Comment by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe

Noblesse oblige exists because of a moral economy. You can be a horrible Duke, because there's no real reward for being the good one.

This is not that - Steam has to compete on the free market, there is a reward for making the product everyone else refuses to make. In a post-Deck world, it's hard to believe that moral obligation plays a bigger role than the overall hatred of Windows for seamless gaming experiences.

>He's just the good Duke

The Gaben house is building a secret army, using a technique unknown to us; a technique involving steam.

> Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won.

What universe do you live in?

- Broken games still pre-ordered

- marginal updates sold at full price

- double/triple-dipping with microtransactions and battle passes

- DRM still [predominant and still hurts performance

- every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)

- rootkit as anti-cheat

- offline game that require online connectivety

- online services get shutdown

- LAN multiplayer is a thing of a past

What did games exactly won?

- Paid skyrim mods? It's back.

- MS game sharing thing that rendered GameStop business model useless? IMO a mistake, MS was onto something there.

> . Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won

DRM is everywhere so gamers have clearly lost

The PlayStation seems pretty successful, not sure what "PS fiasco" you're referring to. The stock price is doing fine, at any rate

We live in the live service microtransaction era. Gamers have proven as resolute as wet tissue.

> keep the licensing good

That’s an imaginary issue.

Didn't Xbox pivot to be an entertainment system a couple generations ago and flop compared to PlayStation?

> Well, Microsoft seems to be throwing in the towel on consoles.

Can you expand on this? I'm not a massive gamer, I thought xbox was doing well?

This could be restated as: open systems mean you don't need a tangled web of partnerships to provide content, and Valve is taking advantage of this.

But it is also a PC, so I don't see the issue even if this were true. It's just a box running an Arch Linux flavour.

To be fair there are a lot of games on Steam that don't have DRM, which means you can just drag them out of the steamapps folder to a computer that doesn't have Steam and they work fine. The decision to add DRM comes from the developer/publisher, not Valve.

Name a game distribution platform that doesn't do this. It will be a toy example like a zip file purchased off of itch.io or something.

I think that's more a situation where publishers demand some form of DRM so steam is trying to provide a default solution that most publishers are happy with.

DRM is optional on Steam and up to the game developer.

> That's the same Valve that doesn't let me play the games I paid it for unless they are running on its platform?

What exactly does that mean, for you?

Were you not aware of that before you purchased the game? How has this negatively impacted you?

It is nice to see people bucking the trend getting rewarded, I see a bright future for an open ecosystem for gaming (even ignoring the Steam announcements).

DRM is the publishers choice, worth noting.

That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.

You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.

Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.

Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.

This is true. But it doesn't matter to me.

Most media for me is a one and done. A book, a movie, a computer game. Granted a computer games version of "done" might mean "played on and off for a year".

There are exceptions to this - books I read again, shows I'd watch again, but games seem to age poorly by comparison. Original Syndicate or Deus Ex - while playable - is not what I remember it to be and I'd rather keep the nostalgic memories than shatter them with a replay.

This rarity of exceptions means that I wouldn't lose much if my Steam account disappeared - mainly just "whatever I'm playing now". Create a new account and go again, or buy off GOG or something.

However in return for using Steam I get a lot of convenience - updates, propogated save files, easy chat and "Right click -> Join Game" with friends. That "Right click -> Join Game" is almost worth it on it's own for ease of social gaming.

I would like to see change there for sure. That said, DRM is optional for publishers on Steam. Once you've downloaded a game without DRM (steam's or otherwise) you can back it up and play it without Steam.

This is true for all digital purchases, video games or otherwise.

There is no such thing as "owning" a game unless you're the company that developed the game (or bought the company that did).

While true, at least Gabe proved you could make a profit while still remaining non-evil.

All good things must come to an end.

centi = 10^-2

The problem is that public companies have different incentives. They take a more short term views.

Their shareholders are not in it for the long term. Investment managers tend to look at anything more than two years as "long term", and they are conscious of their position in annual league tables.

Even private equity and venture capital are usually going to be thinking about the value at which they can exit reasonably soon.

The management of the company will be thinking about bonuses and options they get between now and when they move to the next job.

A private company can often take the view that what really matters is how much they will be making in five or ten years time. Maybe even how much it will be worth when the current shareholder’s kids inherit it. The management are often either owners, or are closely monitored by the owners.

MBAs need to read this: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/15/pathe...

tldr; GTFO!

They care about money. They definitely care about money. They have achieved a steady cash flow that can sustain their business forever, unless something really bad happens.

What they don't care is the endless growth that MBA guys always try to achieve, and the quarterly profit driven decision making that ultimately destroys their customers loyalty, for short term profit.

A business can be very profitable without being exploitative. It's the people in Wall Street who can't seem to understand this. For them a hundred million dollars of profit is good if last year it was only fifty million dollars, and a dying business if last year it was also a hundred million dollars. It really makes no sense.

I think valve are the only players in a position to do this. They can probably ship this new hardware at a loss and make the money back through steam game purchases. Much like console manufacturers.

>nobody else tried a "boot to game library" PC,

Since Valve owns the library it makes sense that people will trust their solution and it has more chance for succcess

> I'm honestly surprised nobody else tried a "boot to game library" PC

Microsoft used to have Windows Media Centre, which was a version of Windows designed for HTPC use that booted straight to the media centre control screen. The last version of that was in Windows 7.

It is actually possible to replace the desktop in Windows, window management (but not chrome, that's part of Aero and/or individual "owner draw" applications), Explorer etc. Nobody's really bothered with that.

Microsoft are just too used to not having to compete, so they don't provide lots of variant SKUs for different uses. Even "point of sale" and LTS are somewhat neglected.

they've done a ton of engineering to make this happen. they implemented the necessary interfaces in steam, _they developed proton_ to avoid windows, worked with hardware to get console features like wake from controller connect, and custom hardware we see here.

>Except that (I believe) "just a PC" was a bit offputting for a lot of people - when you buy a PC you can't just turn it on and play video games, especially not after Microsoft's shenanigans.

Steam deck is "just a PC" as well, which can be turned on to immediately play video games.

Thanks to its reputation, the masses will trust the Steam Machine to do this much.

Valve know what they're doing.

I mean, even Valve has tried it in the past, and it was a failure. Look up Steam Machines from 2010s. I consider the success of Steam Deck (thanks to flawless execution this time) as almost a minor miracle.

but it has 'steam' in the name. So the target is the steam audience already.

>Microsoft could've done it, but they chose to make a console.

Missed the one, they did try with the rebranding of 'xbox'

This is a good comment, I don’t understand the downvotes.

Anything that makes the PC gaming experience more like a console is good. This is the first gaming PC that I could actually justify putting in the living room.

> I'm honestly surprised nobody else tried a "boot to game library" PC

Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Atari, Sega...

They intentionally choose to brand their personal computers poorly to coerce their customers into giving up control of their computers. That doesn't make their computers any less personal, unless they are using it to serve other people.

>> when you buy a PC you can't just turn it on and play video games, especially not after Microsoft's shenanigans.

In like, what way? You can "just" boot up a new Windows PC, install some games and play them straight away. Do you mean the fact that you now have to log into a Microsoft account first? Because if yes - SteamOS also requires you to log in before you can use it.

If a single GNU steps in the forest, does it make a sound?

It's actually not that impossible, given how the DRM ecosystem trusts steam I could imagine banking apps doing the same.

Some banks might even be up for putting children's banking apps on the steam deck to start with.

Signed in just to upvote this. Amen homie

Or.. just a better experience for mobile games, if they have porting tools.

The problem is for now more of principle. Any DRM means you depend on Valve/Steam to continue to legally play your purchased games. If Valve has a change of heart, or of leadership, or hits a financial rough patch they can easily become a rent seeking gatekeeper. That non-intrusive DRM is the thin line between perpetually accepting Valve's conditions or playing illegally. This isn't a Valve specific problem but they get a free pass today because of all the good things they've done and the good will they're continuously showing. If this ever runs out a lot of people will be very disappointed.

I'm not judging them "by comparison" because it's hard to look bad next to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc. Just looking objectively at the situation, even if Valve was alone on the market.

That has nothing to do with launching more than one steam game at once not being allowed.

Not really. It still has a library level lock. What Steam Families has enabled is to play games from each other's libraries at the same time. For example, if my account has a game A, and your has a game B, I can play the game B while you play the game A. This used to be disabled before.

You still cannot play a game C from my library while I play the game A from my own library.

The only way to be able to play any game you want would be to create a separate account for each game.

This is outrageous.

Only if you do it on the same computer. The restriction is still there if you try to, for example, run one game on your PC and another on Steam Deck.

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