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Software has won. Every game wants to be on every platform, because platforms are an obstacle to customers. The only exceptions are from studios getting bought off or bought up.
Consoles don’t even have any special sauce left - they are computers, full stop. Do you want the blue AMD laptop, or the green AMD laptop? Or the red Android tablet?
Microsoft saw this coming a mile off, and is still getting walked by Valve. The Xbox brand was invented to computerify the console market. The first one was literally a PC. The second was a generic compiler target. They’ve been breaking down barriers because they expected to own everything.
Sony saw this coming… last year, maybe. Helldivers 2 showed them how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. That’s why they burned a lot of customers by forcing them into the PSN ecosystem. Force is the only way they have an ecosystem. People say “PS5 has no games” despite that object supporting hundreds of titles and basically the entire PS4 library. What they mean is: having a PS5 is fine. But why should you buy it instead of something else? What’s the difference, anymore?
First handhelds, then PCs, then laptops, then phones. Maybe, maybe, maybe we’ll finally see another OS take a big bite out of the OS market. Fuck Macs. They are a shit choice (unless you like being locked in).
Maybe, maybe, maybe we’ll finally see another OS take a big bite out of the OS market.
Which OS Market? The are several and the only one that Microsoft dominates is General Purpose PCs (Desktops & Laptops). Every other OS Market has a different major player. Nintendo owns handhelds with Valve as the secondary. Sony is on top in consoles with Microsoft as the secondary. Tablets are owned by Apple with Android as a strong secondary. Smartphones are the same as tablets.
I could type several paragraphs about why MS is still relevant, although less so as time goes on, for GP Computer OS but instead I’ll point out that the reason so many games target Windows OS is simply because it gives access to the largest number of buyers.
IMO opinion the decades of continually increasing DOS & Windows PC based ownership that got the gaming industry to this point is quickly running out. Personal computer ownership has been steadily declining for years as people increasingly use mobile platforms like Smartphones and Tablets. Assuming that trend continue then it won’t be long at all, maybe five years, before gaming companies find that Windows OS compatibility no longer provides a large enough target audience.
When, if, that happens there will be a rapid sea change in the gaming industry. I strongly suspect that this is why MS have invested so much money into creating platforms for game streaming. It’s the only way they can stay in the game, lol, as personal computer ownership declines.
Yeah, not a fan of macOS, but I really wish Apple cared more because it could totally drive forward ARM compatibility in games.
Make the software work on ARM so people can do their day to day tasks, then the games will come.
Mac OS has had a decent push for games on their Apple Silicon Macs recently. With how powerful the iGPU is even a lowly MacBook air can run modern games. It’s just getting more and more developers to pay attention to anything outside of Windows (aka nothing has changed in the last 20 years). Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is. A lot of native Linux ports just straight up suck and the proton version runs better.
Day-to-day software does work on ARM, games don’t. I can run macOS or Linux on ARM, but that’s not going to encourage game developers to port their software to that architecture.
Apple doesn’t particularly care about gaming on macOS, if they did, they’d be working directly with game developers to get games working there. They have made some attempts to improve APIs and whatnot games would need, but that’s also relevant for other software Apple seems to care about more (CAD, Adobe products, etc). Gaming just isn’t something they really care about.
Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is
Absolutely. I actually didn’t make a Steam account until they ported their client to Linux, and back then they didn’t have any form of compatibility for Windows games. It wasn’t until 2018 (~5 years after initial Linux launch) that they released Proton. That’s a big part of why Steam Machines failed, they were released 3 years before Proton was a thing so game selection was extremely limited. Valve hoped devs would create native ports for Linux, but that never happened, and it’s why Proton is a thing at all, and why the Steam Deck launched years after the initial Proton launch (they wanted a large library of games).
I really hope Gabe doesn’t die right now because we are SO CLOSE to having a mainstream windows competitor.
The users-&-software feedback loop snowball is about to go down a mountain and I am so here for it.Agreed.
Hopefully other platforms start caring about Linux because I really don’t want Gabe to be replaced by a “profit all the things” CEO and for Linux gaming to become a locked-down platform.
That already happened with Android.
Successful deployments of Linux for consumers are going to include a DRM app store.
Android is quite different though, since the user has very limited access to the actual hardware and largely interacts with the system through approved apps. Whether it uses Linux or some other kernel is largely irrelevant for the functioning of the device.
When I say “Linux,” I mean the rest of the userland as well, whether that’s GNU or something like busybox. There are certain expectations about user interaction that SteamOS satisfies that Android really doesn’t.
I’m 100% fine with Steam as-is, the DRM is optional and you can install anything else you like. If that’s what takes over, I’ll be ecstatic.
I really don’t want Gabe to be replaced by a “profit all the things” CEO
Like with their black market loot crate casinos?
A “profit all the things” CEO would be running the casino themselves. IE: Many of the big mobile games. Hell, I don’t play many modern triple-A titles, but it sounds like they’ve largely gone that route too.
Nintendo’s unbeatable advantage will always be its first-party games, but the Switch 2 — a device rumored to be a fairly light improvement over its predecessor — doesn’t quite feel like it’ll be as culturally dominant as the Switch was in 2017.
That remains to be seen. Back in 2016-2017, every gaming media was skeptical that the Switch would be anywhere near as much of a success like the DS or the GameBoy had been, or if it was going to be another failure like the Wii U.
Why buy a game on PS5 when you can get it on Steam and have access to it on any number of devices?
That has been one of the arguments for PC gaming in a long time, but it never quite reached the console players’ mindset. Not to mention that, despite its dominance in game distribution, Valve and the Steam brand are nowhere near as recognizable as any of the other ‘big 3’. The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays. I can’t see it take less than a decade for than a decade for that mindset to start changing change and competitors and regulation to get interested, and even that’s an optimistic estimate.
Still, it’s good to hear the platform exlusivity walls are finally breaking down.
it never quite reached the console players’ mindset
Exactly. Console players want to plug it into a TV and start playing. PC gamers are happy to tinker a bit. Steam Machines might fill that gap if Valve ever successfully launches one, but consoles still provide a good experience for a lot of people so it’ll be hard to shake loyalists.
So yeah, your assessment is spot on.
Steam is a marketplace, making games is a side hustle. It’s the opposite for the big 3.
Precisely. Valve builds stuff largely to drive some kind of idea forward so hopefully other devs will copy it and people will buy more games. They also want them to make money, but they make so much more through Steam than any of their games that it’s not really worth the investment. Counterstrike (their biggest cash cow) makes ~$1B, Steam makes ~$10B (estimates of course). Most of their games are way below either numbers in total revenue ever.
what about Microsoft? don’t they make games too? and a whole console? and the os that most pc gamers use? don’t they own like a whole bunch of game studios? why are they not included? why does it have to be 3? is it because of the weebs? we don’t need the weebs to tell us what to do.
To address other points, Microsoft has used Xbox as a trojan house into console gaming, using its PC gaming development to subsidize Xbox development as Sony used its hardware division to subsidize PlayStation development.
The strategic deployment of Xbox on the PC is probably the largest strategic threat to Valve and Steam, which is why Valve developed a way to play Steam games on a self controlled OS.
