The Official Steam Deck Thread

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

mutantsushi said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Yea they are probably losing money on this but I think their goal is to push people towards Steam OS which why they are putting so much effort into the OS instead of using Windows. If they can get people to use Steam OS instead of Windows, then they would have full control like consoles do. But if not, then they will still make money off of people buying games on Steam and carve out a new segment in PC gaming. But that's just my theory anyway.

Hypothetically they could try to lock it down like consoles (which themselves have been cracked), but it seems pretty clear they are NOT aiming for that, instead emphasizing it is open  like PC, able to run any OS or store. I see people talk of installing Windows, but that shouldn't be necessary for Epic or anybody else to release store that runs on their Linux distro and is optimized for the format. If somebody else offers "clone" product, it will likely be under same open terms even if default store installation is different (e.g. Sony-Epic, MS) since the format is being established around PC gaming expecations. And honestly, Steam could lose quite a bit of market share in PC gaming space and still be very dominant and profitable, so growing the pool with new format that will be heavily associated with them probably doesn't carry much  downside risk.

EDIT: The CPU Frequency scaling and scheduling work might even be portable to Sony's OS even though it isn't Linux per se, and wouldn't be using D3D. That could be a nice future performance patch for the OS.

Yea I am not saying they will lock it down to console level but they are trying to persuade people to use Steam OS and Linux. I don't think they will ever ban or prevent Windows from working but I think they do want to try and get people on board with Steam OS. And the main reason is having such a integration at a both OS level and Store level is a huge benefit to them. Especially as their store would be the forefront and be pre-installed instead of having new comers go out and install it. If successful, they would no longer need to worry about what Microsoft's plans are and instead, can do their own vision.