Gabe is literally practising Noblesse Oblige, which is really funny but really shows that our billionare society is really just a reduction to old aristocracy. He's just the good Duke, whereas most Dukes are horrible, horrible people.
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.
"A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants."
Gamers are a passionate bunch. Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won. And also because a lot of their competitors fucked up to pave the road for them (Think Sony's PS fiasco, Microsoft's X-Box clusterfuck from which they're yet to recover from, a decade later). Valve has gotten alot of billion dollar lessons in here that Valve got for free.
> every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)
I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.
Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.
My problem with launchers other than steam and galaxy from GOG: usually shitty and brings no value.
Paradox launcher is alright for example, it adds value in form of mod preset managment and ability to launch straight into saved game.
What ever is in
dune: awakening" exists just to tell me about their other games and as a result make game launching longer than it needs to be. Not only that it adds A LOT of friction when I launch it via Remote Play with a controller.
Point is: if you make a launcher make sure it adds any value and not just an advertisementr billboard.
As for store fronts: steam by far has the most functionality among PC storefronts.
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.
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.
Xbox One/PS4 is when both sides standardized on BluRay.
When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.
PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.
Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.
The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.
Which is probably why Microsoft decided to focus so much on media features for the Xbone. What they should have considered was that they had won the Xbox 360 generation by being a better game platform; it should really be no skin off Microsoft’s back that Blu-Ray won the format war.
> it’s like how the PS2 was one of the most popular DVD players
I worked for a Sony dealer when the PS2 launched, and they wouldn't give us one :-/
What I thought at the time was insane was that they were still selling a 200-disc carousel CD changer, and DVD version of the same thing (same box, different shade of silver grey, different drive mechanism, two chips different on the PCB) - but they had no plans to sell a 200-disc carousel PS2.
Imagine if you could have had all your movies, audio CDs, PSX, and shiny new PS2 games in one big box, tucked away out of sight, with your spiffy new 576p projector and 5.1 speakers hooked up to it!
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.
Back in the 1980s you got your Mom to buy you a game console and you would have needed a logical naming scheme so she would know an PS 3 was better than a PS 2.
XBOX cultivates a "gamer" who is heavily invested in the identity and is well educated in the various versions of XBOX and how the naming scheme works and since they are an adult buying the console for themselves they don't need to explain it to outsiders.
Even before they muddied things with reusing the S and X names for completely different things, "Xbox One" was bad enough
I worked at a pawn shop when that console generation kicked off. One day a guy called in and asked if he could bring in his Xbox One. "Of course," I told him, until I had to turn him away because it was an original Xbox.
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.
In theory you can, in practice Game Pass games are distributed in such a way only Windows can run them. You can use Game Pass Streaming which is fine when at home, and entirely useless when on a train using a Steam Deck.
The ideal would be MS just selling Game Pass subscriptions via Steam but I expect we'll see that happen shortly after hell freezes over.
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.
> Sony is not doing much better considering almost all of their former exclusives are on steam these days.
I still can't wrap my head around why they decided to do this considering they were in a pretty killer position coming out of the PS4 generation. I mean, it's probably a positive for consumers to have more options for platforms, so I won't exactly complain. But I do want PlayStation to stick around as a strong competitor because fierce competition is best for consumers in the long-term.
At first it seemed like they were just porting the previous game in a series when the sequel came out exclusively on PS5, as a way to get people into the series and then making them buy their console to play the next game. But now it seems like there's barely any wait between when one of Sony's exclusives comes to PS5 and the PC launch afterwards. If Sony is confused as to why the PS5 isn't selling up to expectations, the answer to that seems pretty obvious to me.
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...
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.
GOG is hardly a toy and is the platform I look to purchase tons of games on instead of Steam (which I really like) and definitely over Epic (which I've never even installed)
I think that's the point. The GP post basically said, "Gamers can't be messed with." A child post gave a ton of examples of how gamers are messed with, and this comment helps cement that. It does beg the question as to why Steam isn't as evil as it could be but does choose to be as evil as they are. To me (a very casual gamer) they do seem like the least evil.
Also don't knock those zip files purchased off of itch.io. Sometimes it's good to visit a cottage industry to see what's passing under the radar of the big guys.
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.
Because they're not owned by private equity/publicly traded. If that ever happens the "let's squeeze this for every dime it's worth" will happen.
That's really the saddest thing about capitalism, if everything around us wasn't getting enshittified in the exact same way at least the future would be more alluring.
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).
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.
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.