As long as it’s comparable price or cheaper than a pre-built of similar specs or building a similar build yourself, they’ll be a market for it. There’s always people looking to get into PC gaming and existing PC gamers who want their Steam library in a console form factor.
They also likely have the most non-union employees of any game company.
Problem is there’s been reports about memory providers cancelling contracts, as the premium AI companies will pay is far higher than breaking the current contracts.
I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.
And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.
Is this improving their product? These changes benefit users on non-Valve hardware playing any game on Linux (including non-Steam games). Like I’m glad Valve is funding talented free software developers to work on whatever they want but the benefit for Valve is very indirect.
Unfortunately GOG are very selective in the games they allow, you kind of already have to be a successful indie on Steam before they’ll consider you.
For what it’s worth Overwatch is in a decent state at the moment.
The realistic question is how would you enforce something like that, the recent push for age verification has been terrible for privacy and security.
The problem is GOG gatekeeping a lot of indies, he even mentions it as a good thing in this very article.
What profit? I can guarantee that Valve has spent far more in hiring hundreds of highly skilled full time contractors for 5+ years than they’ve made from the 3% of Steam’s users on Linux.
Obviously it’s a long term strategy for them to eventually make money but we’ve only gained from their investment.
Well it’s not GAAS(yet), it has 0 mtx so far.
They use regional companies I think, for Europe they use French chocolate (la maison du chocolat).
The problem with a price war is Valve is “just” a multi-billion dollar company, very impressive for their size but a $100bn company like Sony and especially a $3 trillion company like Microsoft could squeeze them out of the market.
And they would have to subsidise the cost by far more than Sony/Microsoft do due to the smaller scale of production and more expensive newer contracts.