As an early season Simpsons lover, I enjoy D’ohrdle.

I don’t see the Deck as a critical mass device, and if Valve choses to make it one I will probably no longer be interested. The Deck is great because you can tinker to your heart’s content in an open system. That just isn’t going to fly if Valve decides they want to be the next Xbox or Switch.

Everyone is losing their shirt over ARM because Apple is producing some insanely expensive chips on it that have high performance. I’m not saying ARM doesn’t have some advantages, but I think that’s a long way out from going into something like the Deck where compatibility is everything. The switch being ARM has nothing at all to do with this conversation.

The whole point of the Steam Deck for me is playing my older games. Unless they get x86 translation working without a performance hit them I’d rather they stay on x86.

That’s a good point. I’ve never participated in that so it didn’t really factor into my opinion of them. In every way I’ve interacted with the company they have been excellent.

I like them because they make niche products that may not have mainstream appeal, but that their customers love (steam link, steam controller, valve index, steam deck). They have excellent customer support and always do more than they have to:

• My GF lost the power adapter to her steam link and asked how to buy a new one, they just sent her an entire replacement device since they were stopping production anyway
• One of my Index lighthouses died and I had bought it used from a guy since they didn’t sell them in my country yet. No questions, they sent me a new one
• When they were releasing Half Life Alex they just checked if you’d ever had an index connected to your PC and if so they gave you a copy. No asking for proof of purchase or redeeming codes that expire.

I could go on, but yeah to me they are pushing Linux forward, making hardware that excites me, have reasonable prices, and great service. So I like them.

You are technically correct, but Valve is a very “consumer first” company. This of course is no guarantee they’ll always be “good”, but Valve has earned and maintained my trust over the years and I trust them more than any other company I can think of. Far and away orders of magnitude more than Microsoft.

I think he’s referring to your draconian punishments. It doesn’t give you much high ground.

Very well said. As a fellow vegan I wish more of us took an approach like this. Too often I see the militant side focused on shaming and I don’t think that works. It raises people’s defences, gives the movement a bad name, and puts them in fight or flight mode.

I actually had a lot of fun in that game as a kid. It had the opposite effect though and made me never want to join the army. You die… a lot. Doesn’t work that way in real life.

The only downside to something like this would be electrical surges if you leave the drives plugged.

That touch pad does not appear to be in a usable area.

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I can’t see how they will be. We know the performance of the high end is not a large generational improvement and they can’t compete with what they’ve already launched. That means what’s left is to release… a 7800 that performs about the same as a 6800? Wow.

All they can do is price them aggressively so that they are more appealing than the 6000 generation, but I would be shocked if they do. It hasn’t been their MO recently.

Yup. Steam is my go-to because of easy game steaming, steam deck integration, etc. But I know what I’m sacrificing for that convenience. Luckily Valve is an incredibly customer focused company and I have a huge amount of (well deserved IMO) faith in. GOG however is definitely still the best way to own your games.

A few of my friends got the Autonomous ErgoChair and really like it. It’s not at high quality as a Steelcase or Herman Miller, but it’s a lot more affordable. I’d rather it than one of these gaming chairs.

4mil sounds like a pretty good deal. That’s just good business!

I wouldn’t have a problem with round robin if you could still manually choose an instance, had the ability to move your account, and the servers were vetted and in good standing.