I hate to be a doomer but I'm worried too. All MS has to do is get big box stores to offer monthly payment plans, MS can fold in a year of free GamePass, and they'll lock in all the sales. MS could even do this themselves and ship directly from their MS Store, or offer a new $50/month GamePass sub which includes a leased handheld.
Why buy the Steam Deck when you need to pay attention to a compatibility metric, when the Xbox handheld will natively play everything including all anticheat games?
Modding is easier as they won't need to find Linux workarounds.
An awful lot of people don't seem to use the Steam Deck's trackpads, and many seem unaware of how to rebind basic key presses. They don't even learn steam shortcuts like steam+trackpad for the mouse cursor.
I'm eager to learn what Valve will do next. On the plus side Valve aren't publicly listed and don't have to answer to shareholders, so they can take a loss on steam decks where MS maybe can't subsidize these handheld costs.

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I played the demo of this years ago and came away impressed and it has occupied #3 or so on my Steam wishlist for a while now. I'll be getting it early.

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Just a reminder that it's easily possible, and free, to stream your PC with Steam Remote Play outside of your network, and if you have at least 10Mbps Upload from your ISP you should be able to stream reasonably well depending on your downstream network. If you set your mobo bios to enable wake on LAN, and then install the MoonBuddy DeckyLoader plugin to remotely wake your PC (or just instruct your PC to remain awake), you're never far away from your locally hosted games.

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Yep this coin won't get hacked ever.:whistle:

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My take on Epic's strategizing:
We need the Vampire Survivors, the Schedule 1s, the Balatros, and those flash-in-the-pan lightning-in-a-bottle indie games to come to EGS rather than Steam. We need EGS to be 'in the news' for once, rather than Steam again being the focal point of some hot new release that attracts millions of sales. How do we do that? By reducing sales cost to zero on the first $1M revenue.

Trouble is, these Vampire Survivor lightning games release on Steam because that's where the player base resides. Despite the application fee and the 30% take, it's still where you find the bulk of PC players.
I'm torn on this because while we do need competition in the PC Games Storefront scene, I don't really want a bunch of EGS exclusives that I need to sideload on my Deck or my PC. I much prefer the rich library environment of Steam games than the lacking library view of a non-Steam game shortcut.

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Just echoing the comments about certain communities existing solely on Discord. Many game mod communities have no other home than their Discord channel, and some of them release Discord-exclusive mods unavailable elsewhere. Other servers I follow are the only place of live discussion around that topic. I avoid Reddit since 2023, and the alternatives like Lemmy just became deadzones.
Given the amount of users I see nearly daily say things like "I'll pay money for beta access to this mod", "I will pay $100 to someone to help me solve/navigate this SteamOS issue", "who do I have to pay to get help around here", or the increasingly common "I just want to donate money to [alleviate weird American-sensibility that everything has to have a dollar cost]", it seems to me that many Discord users will be happy to pay $10/m for Discord access. That will freeze out users like me who are unwilling to pay sub fees for server access, or other users unhappy with shitty corporate policies designed to encourage LineGoUp revenue behaviors.
The enshittification train is battling towards us and there are no brakes.

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I don't recall this game and I thought I knew all the crappy doom clones from back then. This screenshot makes it look like the Build engine, but Duke 3D didn't come out til later.
Simpler times. Remember when Duke Nukem was 2D ONLY? (Whatever grandpa) ((Duke who??))

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It's a pity this isn't cheaper...

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Discord was a revelation when it launched. It's just a shame that it's neither open-source, or improved in any meaningful way since its launch. IPO may well kill it, tbh.

IPO will lead to enshittification which will lead to a less-bloated open source successor to slowly take the reins. However, Discord will still be the most common integrated chat app for a decade or so.

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My assumption is Arm laptops are going to become the norm for reasonably powerful and cheap school aged users. Therefore Epic wants to support Arm devices simply to retain access to children with a parent's credit card.

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