Part of problem is that being able to keep a copy of a game indefinitely doesn't mean you "own" it. You just have a (revokable) license to use it within the conditions of the license, as with almost all software you use and media you consume.
When companies say you don't own games, they mean this: you've never owned games you bought.
Why is $60 the full price and not $50, as was the standard for AAA titles before that?
When accounting for inflation, both a $60 game purchased in 2021 (just 5 years ago, when that was still the norm for AAA games) and a $50 game purchased in 2001 are more expensive than buying a $70 AAA game in 2026. Meanwhile, AAA game budgets have exploded.
Another way to look at it: Galactic Racer in 2026, at $60, would be $49 in 2021 or $32 in 2001 when accounting for inflation.
Galactic Racer feels like a AA game, and has a modern AA price, both relative to new AAA game prices for the last few years and relative to prices in the past when accounting for inflation. It is fair to not like that or feel it is overpriced, but it does line up.
Not saying it’s a bad game just it isn’t a full priced title.
I understand the complaint that it doesn't have enough content for the price, and that's fair if that's how you feel. However, new AAA games these days are 70 to 80 USD. $60 isn't the full price for a AAA game anymore.
Thanks for your perspective on this. I am going to go into a bunch of detail on why I disagree.
I didn't say that streaming video requires a lot of RAM or storage, I said that streaming video, decent tracking, eye tracking, and the on-device compositor combined require "a decent amount of onboard processing, a full OS, and some memory/storage."
It is true that decoding a relatively low bitrate H.265 video doesn't require a lot of RAM or storage on its own. It does add a bit to the processing requirements across the whole package, though.
The XReal One Pro has 3 DoF unless if you add a single camera (XReal Eye) to do 6 DoF SLAM. It does benefit from hardware acceleration of the tracking.
Still, the single tracking camera produces less data that needs to be processed, and limits the tracking quality. This limited quality is reflected in reviews:
With the XReal Eye, the XReal One and One Pro can do the same thing, in a very loose sense. Anchoring the virtual screen in front of my TV, I could indeed move closer to the screen and step around it. The picture would constantly move with me to some extent, though, making it shift back and forth a few feet when I walked around my living room. It felt like a half-step between 3DOF and 6DOF, where the head tracking is more accurate than without the Eye, but the position of the screen is taken as a suggestion more than a fixed point. This isn’t surprising, though, considering its calculations are based on the input of a single camera.
However, the real magic of the Eye comes with its ability to infuse the One Pro with spatial 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) tracking. With this capability, the virtual screen stays in place while you move around your environment. This feature is usually enabled by using multiple forward-looking cameras, but Xreal is implementing it with just one (monocular SLAM), which limits its performance. In other words, tracking isn’t as steady or jitter-free as devices like the Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3s.
It may be that you don't need the higher quality tracking with your needs and in AR glasses. This doesn't work so well in VR.
In comparison, the Steam Frame has 4 SLAM cameras (also used for tracking the controllers) and 2 eye tracking cameras, and doesn't have dedicated hardware to accelerate the tracking. This means the tracking is implemented in software, where it must process 6 cameras (among other sensors) at low latencies and high refresh rates to keep the tracking quality relatively high.
The XReal One Pro has hardware to smooth motion when displaying a relatively low resolution, 2D image in an apparent fixed position. Like with tracking, this is probably enough for AR glasses.
Unlike the Steam Frame, XReal glasses aren't capable of compositing arbitrary 3D scenes with depth buffers and/or motion vectors that are used to reproject the image with reduced artifacts compared to a naive implementation.
The Steam Frame, again, isn't benefiting from dedicated hardware for this. It does do some fun tricks to reduce latency of the compositor in the GPU.
Combined, this is a lot of data to crunch that less powerful hardware like is found in the XReal One Pro cannot handle. The most popular headsets with similar needs use the Snapdragon XR series SoCs, which have hardware acceleration for SLAM tracking with many sensors, and basically requires a full OS (in practice, Android) to function as expected (requiring more storage and RAM as a result).
The Steam Frame has similar needs to the other wireless VR headsets (with some different trade-offs), and is using a smartphone SoC without dedicated tracking hardware. It could be that it could cover all of its needs (outside of standalone functionality) with bespoke hardware that is a lot less powerful, but this would certainly be more expensive than an off-the-shelf solution, as the requirements are too great and the volume too low.
It also makes sense to reuse SteamOS and SteamVR, which already had a lot of the functionality they need, instead of creating bespoke firmware. These add some overhead relative to the firmware running on XReal glasses.
Since it is already using an older high end smartphone SoC to be able to handle all of this, plus all the other components (like displays, optics stack, cooling, audio drivers, IPD mechanism, modular strap, etc.), a bit more memory and storage wouldn't have been a big price increase before prices exploded. Valve said as much in interviews, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ag2S8yvVak
Early on, before we had a sense of the compute capabilities, we were picking a lower spec, but as more and more of the catalog came online, it turned into a scenario where we're like, "well, this chip is powerful enough to run these- this level of game- if we had 16 gigs," right?
They landed on having the standalone capability because it was already in reach after choosing a SoC that met their other needs, and adding extra memory was an easy decision to make at the time. It makes sense, then, to increase the storage a bit, too. They could not have predicted that prices would explode, and the resulting pricing is their biggest regret with their latest hardware (as stated in the same interview).
For them to have things like:
There needs to be a decent amount of onboard processing, a full OS, and some memory/storage. Before prices exploded (which was certainly after the hardware was mostly/entirely finalized), it would have been only a small price increase (proportional to the rest of the hardware) to bump the RAM and storage a bit to allow for more games to work standalone.
The passthrough cameras are really not a focus of the headset, they are a semi-convenient side effect of the tracking cameras. The actually-decent-quality passthrough is a separate add-on.
If you want an AR screen and only need 3 DoF, would something like the XReal glasses line up better for you?
Apparently streaming only works on Windows at the moment but that has to be temporary if it’s meant to work with the Machine.
It is only when the Steam Machine is in the default game mode, which uses gamescope. It should work fine(-ish) in desktop mode/KDE Plasma, as well as any typical Linux distro.
The Wayland spec doesn't allow for clients to arbitrarily get clipboard data under typical conditions. Since most applications these days are running under Wayland, it should be that copying to the clipboard isn't exposed to X11 clients most of the time (only when copying from or pasting into XWayland).
You can somewhat mitigate that with different sorting options, but afaik there is no option at all to hide games unavailable or unowned on the current account.
Does "ready to play" filter those out?
Does BattleBit Remastered count? There was never a released game called BattleBit, and it was named that as a joke by the devs, because of how many times they had to redo things.
When stable is ahead, you should still get all the updates on the beta channel.
No, Valve's rule is that you can't sell Steam keys at a lower price in different places. You can sell the game at any other price without the potentially-unlimited Steam keys they provide to devs.
Steam key rules and guidelines in the Steamworks docs: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
The topic of the talk was how Rust eliminates classes of errors (and security issues) that are being very frequently found and reported. An example given: you can't forget to lock/unlock when using the locking types in Rust.
That Rust can be (and has been) used in AI and crypto projects isn't relevant to this argument.