Valve Releases Steam Link Beta for Vision Pro, But VR Games Aren’t Supported Yet

Of course, I remember paying for HL2 in store and being among those annoyed that we were forced to use Steam. Their behaviour since then has been obviously about that revenue, just look at the MTX in their first party games and the state of Steam Marketplace to see their priorities.

My issue is more with how they've shaped the nature of game distribution on PC, and so news that they are spreading to other platforms rather than opening up the PC gaming one incenses that I guess.

The point is that the "something else" could be something that isn't an entire ecosystem, where how you use and interact with the product you buy depends on where you bought it from – totally bonkers for PC.

I am agnostic, I have games from multiple different sources but they will never play as nice with each other than they could have if we had a PC gaming market where Valve didn't make the terms.

Even the Steam Deck undercut the existing market using their dominant position and Linux is just Valve ensuring that its ecosystem is entrenched there.

Some of what Valve does is good, it's just a shame almost all of it is tied up in Steam in one way or another.

I don't care about paying for licences, but as I already said I buy games from everywhere, on PC that's Steam, GoG, Xbox, Battlenet, EA, Epic, Itch, Meta, etc. etc. My issue is with the expectation that users access all of their games from within a specific store (launcher), and have an expectation that the shop itself should be the one to provide features, a situation uniquely and definitively created by Valve.

Part of it is a principled dislike of the practices and the market manipulation that comes from ecosystem lock-in, but a lot of it is practical. Many of its features only work by adding games from elsewhere to Steam, and even then others (like workshop and achievements etc.) do not, so they sit awkwardly as second-class citizens in the launcher (with an awkward 5 step process for just adding boxart).

I choose to use a library-agnostic launcher, but I need to use Steam if I want to use SteamInput, or Steam Link (fortunately I have solutions for both of these so I don't have to, not always the case). Annoyingly I have to use SteamVR with my PSVR2, and like all things Steam it's difficult to just launch my games from elsewhere without it trying to wrest control.

You're right, there aren't a great deal of problems for those who just don't think about any of this and simply use Steam for everything, regardless of whether it's cheaper or even free elsewhere, but this is simply not a sign of a free and healthy market.

The issue is that you seem to think it's either Valve's shopfront launcher or someone else's, when I'm talking about an actual separation of storefronts and launchers, as used to be commonplace before Steam became the monolith. This is what I mean, their approach is so ingrained that it's hard for people to imagine things working differently.

The "box art" thing is not a specific need, it's just an example of one way that non-Steam games feel less premium in people's libraries, and discourages people from buying elsewhere in the first place. It's all optics and marketing (like how I have to disable the ad pop-up with every Steam install), whereas even third-party launchers with one-person development teams have auto-box art, it's a very Apple approach to ecosystems of making outside stuff feel worse.

Look at the recent (re)release of GOG's Resident Evil trilogy on Steam, it's far and away a worse version and has DRM added to boot, because Capcom know that users will buy it on Steam anyway because of inertia – they simply won't entertain the idea.

It's easy to say that none of this is Valve's fault, these are choices of other developers, but they're literally encouraged to behave this way because of the system that Valve has built.

It's a DRM provider that has been obsessed with ecosystem lock-in for decades, with plenty of shady and predatory practices throughout the years to boot (being at the forefront of the types of microtransactions many hate).

As self-serving as he is Gabe has a lot of values that align (or seem to) with the general PC gaming market, but this is where the double-edged sword of being a private company comes in, they already skirt the line in a few places and who is to say that the line of succession when he is gone won't completely sell out their 80% marketshare or whatever it is.

The state of PC gaming distribution today – one where people are often choosing less because of ecosystems even on an open platform – may suit you and others but I very much would take the gamble of what could have been had we taken another path.