this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Interesting take, for sure. I agree to some point. I also think Gabe just knows the audience, and he knows how much people would have rebelled against the very idea of this device if it came from Steam (not Valve), and excluded users. This would have been a completely failed product had the initial reviews been something like "Just a Switch knockoff".
Instead, this has garnered Steam as a platform with an entire group of adoring fans, some of whom used to be critics. I guarantee they added a ton of business to Steam as a platform just because a lot of users would buy, say, GTA5 on Steam again during a sale for $9 versus jumping through the tiny hoops to make a bootleg copy run.
They did a fantastic job in parallelism getting Proton to an easy to use product (for free, mind you), and reinventing the portable PC game. Many may not know that was an entire segment of handheld PC devices on the market for years before Deck hit, and Steam's team hit all the right spots to completely blow them away, and not only make them irrelevant, but also lure in new adoptees to Steam as a platform. Brilliant execution and moves.
man I remember using a 8" windows tablet with a 3d printed mount to a xbox controller to be able to play steam games like hyperlight drifter, it was so cool at the time but man did it suck holding it for long and the performance was so bad for anything but the simplest game. after that I turned to steam link with my phone and a razer kishi controller, I setup a headless steam docker on my server to keep my games accessible and that worked pretty well when 5G came out but nothing really beats games running on the hardware you hold in your hand, at least not for a good while
This is like...the most resistant path. Steam had Remote Play 5 years ago.
Autism is a hell of a drug (Saying this as an aspie)