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Valve having such a stronghold on the market is both:
- amazing because of projects like this,
- frightening because we’re one Gabe brain damage away from having PC Gaming enshittified.
I avoid buying from Steam and prefer GOG when I can because I don’t really want to have continued access to my games collection be dependent on Gabe eating his veggies, avoiding saturated fats and doing at least a 30m walk a day to keep the risk of a heart attack low and look both ways before he crosses a road so as not to be run over by a car.
In almost 4 decades as a gamer and a techie I’ve seen plenty of good companies turn into evil companies and start to leverage whatever dependencies customers had on them to pretty much blackmail them into paying more, sometimes after the founders died, others when the founders cashed out or just lost interest in managing the company’s direction and yet others because they were evil all along and just hid it whilst they built their customer base - enshittification isn’t a XXI century thing, what’s XXI century about it is that many companies nowadays already have it as part of their mid and long term strategy from the start.
Best avoid situations where you give power to some big company (for whom you as an individual customer are basically a nameless bacteria) over something you care about, unless you have no other choice, even if at the moment they’re basically a benevolent dictatorship.
Better safe than sorry.
They are not public so we are safe for now. When they go public they go shit mode
Sadly i guess it could happen to GOG too. I mean, anything you have already bought is safe but someone could step in and change the business model and end such a great thing.
Indeed. Any online store can go under or enshittify.
If you want to stay safe with GOG, download the offline installers for your games and archive them. If you don’t you’re running the risk of losing some or all of it.
The rule “best avoid situations where you give power to some big company (for whom you as an individual customer are basically a nameless bacteria) over something you care about” is general, not Steam specific.
Fortunatelly GOG has DRM-free offline installers available for download as standard, Steam does not make that option available - at best you can copy and zip existing installations of Steam games and hope for the best (some will work, some will not), and that is a “hack” rather than official supported.
The point being that Steam could make something like DRM-free (or at least phone-home-DRM-free) offline installers available - at least for games whose developers/publishers are willing - and mark that as a feature in the game page in their store for those games, but they have chosen not to do so and remain steadfast in that choice: they purposefully keep customers dependent on them of enjoy their purchases and we’re all expected to just trust them, now and forever.
As I said, 4 decades in gaming and Tech have taught me you can’t trust large companies forever.
Valve is set up as a horizontal organization. I expect that to continue after Gaben’s death. He doesn’t really do much at valve these days anyway.
Yeah, well, somebody is going to inherit his share of ownership, and even if he goes out of his way and sets up a Foundation for the purpose of preserving the founder’s strategical vision for the company that will inherit his share, such Foundations tend to over time end up subverted and doing the very opposite of what the founder would’ve wanted.
Great customer friendly companies turning to shit when the founder dies is the kind of thing that happens all the time.
Best avoid situations were your shit is hostage to the whims of a big company for whom you as an individual customer are irrelevant.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it became employee owned.
GabeCube
sorry by dose is stuffed.
GabeCube™, GabeGoggles™ and the GabeController™. Maybe we’ll get a GabeBoy™ next
Maybe we’ll get a GabeBoy™ next
steam deck
While that comment was made as a meme, and I certainly thought of the Steam Deck, what I was initially thinking was about a super efficient SteamBoy of sorts.
An ARM-based, powerful, power-efficient, and pocketable handheld to play select retro games from Steam. And of course it will support emulation. It’s just wishful thinking at this point but would be great. I think a smaller handheld would pair nicely with the Steamdeck.
That’s the Gabe Gear.
Looks familiar…
Indeed
Off topic but the NeXT logo is my favourite logo of all time. If I get a GabeCube I’m 100% putting a NeXT sticker on the front
Oh nooooo
TIL I built a Steam machine 6 years ago
How did you like that case?
I almost went with that before getting the M1 Case back when it was just a forum post order.
I’m not an expert but I wanted to build my own gaming mini-PC. I followed this guide step by step, which was super useful because they were giving useful tips to make sure everything fits and works correctly: https://techbuyersguru.com/reviews/building-a-small-form-factor-pc/ (they update the config each month so the current guide is very different from 5 years ago) But, in retrospective, I think I should have gone for a bigger case because there is basically no other GPU that can fit this case anymore.
I’d call it the PlayBox, just to confuse elderly relatives who want to buy a console for their kids.
Companion cube skin pls
Saw one just here !
Absolutely. A Companion Cube shaped gaming PC would be perfect.
Somehow I get NeXT vibes…
Add another year.
Can someone tell me how do I recreate the guitar tone from Hazardous Environments (the Valve theme)? I want to do a funny thing!
single coils, reverb , bridge pickup, play near bridge
edit : although it might be a baritone/bass vi ?
this motherfucker looks beautiful
Can anyone tell me why anyone would want to buy a Steam Machine? Serious question.
It may not he for you, but there’s a huge potential audience. Somebody who is used to the console experience and wants that simplicity for playing on the couch, but wants access to PC gaming platforms like Steam.
I like tinkering with my PC, but a lot of people don’t. They like consoles because they can pick up the controller, push a button, and it powers on and works, and they never have to worry if a game will run. If it’s released on the console, it should work.
Yeah, there’s 1001 ways to get a PC running on the TV, but none of them are as dumb-simple as turning on an Xbox. This device solves that issue.
People who don’t have a game pc, and don’t have the time or the inclination to tinker with one, but who do like to game.
People who would like to play retro games on their TV but don’t have the desire to tinker with a raspberry pi to set up their own arcade.
I’ve been PC gaming for 20 years and always wanted to be able to play them on my TV. Yes, the methods exist, but it feels needlessly complex- right now I have long cables running through my small apartment just to play on my TV… with latency. It feels like to get everything running you need specific dongles, cables, hardware, ports, and then there’s compatibility issues on top of that.
I’m not a computer savant who runs a home network and meticulously manages their home tech. I’m also not a total noob- I can troubleshoot issues, setup mods, do some basic tinkering, etc. which puts me ahead of many, many typical users. That said, I have other hobbies and things I want to do, and the amount of work it takes to get this stuff minimally functional just isn’t worth the time and frustration for me (inb4 someone replies “just try xyz!”).
The Steam Machine is something I’ve always wanted. A one-stop shop I can plug into my TV, hook up my controller, and boom- steam library at my fingertips. No worries about compatibility, cable runs, or any of that crap. Plus, it could get someone like my partner (a lifelong Mac user who hates computers in general, can’t troubleshoot, and loves Nintendo games) into PC gaming.
I don’t have a smart TV. Also, called it (inb4 someone says “just try xyz!”)
inb4 someone says “just try xyz!”
lol fair enough
I don’t have a smart TV.
Honestly where did you get one? When I was shopping for a TV a couple years ago I wanted to get one without any built in smart TV software and I could not find one
But you still have to know about it.
Whereas the Steam Maclhine - like a Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo - just plugs into the TV and works.
Plug in the power, run the HDMI cable to the and log into the wifi after powering it on.
I see. Thanks for the reply. You sound a lot like me actually. But one of the many things I like to build is computers and when I heard that the CPU was soldered on, I thought, well that just gets thrown in the trash as soon as it’s outdated. And it seemed like it wasn’t as good as a different computer running the same stuff, but I hadn’t heard anything about it until now and that’s ALL I’m hearing, so I figured I must have missed something.
That’s a fair point re: CPU, although I’m not patient enough to build a PC (my friends built mine ages ago 😂) so it won’t make much difference to me… hopefully. But for sure I think if upgrade-ability and/or final price are of concern, then building your own box to the same specs would be much better
Missed opportunity to do a goatse gape cube
The probability of releasing Half Life 3 is non-zero considering the lifespan of the universe and the possible existence of parallel dimensions.
