I dislike “spend money to save money” logic, but I’m gonna be honest, the Steam Deck was really transformative to me in that regard.
The fact games suspend and come back immediately, and that I can carry it to bed, to the sofa with my wife, and so on, means I actually finish games. Hell, sometimes I’ll be watching TV and playing at the same time, but the game does get played. It’s a backlog destroyer.
I don’t really get why this is a story. They have a smaller staff than game studios who are producing far more complicated properties. That’s not surprising. What they build is a large app and network, but this seems normal to me.
What will happen to the Steam Deck? Will they discontinue it and support for existing units, or replace the OS with Windows (causing degraded performance and exposing their users to Microsoft adtech enshittification)? The Steam Deck is a star product of theirs, which hopefully will count for something.
It’s important to remember though that the steam deck itself is not the end goal for them. It’s part of building a larger Linux gaming ecosystem and solidifying their hard-core followers. Last I checked it it only sold 2 or 3 million. That’s impressive, but if you’re thinking about it as a competitor to say, the switch (which you see it compared to all the time) it’s clearly not a massive money maker. So it’s not hard to imagine a short term thinking leadership ending it.
An Omdia report from April 2023 claims Valve sold 1.62 million units of the Steam Deck in 2022, which was expected to grow by 14 percent to 1.85 million units in 2023. If we assume the 14% growth continues, and those numbers are accurate, then Valve is closing in on 4½ million units sold.
Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive… I think that’s going to be a tough hill to climb, especially as they’re only asking to not be undercut as a supplier. There’s no requirement to sell exclusively through Steam, and Steam even allows developers to give Steam keys on other platforms, including with game bundles that have a total “value” well below Steam sale prices.
Like, I use Steam daily, and buy multiple games most months in game bundles, but in the last few years, I’ve only made a handful of purchases on Steam. One game and my Steam Deck Dock were my only Steam purchases this calendar year, and my Steam Deck OLED and two games were my only purchases last year, but in that time I added about 150 new games to my Steam library.
I don’t think people realise how generous steam is by allowing Devs to sell steam keys on other platforms and still handle all the distribution and updates and everything for a key they didn’t get paid for, and all they ask is you give the same or better deal to customers who purchase direct through steam
Yeah, exactly. Steam gets very little money from me (well, aside from the Deck), but I get all the benefits from their services. Not sure how that’s monopolistic…
Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive…
No it’s not. This hinges on whether you can sell the generated free Steam keys on other sites for less than the price you have set on Steam.
You can absolutely sell your game on another site for less. You can’t sell your game on another site for less and make Steam pick up the infrastructure costs.
The only claim anyone has ever documented is detailed in the article.
An accusation doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right though. Something people get confused on often is Steam Keys, which are completely separate to Steam Store purchases. Valve do ask developers not to “give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers”
You can read through all the claimants key documents if you like 😉
So far no one has ever shown Valve asking for price parity with other outlets, and this doesn’t appear to be any different. Just a lawyer looking for a payday.
I buy the games I wanna play because Steam makes the process hassle free on Linux and I’m old so I don’t feel like tinkering most days but PSN isn’t available here so there is no other way to play but piracy to play these games.
I am so patient that I won’t buy these games until they put them 50% or more off.
I just leave them on my wishlist. My computer is 9 years old and it is still better than even the next gen will be. Why would I pay for a downgraded computer with a crap operating system.
I think you’re overestimating your PC if you haven’t updated it in 9 years, even if you have like 2 Titan Xs, the featureset on them is totally outdated.
I’m only basing it on Can I Run It, it say the computer can still run 96% of games in their list on minimum requirements and 71% of games on recommended.
It even says I can’t run Cyberpunk 2077 which is not true as I have played it on my computer without issue on high settings. I have an Asus Strix GTX 970 OC
Edit: I think I remember what I wrote, and I’m pretty sure it landed me a 5 day account ban. Though I feel that that was a touch heavy handed, and unnecessary.
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