The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473



GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got.
I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games.
I play modded D2 without much issues.
You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve’s yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.
What is their current market share on Linux?
Why is that even relevant? You said people can only get games on Steam and that’s just not true
If they have no market share then that competition exists in theory only.
You’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Just because other game distribution vectors lack market share does not mean there are no alternatives to Steam. People have options, but they overwhelmingly choose Steam based on the quality of their product and service. If others decide to improve those things or a particular game is better priced or contains more content on another service, the consumer is free to choose that distributor.
Market share is completely irrelevant in this case.
Market share is very much relevant to determining if some company has a dominant position in that market. You people would be arguing that Internet Explorer 6 wasn’t a monopoly because Mozilla and Opera existed.
Homie you’re having a completely different argument than the rest of us. It’s been explained to you like 3 different ways now. Not sure what else to tell you, so yeah. Believe what you want to believe, big dog.
How do you explain piracy being a perfectly viable option to game on this new console? You never need to buy the first game to use this machine effectively.
How do you feel about Google requiring apps to be notarised by them to run? How do you feel about locked bootloaders? How did Google get to be able to do that in the first place? I outlined steps that are required to get there and where Valve is on that timeline (this HTC Dream, attempt 2).
For PC you can Frankenstein random hardware so you aren’t at the mercy of prebuilt OEM options.
Now look at phones and see how easy it is to make your own from scratch with parts. Then look at OEMs and how many will even let you unlock the bootloader.
Then look at how many iOS options there are for phones not from Apple. Mobile hardware freedom was dead from the get go compared to PC. Why? Hardware roadblocks for mobile compared to PC.
I feel like you’re purposefully ignoring everything that’s being said. I understand what you’re saying, but it isn’t applicable in this case. It’s just a PC man. A Linux based PC. There’s nothing mandatory about using steams services on the hardware, nor given the announced architecture, could they enforce such a requirement.
Linux ≠ Android. One is open source, the other is not. And to add, it’s pointless to discuss what might happen on a theoretical piece of hardware multiple generations away. You might as well argue that Windows will go open source in 2035 based on the fact consumers never pay for it for home use.
You can launch any .exe through Steam using Proton… You don’t even need to buy the games if that’s your prerogative.
Where the software is from is entirely irrelevant.
Just walk me through what prevents Valve from following Google’s footsteps in commoditising Linux only to lock it down like they are doing currently.
Linux and proton are open source, and their licenses allow literally anyone to fork it. GE-Proton already exists.
How are they currently locking Linux down? The Steam Deck is literally a desktop PC, and can do anything a desktop Linux PC can do (including using it in desktop mode which is KDE Plasma). You can even install a different Linux distro (or Windows if you’re a freak) on it if you want. There’s literally nothing locked down about it.
Same could be said about Android. Will you be able to install other OS on Steam Machine 3 in 2035? It could have bootloader locked, they could say it’s required for anti-cheat and some even will be happy that they can finally play CoD.
The same cannot be said about Android. I think you need to educate yourself on what Linux and FOSS actually is.