With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).
https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742
That said, I've never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.
(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)
valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough
And I've paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don't get those for the PS5 that much.
I also don't have any need for a "Gaming PC", what I've always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.
Even if a game takes 5 hours that’s 2500 hours
That’s mind blowing to me
If you check out Humble Bundle, you can find bundles of games where you get 20-30 games for around $20. Many of them are charity bundles, like one I got to help people in the Turkey/Syria area affected by the 2023 earthquake. Those bundles mostly consist of keys redeemed on the Steam platform. I don't play first-person-shooters, so those are going to sit in my library unplayed & uninstalled.
You do that like 50 weeks a year. That's ~400 hours a year. 2,500 / 400 = 6.25 years.
My Steam account is 20 years old. Even if we doubled it to 5,000 hours, that's 250 hours a year. Roughly 5 hours a week on average.
That said, a lot of people just end up owning a lot of games on Steam through sales even though they may never play them or only put a few hours in them. I've got >200 games and yet over half have <2 hours of play time. A ton I've never installed, they just came bundled in sales with other games I did actually want. When you can buy a whole publisher's collection of games for like $20 on some crazy sale why not?
I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.
but youre exactly the target market for this it sounds like
I think you could kind of get there with a gaming pc that boots up steam big picture immediately? but it would feel hacky vs this for sure
We're truly screwed if things don't calm down at least a little....
We're also nearing PS6 time in the next year or two. It's already six years old.
Watching the LTT review of the Steam machine, it also reminded me why a console holds a lot of value. A lot of their video was about fiddling with settings per game to get a good balance of performance vs visuals. Something I never have to think about with the PS5, especially the Pro.
While I like the idea of PC gaming, and even more so what Valve is doing, trying to move the industry to Linux, the reality of PC gaming has always felt like a huge pain. As much sys admin as actual gaming.
If the Vavle platform are popular enough, they could get presets with a lot of games, but that remains to be seen.
If the price was not upset by the RAM debacle it would have been a very attractive offer, no subscription and more upgradable. I still think in time when the market calms down and supply is less constrained it will reach that price point, even at its current price it's not a completely unreasonable offering for a family member especially with the ability to share your existing steam library.
I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.
Denuvo and other DRM also exists though.
I’m not the target but I can see the point.
indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously
the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
And yet steam's indie library far outpaces what all other consoles indie games combined provide. Also you get access to a vast amount of games distributed independently and other stores that the PC ecosystem has available.
> the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription
I don't think most PC gamers like being told every month what games they have to play in order to maximize their subscription value. They view it as wasting 100$ yearly just to have the ability to play online along other features that are free on PC.
> people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available
That's a legit improvement from the console platforms but since it was only a change made in the previous gen you can only go back a single generation for now. On steam your library might encompass stuff sold three generations ago and if you are willing to take advantage of PC gaming outside steam you can go as far back as the invention of video games itself with emulators.
Running an outdated, out of support version of android with limited app availability and a crappy selection of poorly maintained emulation forks... with a buggy GPU driver that causes so many visual and performance issues on a digital platform that does everything they can keep you from installing your choice of OS, let alone the lack of usual niceties that desktop operating systems get you. It will do in a pinch but I don't think anyone who likes emulating stuff enjoys using a system like this. Even a new flagship phone will share some of these issues and if you have an iphone you will pay to have an still inferior solution that can vanish at moments notice if apple decides the emulator your purchased isn't compliant to their draconian guidelines or isn't compatible with newer apis. I guess at least the UI/UX will be nice.
At what point does the value proposition go back, for the target audience you are fond of and can imagine to be disinterested in both consoles and enthusiasts uses of old phones
That was the premise of this thread, the price point of consoles and a generally antiquated understanding of current gen console indie gaming libraries
I constantly encounter indie games that are only on PC, for example Satisfactory, Chained Together, Last Call BBS
Steam is still way better for indie stuff
(both "semicustom AMD" so probably effectively the same architecture)