Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper

No, it doesn’t even get that far.

Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.

A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.

But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.

And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.

You would price out the closest equivalent in price and performance, if you wanted to make an honest comparison, and plenty of people have specced out builds like that, with the differences between the two noted. And for as “ancient” as the tech in the Steam Machine is, it’s still better than what 70% of Steam users are running. Considering that the most popular games by a wide margin on any modern platform right now are all 10+ years old, that’s not much of a surprise.

The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.

I don’t think you’re making an honest comparison if you’re doing it with used parts. You can get lots of things cheaper used.

Definitely not less than half the price. The build I see linked in this thread comes in around $950 with as close to equivalent specs as possible. The machines people on YouTube were building when the specs were announced, before the RAM and SSD prices spiked, were coming in a little under $700 at the time.

The one build I see in this thread is within $100 of the Steam Machine with comparable specs, without the form factor. I’d call that competitive. But if you disagree, they’re also releasing the ISO for SteamOS, as they’re more confident in broad compatibility, so if you were ever in the market for such a machine, you can save the $100.

How recently have you checked? Word I’ve gotten from elsewhere is that this is pretty competitive with what it would cost to build it yourself.

As a realist, I don’t see any way cloud gaming services are an option that customers en masse will be willing to pay what the providers have to charge to make a profit. Stadia was not that long ago, and Google couldn’t make it work under what had to be a softball toss for that business model.

The DRM on Linux browsers that all of these services rely on doesn’t let you stream any better than 720p.

There’s an ocean of hardware requirements between the upcoming PS6 and what it takes to run pixel graphics games. Many customers are still happy on PS4 level hardware, and third party titles like Madden still got PS4 versions until just last year.

They wouldn’t be licensing it to Valve for this device; it would be the DRM vendor updating their software for web browsers on what had been a niche operating system and is becoming less and less niche of late.

I suspect the DRM those streaming services rely on will start to budge on Linux in the near future, as it gains market share. In the meantime though, I’ve mostly been using Jellyfin lately, which ironically works on Steam Machine but not the other consoles. I’ve still got my PS4 from 10+ years ago for the regular streaming services, when I still have a subscription to any of them.

I think that risk is still reduced because the parent wouldn’t have their own Steam account to reserve one. For at least months, anyone buying one of these is probably going to be someone very intentionally doing so.

I don’t think there’s a danger of that person accidentally buying this thing, as you can only buy it from Valve and not Walmart. From a casually overheard conversation on the subway last week, I can tell you that someone who is seemingly “the average NBA 2K player” is pissed off at the upcharge for PS+ just to make his game function in multiplayer, and that guy is aware of the Steam Deck.

AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that’s so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.

But why use one DNS service over another? Sorry if you’ve covered this already and it’s just not clicking yet or something.

Yeah, I’ve only got a handful of services I want to run. It’s possible that the bug bites me and I want to go deeper into this stuff, but for the here and now, I’m only eyeing 8-10 things I want to host, and they ought to work across a mini PC and a NAS.

Why do I need that? From my perspective, it seems like it would be more useful if I had far more services that I intended to run than what I’m actually planning for.

I plan on putting just about everything I can in Docker containers, but I don’t think what I’m doing requires VMs, unless you spotted something that’s eluding me.