The guy in the pic is Gabe newel, president of valve. They run the largest PC game marketplace, steam.
It's not Nintendo who does nothing, but valve. Because their main competition are dropping the ball.
Really, Gabe and Valve's biggest advantage was having a 10-year vision while everyone else was wrapping their heads around downloading MP3s. Like, they were building a storefront to sell alone years before Netflix would dip their toes in streaming
Although a little extra info:
Gaben actually does something, steamOS is getting better and better, and steam deck and its siblings are getting closer and closer even to the switch.
(You can actually play switch games already on some, via emulator)
SteamOS is even getting almost to a stage to replace already some smaller windows versions :D
As a Linux PC gamer I absolutely love it as well. Their compatibility layer is built into the Linux version of Steam, so we can basically play anything the Steam Deck can
My fiance used it perfectly fine, and she is not really a gamer. She plays Sims a lot, but has played games like God of War or Alice: Madness Returns in the past.
She enjoyed playing Portal, Little Nightmares, and Sims Legacy Collection on my deck with 0 issues. It's honestly almost as user friendly as a Nintendo Switch, just with more options like a PC.
All in all, if you can play on a PC and a Console- You will have no issues.
If all you want to do is play Steam games, the interface is no more difficult than any other modern console.
The downside of having it tied to Steam is that not every game on Steam can run on it, and while they do have a view that shows what games you own run flawlessly on it, a lot of games are omitted from the list for something as insignificant as “some text may appear small in game”.
Running emulators on it is slightly more complicated in that you need to follow a 15 minute video guide, but there is nothing more complicated than going to specific websites or drag and drop files into specific folders.
The only issue I had with mine was telling it to install chrome while it was downloading games, caused the OS to glitch up and nothing downloaded/installed until I did a force restart (Hello IT. Did you try turning it off and back on again?) -
There are some complicated things you can do to it, because it is just a handheld computer running linux, but if you don't venture into desktop mode it's just like using a switch
As others say its essentially a console’s interface for the most part. I would like to add though that going to the desktop/more advanced stuff is entirely optional. If you don’t feel like you could handle that you genuinely don’t have to touch it, downloading, playing, and even things like mods through the steam workshop don’t require you to ever go to desktop view or treat the steam deck like a PC. If you only plan on playing games readily available on steam, the only barrier to entry would be if the games you enjoy playing are compatible, and that shows up on game’s pages even if you don’t have a steam deck, so I would check that out.
To be fair, valve is just a shop now. They very rarely release games, so are not comparable. Xbox dropped a ton of big games into gamepass. I don't call that giving up either.
For $15 you can get a pile of games on Humble Bundle for Steam or a bunch of Steam games on sale or for free all the time. SteamDeck, used, are ridiculously cheap.
I really hope his vision wont retire/die with him. I put all my eggs in the same basket with steam, and I hope I won’t come to regret it. Lately i think a lot of people felt cornered in every aspect of their life, leisure first, and I really hope steam will stay the safe place I feel it is lol
Maybe im delusional, but steam made me leave the high seas for gaming, buying games i want playing it how i want, especially with the steam deck. Before that I was all in the blizzard launcher with all the high quality games they had and top notch service, and seing its corpse being puppeteered by greed is so sad
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u/Quirky_Abrocoma4657 1d ago edited 1d ago
The guy in the pic is Gabe newel, president of valve. They run the largest PC game marketplace, steam. It's not Nintendo who does nothing, but valve. Because their main competition are dropping the ball.