The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
And when they do, that hardware will be worthless shit, but steam still has to run of my 15 year old Debian/Fedora x86 box, and other companies are making handhelds like this now.
Why does it have to? Valve isn’t known for maintaining legacy software. You assume your software will run forever as-is but you can see how that looks like in accelerated timeline in the case of Valve games on Macs.
Because most people play on the 300$ dell their mom got them for school ten years ago.
The equivalent of that $300 Dell in 10 years is even more likely to be locked down. Open hardware will become more and more niche, and therefore even more expensive comparatively. This is where the entire industry seems to be going.
Okay. I agree this is likely abd a problem. But like, is valve’s hardware locked down? How are they different from dell?
Valve, unlike Dell, has the power to vertically integrate an ecosystem. They own an app store with de facto monopoly over PC gaming. If Valve says that starting 2030 you can only run Steam on Windows and their own locked down OS (and enforce that via bootloader or some other measure) what can you do about it? You only licensed games from them, never bought them.
Why can’t they take back shit you ‘bought’ rather than just licensed?
Ownership is just a licensing agreement under capitalism.
I agree the problems are real, but they are not specific to valve.
I’m dying on this hill because people act like Valve is different. If I had to guess it’s PC players that want to feel superior to others, even though they were first to lose access to physical copies of games and second hand market it provided.
The thing is: they’re not different.
And their hardware isn’t, like; special; it’s a single board computer running the standard x86/64 architecture that ships with a lightly customized OS most users won’t change.
I’m more worried about what nvidia Intel and and are getting up to. They’ll fuck you first.
I guess valve kind of is special? They are a games company, so they don’t have big government contracts, they don’t work with palantir, and they dont work at a low enough level that they can easily install something my electrical engineer or hacker friends can’t possibly fix with a soldering iron.
Theyll fuck me, sure, yes, but the chip makers already have their pants down.