists. My suspicion, though, is that you may not want to acknowledge this and join those who seek to restrain the reach of political power itself, out of a desire to use political power for your own ends and the fatal conceit that it can be used effectively for those ends without ultimately just becoming an instrument of greater abuse than the abuses you aim to rectify.
> But currently capital allocation and mechanisms see to it that the representation and opportunities are limited, which is the entire problem caused by having such wealth disparity.
Ah, an empirical claim! It sounds like you're saying that some people earning large amounts of wealth from success in businesses -- that exist on account of widespread availability of capital in the first place -- is somehow blocking other parties' access to liquid capital. Can you cite any examples of this? It doesn't seem to make sense, given how capital markets actually work, so some actual specifics would definitely help you make your argument here.
> It is thorn in the side of democracy,
Democracy is a political decision-making process that has nothing per se to do with how much wealth anyone in particular has, and if political decisions are being distorted by misuse of wealth, that again is a defect of the political system that can only be remedied by constraining politics itself.
> and antithetical to freedom.
People you don't know and have no relationship with having more stuff than you is absolutely not antithetical to your freedom; rather, organized attempts to take anyone's stuff away from them is a threat to everyone's freedom.
And no, there probably isn't a way to retrofit. Deck OLED's internals were overhauled, too. The entire board is different, up to and including a die shrink, and rotating the SOC. I wouldn't bet on any of the internal ZIF connectors being in the same place.
An example of this was the PS3, being able to run linux. The US Air Force bought ~1700 PS3s, and built a supercomputer. At launch, the PS3 reportedly lost Sony about $300 per console sold, so that one example alone could have cost a half million dollars.
I also think Valve has/had enough demand at the non fully subsidized price there wasn't much point in selling it for less. They could already sell as many as they wanted to make at the $600+ price point so why subsidize if farther and leave money on the table? That has changed now that they're having to jack the prices up but I think they also just don't want to get into that model and would rather have an ecosystem of healthy competitors they sell games onto.
I personally think a controller and a VR headset that isn't standalone would be fine products for Valve to sell. Maybe they can't justify working on Steam OS without the Deck, Steam Machine or Frame. If they can still sell low volume differentiated products, good for them.
There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game.
I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it.
Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck.
Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.