Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.

Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked... which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.

These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn't really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.

But also... have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn't considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.

Well, it got you a better experience than whatever it was Sony were doing at the time, which was a weird ethernet adapter, and seemingly every game reinventing the idea of how online should work.

I don't think it ever needed to be charged for, it just needed to be designed.

I only ever paid for it once they started giving away games with it. Multiplayer alone wasn't worth it to me.

These days? I dont mind it. With the offering of the 3 games a month, it's been fine. As someone who's gotten old and barely plays anything, it's nice only spending the yearly subscription and getting up to 36 games a year. Sure, not all are great, but there have been plenty of big games offered that let me play the big stuff I missed and probably still wouldn't pay $20-$30 for.

A good example would be Alan Wake 2 this month. Really wanted to play it but couldn't really bring myself to buy it.

fr man this timeline is f'ed

As far as I know, this same advantage isn't granted to anything other than Steam Deck. On desktop, you often have a Vulkan shader step before the game boots that I rarely see on Deck. I could be wrong though.

Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar's chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he's supposed to be, you'll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they're supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.

I hope that once my account turns 18 they will stop asking my for by DOB to look at mature content.

All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.

Yeah :(

And it is probably in Valve's best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since "1024 at 40 FPS" doesn't scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.

I'm not sure this is a good idea, personally. The original Steam Machines and the ROG Xbox Ally are pretty good indicators that it's not very smart to rely on OEMs to drive major change in the PC market.

The current gen consoles are basically already just standard AMD x86-64 PCs that just happen to be running locked down proprietary OSes. So it really seems like low hanging fruit to me for Valve to just put out a price-competitive Steam Machine "console" akin to the Steam Deck that boots into SteamOS and otherwise is a normal PC that with a normal UEFI bootloader. That seems both technically easier and cheaper to do than putting out yet another prohibitively expensive VR/AR device.

As a fan of Linux and FOSS, my main concern is that Valve misses a big window of opportunity by failing to capitalize on the current weakness of Xbox and Windows during this awkward transition period from traditional consoles to PCs.

When Valve put out the original Steam Machines, people didn't understand why they would want a computer in their living room that didn't run Windows. But now the Steam Deck has shown people that Valve can deliver a console-like PC gaming experience that gives people the best of both worlds. SteamOS has a compatibility disadvantage, but a huge UX advantage. They've finally sold people on the concept that Windows is not the alpha and omega of PC gaming. But I think Microsoft understands that too, and the only reason that they're doing what they're doing today is because they clearly see SteamOS as a huge threat in the living room.

But as the saying goes, you gotta "strike while the iron is hot".

So if Valve sits back and allows Windows to continue to catch up to SteamOS in terms of gaming UX, then I think it's very possible that Microsoft could sell a lot of Windows-Xboxes, killing a lot of the interest in Steam Machines.

And I'll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle "steam deck games" on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.

True, I can build my own Steam Machine by just throwing Bazzite on just about anything that's reasonably capable. I've been tempted, I'm just waiting to see what Valve has up their sleeve.

But it's not me that I'm worried about. Mass appeal comes from a company like Valve or Microsoft putting out a dedicated gaming box for a decent price that comes preinstalled with a gaming OS. I just hope it's Valve and Linux, and not Microsoft and Windows...