This is stupid as hell.

Silly drama about a mod of an unofficial discord.

What do you think emulation is?

Copying your own copy of a game and using tools for compatibility is what we’re talking about, is protected, and already has the case law demonstrating so.

Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.

Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.

“You can’t put it on the internet anywhere in the world because we own the rights in one country” is some deranged bullshit.

To be fair they did that because law firms were seeking out frivolous arbitration bullshit to try to extort them into settlements.

But their market dominance is definitely primarily about how much better they are than anything else.

As much as I don’t like framework spam, especially when a lot of them are bloated and insecure or need bloated and insecure plugins/extentsions/whatever to do basic things, I have less desire than that to go to C.

I know the first one was only ever intended to be a tech demo, and it did a really good job for that, but does this one feel like an actual full-fledged game?

Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).

The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.

And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.

The triggers are why I’m paying to upgrade. They make a big difference to the feel of combat.

This is about consoles.

I don’t think it’s really that bad, because it enables them to sell the upgrade for $10 without just being a steep discount path for new purchases.

I’d much rather previous owners be able to upgrade for $10 than new buyers be able to get it for $20. Funding a remaster on new customers instead of double dipping is way more fair, and price conscious customers can still likely find used physical copies cheap.

Your game doesn’t sell at all because Steam adds massive value. Steam is the reason PC gaming is what it is.

Retail gets paid for a reason. Distribution has huge value. There isn’t a game out there that doesn’t make way more money paying Steam a 30% commission than they would by not taking advantage of their massive reach.

Steam taking 80% would be a much better offer for developers than Epic taking -50%. You’d still make more on Steam.

I have massively better quality, stability, and latency with the RemotePlay app over the internet from PS5 than I do with Steam in home streaming actually in my house. It’s still not good enough for high precision games, but Steam isn’t close.

PS4 can’t stream for shit because it can’t do the encoding.

No, the OP did.

Edited for clarity.

It would be a handheld console that would play their console library. They’d beat the Steam Deck’s sales volume as fast as they could manufacture them. Also, the Steam deck doesn’t do the triggers, which is a meaningful loss in plenty of PS5 games.

My actual point, though, was that the build quality for the price is really good.

I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I’m into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.

The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it’s definitely plenty capable and I don’t regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I’ve experienced in a long time).

*The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.

I won’t buy a portal. I probably would have bought a “PS4 in portal form factor” for twice the price, but streaming isn’t worth it.

But I have a friend who did, and have had my hands on it, and it is a genuinely really high quality implementation of the mediocre concept.

PS remote play is fantastic (for what remote play is. Streaming still sucks.)

If I’m playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.

I love my deck. As the handheld it’s intended to be. It’s not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can’t ignore any part of it on a TV. It’s fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.

But it doesn’t have the performance for a good living room experience if you’re looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can’t play most of them on Linux at all.)