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Chazore said:
That's the thing though, the OS is Steam, the OS is the store, it is your library. Apple phones operate strictly within Apple's own ecosystem, but Valve allow you to choose with their OS, but either way, their Deck and other portable devices act as a stepping stone for their OS, and other portable systems are now allowing to support it and vice versa with Valve. You cannot quantify this with a sales argument. I not not arguing sales, that matters so very little with the current spectrum being the general ecosystem of an entire brand. This is why MS is so focused more on it's own ecosystem than it is a tiny...little...plastic...box. You do realise Nintendo is already branching out to mobile, yes?. You do acknowledge they themselves see that they cannot forever be locked behind a tiny little plastic trinket for all of time, yes?. The sales of a small box at the end of the day will matter little, it is what you offer in terms of software and features as well as your general library of offerings that will matter to the people. Look at streaming for instance, have you noticed how subs have been dropping like flies ever since multiple companies decided to stop account sharing?. Then of course there are the companies vying for each IP they can lock away within their little service, but it all shows up to the public as a fragmented experience at the end of the day, and thus people wish for a more unified experience, an "ecosystem" if you will, that allows them access to everything. This is what people want today, what the normies want, what I want. What most people want is to have access to a vast library with features that provide a streamline and ease of use experience. You don't get that by locking yourself away to a single plastic box nor can you maintain that bubble forever either. Nintendo will have to follow the others one way or another, because mankind wants this. We want to evolve and we need to move beyond the tiny plastic little box idea, that some cling onto for nostalgic reasons (I love my gameboys a lot, but those are devices that are barely even sold by the companies of today, and second hand sellers take us for rich fools, so there's that little predicament when you look at the tiny little plastic boxes called consoles). Either way, at the end of the day, the ecosystem is here and now, and it matters more to how far it can reach and what it can possibly offer. The boxes are the shells to which the ecosystem can step onto and provide service. Again, you cannot quantify an ecosystem in sales, I just want to make this point very, very clear to you, because you seem to have an unmoving thought process regarding "system sales" of shell hardware, when talking about the Deck, and I already told you it's sales matter little, it is the OS that matters more, and that is what counts as the "biggest win". The fact you seek to quantify it is what baffles me (because I do not want to be that character, but I also don't want to assume you are letting you "fan" side take over your judgement of being able to look at the bigger picture). |
I am not talking about the Steam OS. The post I quoted did not specify the software, it specified the device. I'm talking about apples, you're talking oranges.
Hardware sales actually do matter. More people play on Switch or PS5 than on Steam Deck by an order of magnitude.
And people have been claiming for the last 20 years that the days of console hardware are numbered, yet here we are in 2025 and systems like the Switch and PS5 are doing great.
This is going way off topic at this point though, so I'll redirect to the subject of the thread, Xbox's stumbles this gen.
