It seems largely a move to make accounting easier: before they had to offer a big bag of money for exclusivity, and they had to work out how big the bag had to be, and developers had to work out if the bag was big enough to offset the lost sales. They already established that that approach wasn't working. This is a much simpler first bite of the cherry to exclude Steam, GOG & Microsoft. Whatever sales a game can get in the first six months drive people to bother with the Epic Store, and publishers get a bigger share of the revenue.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI still don't see Valve funding any work to get Soft-Denchi, DMM Game Launcher, or Buddy Launcher to work in Wine (not Proton, because these games aren't sold on Steam), but I would be very happy to be proven wrong. DRM is such a huge blocker for visual novels, even beyond the codec issue.

Having things fixed in upstream Wine is Valve's favoured outcome. They don't want to have to maintain a wildly divergent code base all on their own. That's why they give money to CodeWeavers. DXVK is the exception: it was never going to be included with Wine, and performed way better than wined3d, so Valve brought it in-house.

Japanese non-Steam visual novels aren't going to be a priority compared to other low-hanging fruit, sure, but if the unimplemented-in-Wine functions that those games use are holding people on Windows - especially if they're also used by other software - then Valve are going to be perfectly comfortable giving a bag of money to CodeWeavers or Collabora and saying "make this work, please."

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAnd on that note, while I appreciate Valve's work on Proton and the Wine ecosystem, I know the work they're funding isn't going to help me out with the games I most play—visual novels. Most Japanese language visual novels aren't published on Steam, so Valve doesn't have a reason to care about them.

That's not really true.

Valve aren't using Linux to make more money. The vast, vast majority of their money comes from customers that use Windows. Valve are using Linux as a strategy to ensure the survival of Steam against Microsoft misbehaviour: they need their customers to be able to be Steam users that don't use Windows rather than Windows users that don't use Steam should Microsoft make Steam-on-Windows non-viable in the future. Anything that keeps their customers locked to Windows, including but not limited to games that aren't on Steam, is an obstacle to that plan.

Valve can't rely on hardware manufacturers or game developers to make it happen - the Steam Machines demonstrated that - so they're just brute-forcing it themselves.

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"People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior."
-- Gabe Newell, 2012.

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2880x1920 resolution at 276 pixels per inch
16:10 aspect ratio

That isn't 16:10, that's 3:2.

Looks like a fun machine, though, and it's always good to see hardware with Linux pre-installed.

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It's a shame that it took five years from you asking about it before it happened, but good on Ethan Lee (and likely good on Steam Deck) for making it happen.

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Quoting: constAll these games replicating the PS1 era wipeouts are sadly not for me.
Somehow, wipeout hd/fury for PS3 has become my wipeout of choice. Is any of the available clones close to that gameplay feel?

I wasn't that good at Wipeout on the PS3, and I also wasn't that good at BallisticNG [External Link], but they were both fun. The nitty-gritty of the feel with expert play, I couldn't tell you about.

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Quoting: Linux_RocksAfter thinking about it, the price is a bit steep for refurbs. If they were even $20 USD cheaper it'd make it a better looking deal.

"Two ninety-nine."

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Would you pick up a refurbished Steam Deck?

The 64 & 512 GB are still unavailable in the UK, so a refurb unit might be the only official way.

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Quoting: DoctorJunglistFor the survey to appear on Steam Deck, do you need to go into desktop mode for that to happen, or can you also get it while in gaming mode?

You get it in gaming mode. There's a notification that pops up, but you need to go into the notifications to actually trigger the sending of data, since they need to ask permission.

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