I think they got rid of digital gift cards as well, except through steam, where it has to be gifted to another account.

My understanding is that there were 3 mains scams that abused gift cards (steam and otherwise)

1. A scammer would coerce a victim to buy gift cards and give the info to them. This usually targeted the elderly, and the scammer would often impersonate the IRS/police/etc, claiming they (or their family members) were in legal trouble/facing arrest, and offer to make it go away if they bought the gift cards. Since it usually targeted people who aren’t tech-savvy, they would usually buy these gift cards locally. Banks won’t refund this one because the victim made the purchase themselves.

2. Tampering with cards in a store. People would record pin numbers off cards in the store, put a new scratch sticker over them, and then use bots to try to constantly redeem the card. As soon as someone buys it, the bot redeems the gift card immediately before the buyer can get home and redeem it themselves. Another version of this involves stealing unactivated cards, and swapping their barcode/packaging with cards still in the store. When someone buys it, it activates the stolen card instead of the physical card the buyer has.

3. Using stolen credit card details to buy a bunch of gift cards from online retailers. They then immediately try to resell these gift cards for less than the card is worth (ie selling a $50 steam gift card for $30-40). The catch here is that they have a limited amount of time to sell the cards before the original credit card gets reported stolen, and the cards get cancelled. The users who buy and redeem these stolen gift cards can get their accounts automatically banned, which is another layer of support headaches for Steam to deal with (if they buyers were innocent and didn’t realize the cards were stolen).

The 3rd scam can use digital gift cards, but the other two are usually physical only scams, so getting rid of physical gift cards at retailers will eliminate most of them. The 3rd is much less effective and much easier to trace/undo if the digital gift cards have to be purchased through steam and sent directly to users there.

Their stance for a long time was basically “it’s something we would like to do eventually”, I think it was only the past year or so that they actually committed to trying to make it happen, and this is a confirmation that it’s still on the way and hasn’t been quietly scrapped.

I’m not sure if this has changed, but Lutris for a long time was largely a collection of community install scripts. It used to be one of the better ways to install games on linux, but it was never super reliable, with the install scripts frequently breaking from updates or other changes. This was less of an issue when it was a more popular install platform, but now that a lot of the userbase has moved on to other launchers, the number of broken install scripts are increasing. It also typically installs the windows version of launchers (like epic/etc), which is an extra level of complexity and potential issues compared to stuff like heroic that communicates with storefront APIs directly.

Heroic is generally a more reliable option for people who want to play specifically Epic/GOG/Amazon games, while other launchers like Bottles and Fargus have become more popular for stuff not installed directly from a game store. I’m not sure exactly why, but it also seems like most of the time when people ask for help with installing a game through lutris, it’s usually a pirated copy of the game, and it’s difficult to tell if the problems with the game are due to lutris or an issue with the bootleg nature of the game.

It should be fine, the Steam Machine uses fans to cycle air through, so as long as the vents are uncovered it should cool fine. The body is plastic as well, so not very effective for shedding heat that way.

Although tbf an xbox shouldn’t have overheated from a skin either, since they also use fans and have a plastic body. Any chance your friend blocked the vents or something when the put the skin on?

They’re a pretty small team, I think a lot of that text was just boilerplate. Here’s the specific privacy policy section:

4. WHEN AND WITH WHOM DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION? In Short: We may share information in specific situations described in this section and/or with the following third parties.

We may need to share your personal information in the following situations:

Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

What are you talking about? Their privacy policy/etc seems pretty good by modern web standards, and they specifically say that the only case which might result in another company buying their user data is if it’s part of the entire company being purchased.

The slow response sucks, but usually they’re really good about replacing things like this.

There’s multiple print files, including the companion cube.

There is a decky plugin for it, called Decky-Framegen. It originally just enabled frame gen but now installs optiscaler.

There’s also a new plugin called Proton Launch that seems like it lets you toggle various proton/GEproton options, including optiscaler, FSR upgrades, various performance settings (DXVK async, low latency, etc), and more.

I don’t know of any VR specific games like that. You should play Tunic if you haven’t, because it’s clearly Zelda inspired and makes use of perspective breaking your vision of hidden items and paths. Only other games I kinda of know of that have mechanics like that are Fez and and Screenbound, but they’re both more platformer than Zelda-like.

I can imagine this just leading to Denuvo blocking linux platforms (if possible).

You mentioned seeing the mechanism pillow, they actually offer 3d print models for a lot of their connectors and mounts. There are several options for how you could use them, I’ve seen people do a long arm monitor mount that they can swing out over their bed and clip the deck to.

I think that list is just for games that will run on the Frame hardware directly, without a PC. Alyx is too beefy for that.

It shows 5 for me, but hopefully they’re going to be constantly adding more as their testing expands.

Yep, at least for right now that’s the deal. The Steam machine doesn’t use that much power, so I could imagine a solution that includes a new power cord that can power both at the same time.

Yeah, I thought the deck controls worked surprisingly well. I had tried playing with community control layout before there was an official control scheme, but that was much less intuitive.

Man I thought the Wii weather channel and stuff was so cool at the time.

I’m assuming you mean PS5 controllers, and yes they should work fine. I believe you can also use the controller’s gyro and touchpad area.

One weird issue is that while the controllers work normally wirelessly, I think it has to be plugged in to use some features like the adaptive triggers, for games that specifically support it.

Good, need two so I can race them.

Gamingonlinux and Steamdeckhq are the two sites I follow specifically for steam hardware news, and they’re both pretty good about providing source links and actual info.