It never was, it's just copyright infringement.

pirating isnt stealing, its a different crime!

And Valve would probably love for the new handheld to also use the Valve libraries, if that helps them penetrate the market even faster.

They weren't even the first, Ayn and Ayaneo were making handheld gaming computers well before Valve or the other major companies started to get involved.

I love that all it takes to beat Microsoft is to make an actual, quality product and one that respects the customer. Seems these huge corporations are so bloated and disconnected that they're actually incapable of making anything worth a damn anymore

Remember that a monopoly is a monopoly and unless it's a State corporation, you've got no say in the way it's run.

Valve could turn around and start implementing bullshit and they would be in a position that you would pretty much have no choice but to give up on the ease of access to all your games if you decided not to do business with them anymore or they could decide to ban you for one reason or another and you would lose everything you purchased from them.

You are both correct, and way off the mark in what you've said.

Valve is mostly a store platform for the last like 15 years. They're also privately owned, so no appeasing share holders and releasing all of their data and everything else that goes with going public, so they have a lot of freedom to do what they want, but they still do things that make them money, and that GabeN likes.

Valve takes a 30% cut of any game purchase on steam. That's their bread and butter/huge revenue source. All the sales you talk about aren't valves, so much as they're the game license holders choice. If No Man's Sky is 80% off It's because Hello Games made it 80% off. Not Valve.

The Steam Deck is Linux because Gabe likes it and there's no license fee to worry about paying to windows. If gaming becomes easy for PC based systems and doesn't require a paid OS like windows, more people will go to PC gaming, which means more people will buy games through steam and make Valve money.

The Steam Deck works so well because unlike every other handheld PC manufacturer, Valve doesn't have to or even likely really care to make a direct profit on its sale. Again, they're a storefront that gets 30% of anything sold on steam. Steam Decks mean more game purchases through steam.

It's also why Valve has offered up free use of Steam OS to any other hand held PC. An Asus Rog Ally isn't competition against Valve. It's a free revenue source to sale more games on Steam, and you're even more likely to buy games through the steam store if you're using Steam OS because a lot of customers like easy with no setup needed.

So it doesn't matter if their product sales wane. It's not their revenue stream. Selling other people's PC games is their revenue stream. Their competition isn't Microsoft. It's other game stores like Origin, Amazon, Gog, and Epic. Thus far Valve seems to be crushing the competition.

People in online forums and pretty much everywhere else as well always talk PS vs XBox and never talk about Nintendo. Nintendo absolutely crushes the competition with almost everything they release. The WiiU has been about their only miss in the last few decades. I think the GameCube may have gone a bit stale but not positive on that one.

The switch has sold over 132 million systems. PS4 sold 113 million its entire run and PS5 is sitting on 50 million. Poor Xbox series s/x has only sold 21 million.

I don't know why you have any downvotes. Everything you wrote is true. Steam has a very nice user experience, but if you don't want to use it, GOG, Epic, and retail still exist as a means of buying PC games. It just so happens that Steam makes the whole process painless.

I switched from mostly Playstation to mostly Steam slowly over the last decade cause I like their services. It just works. I explicitly at this point won't get a computer game that isn't on Steam. I own one of the little physical Steam Links and cant believe it's still supported by Vavle. Steam Deck was the final nail. I once didn't like a game and got a refund on it. I have made older games playable and comfortable with the controller custom configurations. My older games and game saves still work on my new PC's cause it's all mostly backwards compatible. I love the Guide, Discussions, and Community Content parts of Steam. It adds so much life, answers questions, builds camaraderie, for some games.

With Playstation, the 2011 hack was bad enough. Being a day 1 Vita adopter, I feel forgotten and taken advantage of. I've had to deal with Sony repairs before and didn't get my console back for months. Before Sony introduced 2FA far too late, my account got hacked. Sony rep's treated me like a criminal and only gave me my account back because I so happened to still have the unfunctional console (and serial number) I originally created my PSN account on like 6-8 years earlier. PS4 initially lacked basic features PS3 had. PS5 has done the same. The games hardly drop in price relative to PC games. Backwards compatibility is questionable every generation. I signed up for PS Now to stream PS3 games and a month later they changed it and stopped adding more PS3 games. The PS Portal and proprietary wireless only further shows how stupid Sony is.

I'll never buy another Playstation again.

It's so funny when you remember what people said (or better: screamed) when Steam first came into existence... It was pretty much the opposite of what you wrote in your post.

Having a monopoly because everyone chooses to purchase from you is not "having a monopoly", so not only should it be ok, it should be a wake up call to the competition that they can and should do better.

Who cares if the Switch doesn't have the hardware to compete with Sony and Xbox? It never was trying to compete with Sony or Xbox. It's been a serviceable device with a huge library of awesome games. Graphics aren't gameplay.

And I love how it's the opposite of other console approaches.

Everyone else: "let's rope some devs into exclusives, and make some more in house, that'll lock them in!"

Valve: "let's develop improvements to OSS publicly, so it runs better on PC for everyone (and our product)"

i think of phones as tools, not gaming consoles or computers

of course because games on it are either money grabs or used to waste time, rarely is a phone game an actual game

Most, yes.

The secret is crime

Ryujinx and yuzu both work and run well in my experience. Biggest barrier was navigating the deck file structure for setting them up, but not impossible. Both also perform well via streaming from a desktop.

I'm out ofnthe loop, but I hear good things about yuzu. There are other emulators, but I don't remember any (I hear they are also good though).