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I am very happy about Proton/SteamOS and how they assist in making games playable on Linux. I hope the SteamOS devices become popular enough that developers stop trying to shut Linux out.
I’m not looking forward to what will happen with Steam when Gabe is no longer around though.
Having one big marketplace/launcher might be comfy right now but that can turn into a nightmare quickly when there’s a new owner in town.Personally I’m trying to buy any game I can on gog.com instead of Steam. Both to get my own offline installers and to ensure not all my eggs (games) are in one basket. I launch more games from Lutris then Steam today.
I really hope Gabe doesn’t die right now because we are SO CLOSE to having a mainstream windows competitor.
The users-&-software feedback loop snowball is about to go down a mountain and I am so here for it.Agreed.
Hopefully other platforms start caring about Linux because I really don’t want Gabe to be replaced by a “profit all the things” CEO and for Linux gaming to become a locked-down platform.
Steam is a marketplace, making games is a side hustle. It’s the opposite for the big 3.
Precisely. Valve builds stuff largely to drive some kind of idea forward so hopefully other devs will copy it and people will buy more games. They also want them to make money, but they make so much more through Steam than any of their games that it’s not really worth the investment. Counterstrike (their biggest cash cow) makes ~$1B, Steam makes ~$10B (estimates of course). Most of their games are way below either numbers in total revenue ever.
Software has won. Every game wants to be on every platform, because platforms are an obstacle to customers. The only exceptions are from studios getting bought off or bought up.
Consoles don’t even have any special sauce left - they are computers, full stop. Do you want the blue AMD laptop, or the green AMD laptop? Or the red Android tablet?
Microsoft saw this coming a mile off, and is still getting walked by Valve. The Xbox brand was invented to computerify the console market. The first one was literally a PC. The second was a generic compiler target. They’ve been breaking down barriers because they expected to own everything.
Sony saw this coming… last year, maybe. Helldivers 2 showed them how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. That’s why they burned a lot of customers by forcing them into the PSN ecosystem. Force is the only way they have an ecosystem. People say “PS5 has no games” despite that object supporting hundreds of titles and basically the entire PS4 library. What they mean is: having a PS5 is fine. But why should you buy it instead of something else? What’s the difference, anymore?
what about Microsoft? don’t they make games too? and a whole console? and the os that most pc gamers use? don’t they own like a whole bunch of game studios? why are they not included? why does it have to be 3? is it because of the weebs? we don’t need the weebs to tell us what to do.
Insane reading comprehension skills bro, keep it up
They’re listed as one of the big three with Sony and Nintendo
shit my bad, i was half asleep
This article talks about how it used to be that gaming was split into two markets. There was consoles, dominated by three corps (Nintendo, MS, Sony) and PC.
This article talks about how the markets are becoming less and less distinct and how Valve is seizing an emerging opportunity to dominate all forms of gaming with Valve’s Steam Deck and SteamOS.
The Deck basically validated the handheld industry that was previously very niche, underpowered, and kinda jank with a first-party, fully supported system with robust hardware under the hood. It also gave Valve a predictable hardware platform to build SteamOS as a replacement for Windows as a low level OS. The only problem being that SteamOS was still very dependent on being run on Deck hardware. Now though, they’re taking the first steps to letting it work anywhere, starting with other handhelds.
By pushing SteamOS adoption on handhelds, it targets Nintendo’s hardware niche. Nintendo is somewhat secure though since their first party titles are what move their systems.
By slowly replacing Windows, it erodes Microsoft’s OS monopoly, which threatens the Windows Store as an alternative marketplace. At a time when Microsoft is already a decade into a dying Xbox brand, and one that is also constantly on the back foot (only company without a handheld and very dodgy support for existing handhelds) And a Microsoft that acquires studios, only to shut them down.
Sony is the least affected since PS5 is the winner of the 9th gen of consoles + they already sell some of their games on Steam. And also, Sony is Japanese, so Sony gets all the japanese titles, once again, unlike Xbox.
