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

  • misk@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually, definitely not in a single generation of hardware. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) or just plain locking Steam to supported platforms to lock you out of other OSs first.

    • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • misk@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        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.

          • misk@piefed.social
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            1 day 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.

              • misk@piefed.social
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                1 day ago

                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.

                • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  24 hours ago

                  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.

                  • misk@piefed.social
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                    23 hours ago

                    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.