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.

No way its that close to steam deck prices

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.

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.

Okay. I agree this is likely abd a problem. But like, is valve's hardware locked down?

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 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.

What are Nvidia and Intel doing?

Intel management engine, then whatever its successor is called. Same concept. I think there was some other more specific collaboration with the regime. Nvidia straight up contracted with palantir.

If Valve starts utilising Intel ME to do what I’m warning everyone about is it on Valve or Intel? Nvidia (and everyone else) sells their GPUs/NPUs to the highest bidders they can legally sell them to. Not sure how that’s relevant to this discussion.

>or No.