Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have long been dubbed the "big 3" of gaming. After CES 2025, Valve now sits at the head of that table.
  • anamethatisnt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    411·
    11 months ago

    I am very happy about Proton/SteamOS and how they assist in making games playable on Linux. I hope the SteamOS devices become popular enough that developers stop trying to shut Linux out.

    I’m not looking forward to what will happen with Steam when Gabe is no longer around though.
    Having one big marketplace/launcher might be comfy right now but that can turn into a nightmare quickly when there’s a new owner in town.

    Personally I’m trying to buy any game I can on gog.com instead of Steam. Both to get my own offline installers and to ensure not all my eggs (games) are in one basket. I launch more games from Lutris then Steam today.

  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    261·
    11 months ago

    I really hope Gabe doesn’t die right now because we are SO CLOSE to having a mainstream windows competitor.
    The users-&-software feedback loop snowball is about to go down a mountain and I am so here for it.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      11 months ago

      Agreed.

      Hopefully other platforms start caring about Linux because I really don’t want Gabe to be replaced by a “profit all the things” CEO and for Linux gaming to become a locked-down platform.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    11 months ago

    Software has won. Every game wants to be on every platform, because platforms are an obstacle to customers. The only exceptions are from studios getting bought off or bought up.

    Consoles don’t even have any special sauce left - they are computers, full stop. Do you want the blue AMD laptop, or the green AMD laptop? Or the red Android tablet?

    Microsoft saw this coming a mile off, and is still getting walked by Valve. The Xbox brand was invented to computerify the console market. The first one was literally a PC. The second was a generic compiler target. They’ve been breaking down barriers because they expected to own everything.

    Sony saw this coming… last year, maybe. Helldivers 2 showed them how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. That’s why they burned a lot of customers by forcing them into the PSN ecosystem. Force is the only way they have an ecosystem. People say “PS5 has no games” despite that object supporting hundreds of titles and basically the entire PS4 library. What they mean is: having a PS5 is fine. But why should you buy it instead of something else? What’s the difference, anymore?

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    81·
    11 months ago

    Steam is a marketplace, making games is a side hustle. It’s the opposite for the big 3.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Precisely. Valve builds stuff largely to drive some kind of idea forward so hopefully other devs will copy it and people will buy more games. They also want them to make money, but they make so much more through Steam than any of their games that it’s not really worth the investment. Counterstrike (their biggest cash cow) makes ~$1B, Steam makes ~$10B (estimates of course). Most of their games are way below either numbers in total revenue ever.