Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though