God, don’t get me started on orbital data centers.

Either you cause kessler syndrome by launching a million microsats, or, you just I guess invent scifi level orbital engineering, and come up with a scifi solution for thermal regulation.

Also like, server databases require, you know, on site maintenance.

… its a very dumb, expensive idea.

… Like, a Canon printer/photocopier?

So its just projectile vomiting generated images of the scene you likely intended to describe?

Real Time Raytracing.

In fairness, the Falcon 9 / Dragon capsule systems are solid and reliable, with good track records.

So its not literally all SpaceX stuff.

But… yeah, the Starship/HeavyBooster is what happens when Elon is in charge, utter shit show.

And also, the Falcon 9 family never actually got close to the cost reductions Elon initially said would be delivered by the re-usability paradigm.

It would have to be roughly an order of magnitude less expensive, for a ton to orbit, than what it currently is, to match what he said it would achieve.

as 18107 says, yeah, at various Musk companies, their have been people whose main job was primarily to distract him from getting involved very directly, but this has apparently stopped being a thing.

Just go find the conversation he had with some of the high ups on the Twitter team, when he took it over.

He just knows buzzwords, beyond that, probably most of the people in this thread are more intelligent than he is, on literally any subject… he has no idea how anything works beyond a very big picture / conceptual level.

That user growth translates to more revenue for game developers. Since the 2018 announcement of the 75% and 80% revenue share tiers, more and more games from developers big and small have reached new higher revenue share. The revenue share paid out across all non-Valve games on Steam in 2025 was 76%, and that does not include any revenue developers may earn selling free Steam keys outside of Steam. Back in 2024, we shipped a new notification feature for developers to make it more clear when their game has crossed a new revenue share tier, and developers can see a game’s progress towards those higher tiers in their sales reporting.

Not directly related to the new hardware, but that does put a bit of a dent in the ‘Valve takes a 30% cut’ line.

Evidently, netted out, its 24%.

More accurately its caused by AI Mania, not AI proper, directly, but yeah.

He lets her know what’s up, wink wink.

Its the sun, thats whats up, COCK A FUCKIN’ DOODLE DOO!

I still kind of can’t believe no one else has done that.

Its legitimately baffling to me.

Oh, yeah, our one game just is a level editor for our other game.

… I can’t think of another example of anybody ever doing that.

They’d work in Streets of Sim City as well.

Aren’t there like… 2, 3 of them, in this huge fucking castle?

And they never move…?

I don’t know.

Its been like 25 years since I last played that game lol.

Logitech 3D Pro.

TIE Fighter, G Police, Sim Copter… all the way through the Battlefields up to 4, Arma 1-3, various flight sims.

I genuinely have no idea how that thing has lasted an actual 20 years with minimal drift.

Luigi isn’t, but Yoshi is =P

Museum Madness had that effect on me.

I kept expecting something to… catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.

I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.

lol.

BEN DROWNED

… I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora’s Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.

Had one single save file.

Only had the couples mask.

Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish ‘hours’ before the impact.

Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out… in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.

And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this … unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.

Have you frequently moved house, moved to new homes, apartments, lived in a car, anything like that? Hiked a long ways, for a long while?

I was homeless for some years… and yeah… almost everywhere you are is a liminal space, and eventually… it all becomes just another space, it loses that kind of strangeness, as you spend more and more time in places you’re not really meant to be in, and the places you think you can stay in, well, they turn out to be hostile and temporary too.

The subway station in the Matrix 3.

The ultimate liminal space that only exists to represent a place that is transitted through, yet is also infinite in space and time if you do not essentially possess the key to actually leave.

I guess arguably, any repeated timeloop type of movie essentially turns most of the world into a defacto liminal space.

But yeah, most literally, a liminal space is a space designed to be moved through, not inhabited.

A doorway or hallway vs a room.

A waiting room at a doctor’s office, a queue at an airport.

A highway, bridge, or train tracks, vs wherever they are leading you to.

On the one hand, yeah, Mario 64 is … kind of hauntingly sparse in places.

It is kind of especially weird that when you get dropped into the world, after the very sonically and visually engaging start screen and menus… you get dropped outside of the castle, which has no soundtrack, beyond like occasional birds chirping.

Its a massive tonal shift. Its meant to be just literally quickly skipped through, but if you… don’t play the game as much as explore the game… its dissonant.

Then you go into the castle, uplifting music, but… its empty. Echoey. Camera angles / Sight lines emphasize empty space… its meant to maximize your ability to to be acrobatic, but… if you just walk, slowly… very large empty space, full of huge rooms that seemingly only exist to have huge paintings in them.

Which you are… alone, in.

An entire empty castle… where is everyone?

Yeah, thats all weird.

On the other hand…

What’s wrong with Zoomers? Alphas?

Oh, constant over stimulation and external judgement.

The absence of those things thus feels like a graveyard, where… you suspect those things somehow are there, they’re just hiding… because normally, those things always are there.

Simplicity, minimalism and a lack of obvious direction and feedback thus = absence… a suspicious, meancing lack of engagement.

It leaves you alone.

With your own thoughts.

Your own unguided, undirected thoughts.

You could say the brainrotted are haunted by their own conditioned expectations.

The hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with… $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.

Which is … well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.

Or I guess… physical Steam Gift cards?

But that leads into the other part of this:

The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.

And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.

Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.

They ship it to you.

No stores.

Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.

So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they’d be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.

Most people don’t own flagship GPUs

Spec sheet culture has warped our expectations

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We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that everyone and their dog owns bleeding-edge hardware when they really don’t. Only a tiny percentage of users run cards like an RTX 4070 Ti Super or above. The overwhelming majority are on midrange builds with similar VRAM and system memory to what the Steam machine is going to ship with.

Repeating this, because it needs to be repeated.

It is extremely not normal to own a high powered GPU.

Very, extremely, not normal.

Further, you can make a lot of good arguments that nobody fucking bothers optimizing anything anymore, that gameplay, story, writing, art design trump pure graphical realism power.

Real time ray tracing is still a ludicrous, unsustainable, elitist, exclusionary paradigm, from every way you look at it.

Beyond that, … I’m looking at a potential Steam Machine buy… because there will probably be a way to plug an oculink adapter into one of its M.2 ports, figure out where to cut a hole in the case and snake it out, and then you can just attach an eGPU of some kind, with its own PSU, to it, if you want to crank up the gfx even harder.

Then, your next upgrade path is along that paradigm: A superior mobo+cpu combo.

Somebody on github I saw already mocked out how you could get close-ish to M.2 long term storage transfer speeds out of the Machine’s fancier USB port, or you could just run it all off of an SD card if that doesn’t sound like its worth the trouble.

Oh, also, a default Steam Machine?

Way less power draw than a comparable PC, more like a beefed up laptop.

If you’re worried about either sustainability, or just the power bill going up… worth considering.