Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
Fuck you Microsoft!
Less concurrent is never a good thing. Steam already got too much power. https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-steam-monopoly-real-gamers-chose/
Luckily unlike monopolies in other sectors, Steam doesn't involve itself in evil oractices that more or less stops others from competing.
Someone just needs to make a better store, but they can't because no company big enough to compete is willing to be as user friendly.
Epic, probably the second biggest store people thing about, can't even make a good platform. They try underhanded practices like bribing developers and customers... maybe they should make their store work properly first.
Yet
Yet, unlike other sectors yet.
High chances that this changes. Monopolies are built friendly and get enshitificated later, one baby step at a time.
Market will get harder and harder to join as studios optimise their processes for releases on steam and users get even more trained Games -> Steam.
Especially when Steam manages to kill PS and Xbox, where I see big potential that this happens.
That's always a possibility, but if it was going to happen, it would have already by now.
It's very obvious to me that Valves leadership cares about the end goal of making gaming accessible and as easy as possible for everyone.
If they ever become evil, I feel it's guaranteed to be because of leadership change to someone who is secretly corrupt, we just have to hope the reigns are handed down to someone good.
And if they do become evil and their product suffert as a result, they are going to create an opening for the others to fill.
The market gets harder to join as Steam makes their platform better and better. This is very very good compared to other companies that get to the top and then add physical and legal barries to others to stop them becoming competition.
Xbox has killed itself and I can't see Playstation going anywhere anytime soon. Steam machines could take some tiny % of Playstation users, but if they do, the users stolen might have been people who wanted to swap to PC anyway. + you can access other stores on a steam machine
I'm rabidly pro-consumer about most things but I struggle with how we define a market when we talk about steam. In order for steam to be a monopoly you have to drill down through super categories of software sales and then video game sales, to the platform level.
If you look at all digital delivery video game sales they still don't have a monopoly. You don't have to deal with steam to play a video game. It's only PC video game sales where they are close to a controlling market share.
But Steam has far less power over PC gaming than Apple, Sony, or Nintendo do over their respective platforms. Gamers and Devs basically HAVE to deal with those companies to have access to their markets.
Yeah, and if Microsoft suddenly decides they want to shut Steam out then there's not much Steam can do other than take them to court. And even if Steam exited Windows there's still lot of popular publishers putting out Windows only games like Valorant, Battlefield 6, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and popular software like Adobe that would lead to losing a significant chunk of the userbase that would not move to Linux due to games and software they use not being on Windows.
Another launcher whether it is Microsoft or Epic or whatever would just fill the void for third party titles and probably be glad that the main competition is banished.
So this market share situation is not quite like Sony, Nintendo, iOS, or Google who not only run a locked down OS but also are the monopoly and sometimes only storefront.
Google recently shifted to wanting to gatekeep what can be installed and wanting verification from even devs that don't want to release on the play store, which threatens viability of alternative app repositories like F-droid. Which is what could happen to Steam if Windows suddenly decided to change their minds about how open they've been in allowing program installations.
So Steam situation despite their popularity is still reliant on Microsoft not turning into a bad actor. They are more Netflix. The go to choice in their segment, but can be replaced.
And even then, most games are available on multiple platforms, for similar prices. So you can get the same game from Steam, GOG, or EGS in many cases, plus all of the stores that sell Steam keys (and Steam probably doesn't get a cut of those sales).
Also, public companies can't make good products because they don't have long term vision. They don't have long term vision because they need to have good short term profits and profit margins. Look at Xbox eating itself just because they need to have a 30% profit margin right now!
this only applies to capitalists
That's good because it is.