If it was sold at a loss, businesses would scrape the whole supply and pave them for windows desktops.

I dunno. The Deck is/was sold at a slight loss in the hopes it would drive Steam sales.

I feel like the steam machine could actually change the trajectory of gaming. I mean look at the playstation 5. It was crazy overhyped, they don't have any games, pay to play online, the next one is around the corner. The xbox is somehow even worse. If the steam machine sells, linux is gonna see an insane push and the game developers have to sink or swim.

Eh, it's gonna depend on your taste in games. If competitive multiplayer games are your thing, then it is a problem. But sure, there's lots of people who have zero interest in competitive multiplayer.

Depends how much the thing costs.

It's Activision-Blizzard. It's the same megacorporation

I'm 1000% certain you could attach a Blu-Ray drive via USB without internet telemetry, unlike Sony's policies ;)

Edit: fixed rogue "care of" character, will contact GrapheneOS team lol

I wonder if it could support an external DVD/BD drive via its USB ports. I assume yes, but that would be an extra purchase for you.

My Steam Deck feels about on par with PS4 in terms of power, and they say Steam Machine will be more like a PS5, so it sounds like it would be an upgrade over your PS4. Just more expensive, especially if you're buying a disc drive.

I think that this thing coming out will only be beneficial to PC gamers, especially Linux users. This will encourage further development and standardization.

IIRC, kernel level anti cheat works for linux. It's at the company's discretion if they enable support for Linux clients

I do both!

I wish laws represented the interests of the 99%

Don't be surprised when one or both of them starts doing some shady shit to sabotage things if Valve starts eating a larger market share.

I doubt the Steam Machine will affect their bottom line in any meaningful way, and that's not Valve's goal, anyway. Most people aren't like me, who got a Steam Deck right after the terrible Switch 2 reveal.

I don’t think the Steam Machine is going to be placed in the market as a competitor for consoles. It’s probably not gonna be sold at a loss. The Steam Machine is a competitor to Windows. It’s Valve’s solution to show hardware makers and publishers that a PC gaming market without Microsoft is possible. At the moment Valve’s business is way too dependent on Microsoft. With the direction Win11 is going, Microsoft is a serious threat to Valve’s survival. The more anti-consumer Windows becomes the more likely it will push PC gamers to consoles.

Remember the first Steam Machines came out when Microsoft tried to force their Windows Store on developers in Win8.

Nintendo will always care, especially since you can easily currently install emulators on stem deck, and I seriously doubt it would be impossible to install those on steam machine. Now aside from the emulation stuff, having another contender in the console market may always affect each of the companies simply because not everyone can afford all the consoles. Growing up the parents who raised me didn't buy us a single console, so my first consoles were from the parent who only visited (divorce), in lieu of child support payments, and we generally only had one at a time until we started buying them ourselves.

If you're on a limited budget, even with kids, you may only choose 1 or two consoles, and your choice may be the most "comprehensive". While Nintendo makes excellent games for kids, it's not like the PC market doesn't have anything for kids. Plus new consoles in a market could convince publishers to expand that way too.

Yes, the same. It being the machine of course

There's no need to wait. You can switch right now.

Indeed. I chalk it up to the power of narratives and emotions. These are emotional decisions by managers who don't know what they're doing but salivate at the opportunity to limit someone's access to something for not paying them or for using something differently than how they'd like to after paying. You know, stupid s**t like kernel level anti cheat and denuvo.

But if the cheats are at kernel level, how can any anti cheat compete without going full server authoritative?