Some dinosaurs wants to preserve the old locked-down console experience, where you have exclusive games, controllers and digital stores. But its just worse for the customer in every way.
Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.
I've been able to maintain my digital library for almost 2 decades now, I've played those games on dozens of different hardware configuration without having to pay a single cent for it - compared to my other digital libraries, many of which (Wii, 3DS, PSP, etc) are completely lost to time.
That is a low bar indeed. Steam got its initial install base because Valve bought Counter-Strike and then made Steam a functional requirement to play it.
"Once upon a time, we enjoyed the right of first sale[0]..."
If you want to valorize a digital games retailers, I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.
Always online DRM schemes were inevitable and even with Steam its ultimately the developer's choice. There's plenty of Steam games where you can just run the .exe from the folder without even having Steam running. And let's never go back to the bad-old-days of needing to download the latest patch from the developer's website.
> CS2 skin trading is also a hive of illegal/underage gambling and scams.
This is not ideal, but back in the day it was RuneScape scams, etc. I'm not sure whether it's actually better to have kids who've been wholly sheltered from gambling until they're 21 then be suddenly allowed to gamble. Ideally, we wouldn't have gambling for adults either tbh, but maybe there's something to the idea of needing to develop in a world where you're exposed to that kinda thing and are more immune to it when older? Or maybe its the other way around. Also kinda rings hollow if we're marketing trading-card games to kids, which are also definitely gambling.
I love the idea of GOG, and I ADORE that they're making old games available (GOG peeps, if you're reading this, civ 2 please!), but if I were a PC gamer I'd buy through steam just for proton compatibility on linux. It's that good.
Sony buying them would be much larger problem.
What some games have is a particularly invasive anti-cheat that's not supported on Proton. But it's not targeting Steam Deck in particular, it's just a side-effect.
That's trivially verifiable.
For end user it makes no different whether it's a side effect or not.
Some anti cheat tools, such as "Easy Anti Cheat" are supported on Steam Deck, some are not supported yet. Perhaps some will never be supported. AFAIK these later categories are generally due to anti cheat hooking into low level windows functionality that Proton doesn't support. You could argue this is "blocking open software" but that would be a stretch since this behavior is generally better described as a lack of support rather than explicit blocking
None of it is due to game publishers including code that limits the hardware that windows runs on (blocking open hardware).
But it is some, not many, a usually widely critized exception. Linux and the steam deck specifically are not regularly specifaclly blocked - why would they do that? It just would limit their customer base and annoy actual customers. Tu put actual effort into earning less money would be crazy.
The games that do not work either still use incompatible cheat detection, like you said, so we are talking only some multiplayer games. And the incompatible rest is just a technical accident that Proton will probably fix with time.
edit: I'm reading somewhere else it's to stop cheat enabled controllers. Wouldn't want to play multiplayer games if someone has an unfair advantage like that.
> I'm reading somewhere else it's to stop cheat enabled controllers
No, it's always been about revenue.
I never understand why people take company's word and run with it. Are they actually fooled? Of course, the company won't be blunt and say to the consumer: honestly, we force you to buy from us because it make us more money.
This is really weird "solution". They likely worked backward. Spotted a market opportunity, then brainstormed plausible justifications.
This remind of Apple claiming its anti-repair policy is there to fight theft. Repeat that enough times and you start to believe it.
Maybe these are more relevant to most consumers than abstract complaints on Hackernews about “freedom.”
Have you considered that?
It seems like the parent is complaining about people taking business' explanations at face value when there's a likely different motive, not "freedom".
They are almost certainly coming at it from a revenue standpoint and then working the marketing spin in whatever way they think will resonate most their users. This is not a pro-consumer decision. It is monopolistic. "Curated" is a euphemism.
They aren't. The customers are the ones complaining about this. Microsoft is doing what its user base wants. People on XBox typically use a controller and do not want to face people on a KBM.
Sure, it's about revenue. That revenue is not from controller sales. Rather, it's about keeping it's customer-base happy, and the general sentiment from the community is that these tools aren't good for the overwhelming majority of players.
You might disagree with that opinion, but I can't take you seriously if you aren't aware of the general sentiment of the community and how Microsoft is doing what it's paying customers want.
And even if they wanted to block you, that wouldn't really work as you can either go around it (via the power of Linux) or just install Windows and make it work that way.