Number of investors think you should be willing to invest in a machine that you probably don't have money for to enrich them. They think you should buy games at $70 or something instead of wait for them to be $30 like on sale. Like I wait. Not all of us want to be in debt.

I got the steam link for ~$10 but that was after it was discontinued.

It's a PC after all, and Valve has access to chipsets the average consumer normally doesn't. I can see me upgrading my current rig with this if it competes with traditional PCs

Yes, it would be very difficult for the owners @outlook to create 10k accounts.

You can always just build your own today even.

Yeah but this is what I mean. Valve buying in bulk would be able to offer a better deal than someone try to build their own…

I mean the original controller had gryo, track pads, USB dongle and Bluetooth, haptics, and buttons on the back. However, I do agree the controller felt cheap (I think really just how light it was). We'll have to see. I think they could pull it off as they've been more aggressive with pricing than other companies.

Yeah, it was. So it had more features than most controllers at the time and I think was still cheaper.

Investors? Valve is a private company

That doesn't mean it doesn't have investors. It means it's not publicly traded.

Here's my source for the Microsoft laptop cpu rumor: https://youtu.be/sJI3qTb2ze8

You're fundamentally misunderstanding what this development means for gaming affordability. Not having to buy a scarce, way overpriced Nvidia (or even AMD) external GPU means that gaming is a whole lot cheaper. If developers are optimizing for hardware like the Steam Machine - budget cards and iGPUs suddenly become viable again.

Especially with the llm crash, this may keep the fabs running Its some degree of good from like every direction.

Holy crap I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, nvidia needs to die. Nothing tied to palantir should survive.

The competition on... Okay, so, it's an OS right? So for free linux-native stuff, there's the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There's a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch. But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You *can* just pirate shit. You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.

You missed the part where Android wanted to [lock people out of installing their own apps](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/google-will-require-developer-verification-for-android-apps-outside-the-play-store/). They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where [bootloaders lock you out of changing OS](https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/61438-samsung-kills-bootloader-unlock-globally). This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into.

Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE's: KDE plasma and a modified' 'steam big picture' mode.

Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you ~~buy~~ license most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.

But it's much easier to pirate a program than an OS, and they can't fuck with the bios too terribly easy once the thing's in your hands.

It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) to lock you out of other OSs first.