> Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land.
This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.
> How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
So far, it seems MS is quite happy to put its games on Steam as an additional revenue source. Looking now, Xbox Game Studios has 49 games on steam, including its latest and biggest offerings, such as Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5[0].
But doesn't this acquisition put MS in a much stronger position, and isn't the Deck a direct competitor to MS hardware? MS now has a massive game catalog and I can't see any reason they would want to allow Valve to access it on their own console. Maybe MS will tolerate Steam near term, but you can't tell me that MS enjoys letting Valve take a cut of every sale, and with so many huge titles they can absolutely force users into whatever store they want (and limit them to whatever platform they want).
I don't know why anybody would give Microsoft of all companies the benefit of the doubt on this front.
I don't know. If they were so bent out of shape that Valve takes a cut of every sale, they could have stopped at any point before now. If anything would force people to use Microsoft's storefront it would have been a new well-reviewed Halo game, but nope, there it is for sale on Steam. And that makes sense to me -- withdrawing from the predominant PC storefront would be a gamble that might not pay off, as anyone who doesn't wish to buy direct from Microsoft is a loss of $60*0.7 = $42 that they could've won buy selling on Steam.
Maybe the calculus changes as they eat up publishers and grow their catalog, but traditionally Microsoft's storefronts haven't done particularly well.
Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
> Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
MS now has a truly huge library, and Valve extracting a portion of every sale on Steam isn't something that's likely to make them happy. They now have so many games that they can use DRM to force users into their own ecosystem (i.e. Windows 11/XBox) to play them.
You could say, correctly, that MS's previous storefronts have not been a great success, but with such a huge catalogue they can just pull the users wherever they want them. There's no incentive for them to allow a competitor to run their games.
Proton is only a solution for as long as MS allows it, and I don't see any incentive for them to do so at this point.
Maybe things move slowly and the Steam Deck itself can still deliver these titles before this happens, but the Valve "ecosystem" as such seems to have really poor prospects.
Can is a bit abstract. I've found it works really poorly in the browser ( just getting to the correct page that actually shows you the list of games available is a pain and requires multiple hops).
For what it's worth, I used xcloud for the first time on iOS this morning, where it runs entirely in the browser. It actually wasn't bad! I had to close out the browser entirely and reopen it to fix issues with the streaming, but once I did that it was much smoother than I anticipated, and jumping into a game was quick.
It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.
This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.