Valve Announces The Steam Deck OLED With Upgraded Display, 6nm APU & Larger Battery

[EphemeralEft]

I'm the same. I went back to Steam for a spell to olay Conan Exiles. I oartook of the beta, and despite it being a rubbish game (typical FunCom), played it a good while.

Came back to it recwntly and jees, wtf m8. Always on solo offline? It tries so hard to go on, and Inhave ti sit and wait for it to fail to log on as Im offline mode. Which I neef to r enable on occassion as oer Stram licencing.

As for the Steam library, I believe you can share it. Not entirely sure if they lock you out of just the active games. That probably comes down to the publicker; one licence, one machine sort of thing.

You need a new keyboard.

[stiiixy]

You need a new keyboard.

Funny you mention that, I bought one and came back to a bunch of emails I really grammatically regret =)

[stiiixy]

My wife uses my shared library. If I play, my games vanish from her library. Once I stop playing, they pop back up.
So yes: the whole library is locked, not just an individual game.

When I see this, I seriously wonder why the fuck you'd even bother (not you personally, simply Steam having the feature) sharing the library in the first place. If you cant share a game (errr, ummm Dirt 3) seperate from the one you're playing (uhhh, Heroes 7), there's really not much point at all. You've paid for the them. They're single seat licences, One copy per machine at any one time. So how the Eff can Steam lock that out ethically.

I go around to my friend place and borrow a NES game' he has it or he doesn't. It doesn't ALL disappear because his Mum's playing Tetris and I want...whatever else was on NES.

[Eudyptula]

I guess the usual. I grew up on physical games, that I could lend to my friends or sell. Steam took all that away.

I can understand, I grew up with physical game copies too (but also embraced Steam in parallel). Thanks for the reply, by the way.

Here's how I look at it: Valve and Steam has arguably been a good constant for gamers. When I think about the alternate reality where EA or some other AAA game company is the monopoly games hub, I get chills. In all cases, physical games existed on borrowed time. It was always inevitable they would fade away. So I'm glad Valve was the one who ended up with a monopoly as opposed to any of the other AAA game companies.

Valve has always listened to the community. They aren't perfect but they don't engage in pay-to-win BS and their optional skin-purchases have no effect on competitiveness or progression. They've always been very open about mods and developers using their engines for projects. Their contribution to Linux and Linux gaming has been fantastic, we owe a lot to Valve. The Index, Steam Controller (yes, it was actually quite good in many regards), the Steam Deck, even Steam Link are all great projects. Their games have always been the pioneer type games shaping game development and they still focus a lot on single-player experiences.

Then Companies used even more evil copy protections. Then GOG came along and I supported their goal of having a DRM free, offline downloadable installers. The Humble Indie Bundles were great and supported Linux. So I had little reason to change my mind about steam. I'm not a hardcore AAA gamer.

The DRM is garbage, but the always online type of DRM deserves a special place in hell.

I don't think you necessarily need to choose either or. If Steam offers something complementary, then I think it's worth the consideration. But if you can get what you need (or want) elsewhere, more power to you.

I'm still waiting for the open-source philosophy to be adopted in the game industry. Imagine what games would come out of that. We'd still pay for the games, as many open-source users do, but we wouldn't be trapped with overhyped AAA-games released in pre-alpha state. Which, unfortunately, is not uncommon today. People still play the unfinished games, I'm happy I have no problem avoiding such games. I don't want to waste my time, or the long-term interest in the respective genres with half-baked games that at times are, quite frankly, disrespectful to both customers and the art itself.

Speaking of open-source games, there are some gems out there. Most projects are small, but a lot of them run great on a laptop and are truly inspiring.

To get back to Valve, though, they are definitely among the better companies (personally I'd put them in the "good" category). Like I said, they aren't perfect, but they have principles they never cross and I respect that. Especially in this day and age.

Still though, anyone can become corrupted with time, especially with management-change. So in a perfect world, we'd have an open-source games client and store. Games would be DRM-free and run on Linux. Oh and Microsoft would be ethically and morally sound. That hypothetical utopia quickly turned into a satirical comedy there at the end.

I still have to make up my mind about copy protection on steam. I would absolutely despise always-online stuff. Ideally I'd only support no-bullshit games. No third-party Launcher, account or DRM. I think Steam already tells you about stuff like that on their store pages...

I don't really see why Valve would make Steam online-only. You can play single-player games without an internet connection (I think you need to authenticate once and there may be some interval, I haven't been in that situation).

The always-online type of games I avoid. It's beyond Steam's authority as it's always one of those AAA game companies with their silly and pointless third-party launcher.

If it gets too bad, and you've paid for the game, you could argue that you are in your right to put on a certain hat, an eye-patch and go down to the bay where you definitely wouldn't download a car, if you catch my drift.

Another problem I have with steam (if I understand that right). I can only play one game at a time on one computer right? So I can't give the deck to my son, play a purchased game, while I'm even logged into my account on my PC right? Not even if he gets his own account and I family share him stuff. There is an entire library lock if one plays games. Right?

Yeah, you can't simultaneously play a game and let someone play a different one of your games through family sharing. However, since offline gaming works (for single-player games) you could just either pull the network plug on one machine or block steam client network access. However, the client might keep logs on the time and date of play sessions and upload it later. This is pure speculation, I have no idea if they enforces this. Then again, you could change the time and date. Unless the client have some sort of internal time-tracker, which I honestly doubt.

I kinda get why they have this restriction, though. At the same time I fully support the idea of lending your physical and digital games to your friend. When you own something, there's nothing wrong with lending it to someone.

In Valve's defence, people would definitely abuse this and since you can share it to everyone on the entire globe as long as they have internet, the situation becomes a bit different. It's pretty easy to abuse to the point where there would be a black market of game lending. In theory, some few people could buy games on Steam and just rent them and most people wouldn't need or care to buy games anymore and the business model would collapse and so would the game industry too.

In real life, you wouldn't ship your games to some random person in a different country and it wouldn't be free as well as instant. On the other hand, if you are on the same network or close-enough location-wise, I don't see a problem with letting friends play your games.

Then again, it's not entirely unreasonable for Valve to have a different perspective on this and they don't have to be bad guys for it.

It's a difficult topic, to be honest. And at least we have non-simultaneous game sharing. I doubt EA or Sony would let you do that. Speaking of Sony, who just recently decided to pull 1200 video titles that people purchased and basically said "sorry for the inconvenience, you never owned sh*t, though".

That is just stuff you don't have to worry about, if you actually owned something. I understand the concept of owning stuff and of borrowing stuff. But "buying" on steam is somehow less then both.

By definition, it is. But then again, most of my physical games don't work anymore because they need to be activated with online connection. I still paid for the games but I can't play them because of DRM. Remember that hat I mentioned? That's the type of situation I think you are completely justified in putting it on. And the games sometimes run better as a result. No matter where you buy your games you always have the safety in that hat, in case some company decides to be dishonest and immoral.

As a side-note, I paid for at least one streaming service for many years. I was never happy with the service, but I want to pay for the content I consume. But it has gotten so bad to the point where you get blocky 720p when you pay for 4k and even English subtitles are often not available (there's always this one friend who insists on subtitles, so then you'd be forced to have subtitles in our own language which is just horrible. Why is there geo--dependent licensing on subtitles and why can't you use your own subtitle files which are made by volunteers and thus they own the right to it...). Anyway, there's a long list of problems with streaming services. At one point, people just get fed up.

The bottom line point I want to make is that I haven't gotten that feeling with Steam, to be honest. Whether I'm biased or the situation is actually good on Steam, is up to you to decide. I see you perspective but I also put Steam in the "good" category, so there's that. I can tell you I'm not the person who become complacent, though. For instance, I don't care for any game I can't play on Linux. If it doesn't run on my OS of choice, it may as well not exist.

I wish more people would make such a conscious choice. There are more quality games than you'd have the time to play in a lifetime, so why waste time on being forced into bad OSs and online DRM-guarded games? Or rootkit anti-cheats? Or shady anti-cheats that doubles as data miners.


I didn't intend for this reply to become so long. But I'm already in too deep to crawl back up...