Riiiiight.... Man, was it really that far away? It didnt feel like it back then.

TF2 didn't originally have lootboxes though. They weren't added until the Mann crates in 2010

The first FIFA game with lootboxes was 09 which came out in 2009. MapleStory's apparently did predate TF2's; but only by 3 years (2004 vs 2007), and it was only available in the Japanese version of the game.

I don't want to excuse Valve's involvement as they definitely shouldn't have joined on the wagon, but Valve jumped on an already existing wagon, they didn't create it. MapleStory did it like 6 years before Valve, and EA did it with FIFA almost a year before Valve with TF2.

I'd say that creating the lootbox system that plagues modern games was Valve's biggest blunder, personally.

I have a gaming PC, a Steam Deck and a PS4. But I'll buy this thing in a heartbeat.

I thought 7000 series production was winding down? It'd be odd if a 7000-series GPU made it into a future shipping system.

It could be a 'testing' analogue for an 8000-series Strix Halo APU I guess, or maybe even an unreleased one.

Why wait?

Pats his Homemade, Bazzite powered 7900XTX system.

This kind of behavior is commonplace in business today, where a dominant player will develop a homegrown version of something that was previously offered by a third party, essentially eliminating any need to venture outward.

This seems odd in this context since the steam reporting seems like the 3rd party in place of windows or the chipset manufacturers.

Chrome OS pulls the plug on Steam gaming

They mean that Valve is pulling the plug on the Chrome OS version of Steam.

So install Linux and move on. Chromebooks are trash anyhow.

I can trust a privately owned company because then I’d be giving my trust to a person.

I will never trust a publicly traded company because then I’d be trusting a whimsical and sociopathic collective that only cares about margins and unrealistic growth while trampling anything and everything on its path.

So, what has valve done to break your trust?

Man I love Valve, but they should really be more transparent, which includes making annual reports public

1. im not. ive degoogled pretty much completely, running grapheneos and Linux. dont call me a corpo pls.
2. it was just a comparison to other players in the industry, in comparison to which steam did a whole lot for the consumers.

Plus, Valve is extremely trusted by the community and is known to be pro-consumer

more that why would valve want to remove thousands of titles they're making money on. Doesn't matter how big or small the company is, public or private.

There are select places where it's usable, but generally speaking most merchants don't accept it. You can sometimes buy giftcards or something like that with crypto and just use the giftcard to pay, but honestly that's kind of a pain. Also I'm only talking about Bitcoin and Monero. Most of the other currencies I probably wouldn't bother using.

Hmm, who do I trust? The privately owned video game company that has quietly built a massive and effective game distribution platform or the hyper capitalist parasitic payments processor?

Hmmm.......

So I haven't tried to use crypto in probably 10 years, can it be a viable alternative or is it all about scamming people now?

CUSTOM SORT NAMING WOOOOOO

Too late.

Gotta get ahead, buy more now so that future steam sales are already mostly in my library (unplayed of course)