Comment by godzillabrennus
3 months ago
Don't sugarcoat it. Valve has to make sure this is advertised as a PC to keep the licensing good on the games you've bought and that they are allowed to sell. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have closed ecosystems with their consoles. Well, Microsoft seems to be throwing in the towel on consoles.
> 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?
It probably didn't help that they removed all of those features over time.
You mean compared to the PS3, one of the strong points of which was also having a Blu-Ray drive ?
I know a lot of folk (myself included) who pretty much only bought the PS3 because of the Blu-Ray drive.
I wasn't an early adopter and only bought a PS3 in 2010. In the intervening 15 years I have bought four Blu-Rays, and been given two more.
I own (and watch) more VHS tapes than Blu-Rays.
I sure did play a lot of GTA4, GTA5, Infamous, and Little Big Planet though.
This was the Xbone/PS4 generation.
The Blu-Ray drive is basically no added cost since the games were already distributed on optical disks, it’s like how the PS2 was one of the most popular DVD players. The problem with the Xbone was that, at least judging on their marketing at the time, Microsoft was far more focused on broadening the scope of the device beyond games while Sony stayed focused on gaming. That’s why I bought a PS4 despite previously using an Xbox 360.
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> 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?
>I thought xbox was doing well?
Microsoft lost the console wars. Their new generation (Series S & X) sold almost 1/4 of what PS5 did because they basically don't have any exclusive game that you can only play in their hardware. Microsoft invested heavily in their Gamepass subscription (that has more than 35 million users) and they believe that the future is on PC. The newest xbox hardware, a handheld made by Asus, is a PC running windows. The next generation of xbox hardware that will compete with the PS6 will also very likely be a PC. The xbox console is dead.
“I already have an Xbox One from 2013, why would I buy an extra X or S version?”
“Oh, there’s a PlayStation 5 now? Man I gotta upgrade from my PS4!”
Microsoft evidently did not learn from the Wii U.
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In theory you can run all your GamesPass games on a Steam Machine in the same way you can run arbitrary games through Proton, which is what Steam is doing.
What a wild world it would be, if Microsoft release a GamesPass client for linux so it can try and get a slice of all this new linux gaming happening on SteamOS.
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I feel like everyone lost the "console wars". Sony is not doing much better considering almost all of their former exclusives are on steam these days. Those next-gen Xboxes will have access to those sony games at discount pricing.
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Also they state that the console will remain the centerpiece, they want to make Xbox a "platform" to reuse their own term. It becomes an ecosystem rather than a hardware product. They idea is that as long as you have a gamepass, you can play on whatever you want - except macOS and Linux...
> They idea is that as long as you have a gamepass
Didn't they just blow the remaining goodwill they had by increasing the gamepads price by 50% overnight?
I think they think that's converted by streaming unfortunately.
You can play gamepass on mac and linux via cloud streaming.
Halo was announced for PS5 recently
> I thought xbox was doing well?
It very much isn’t.
If only they had a game company like Bethesda or Actision. /S
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.