• Norah (pup/it/she)
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      710 months ago

      What do you mean by an escape hatch. Valve have been messing with hardware and Linux for way longer than the Steam Deck.

          • @msage@programming.dev
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            410 months ago

            It’s not a take, that was their actual reasoning behind it. Gabe knew Microsoft well, as a former employee.

          • @Isycius@lemmy.ca
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            410 months ago

            I would also wager that Valve was worried about Microsoft attempting to use “creative” methods to compete with Steam and chipping away at them, like hidden API. Its not like Valve knew that Microsoft’s attempt would continue to flop so hard for decades that they couldn’t even try that.

            • Norah (pup/it/she)
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              210 months ago

              Yeah no, it makes heaps of sense. It just initially sounded to me like the person was implying the Steam Deck is Valve’s escape hatch from running the Steam store. Which would be ridiculous, the two business sectors aren’t even close to the same order of magnitude.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        1010 months ago

        Sometime around Windows 8 Microsoft started making noises about closing the Windows ecosystem and making people buy software through their store. This would have shut things like Steam out, so Valve said “Okay, we’re going to make a Linux-based gaming platform, because we think gamers will follow us and not you. Also we’re going to create console-like gaming PCs called Steam Machines and make our own controller, because we think we can win against Xbox, too.” Microsoft didn’t lock down the platform, Steam Machines didn’t really go anywhere, but it laid a lot of the groundwork for the Steam Deck.

        • Norah (pup/it/she)
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          210 months ago

          Thank you for the history, I appreciate it. Hopefully Valve releases SteamOS properly soon, it could be the resurgence of the Steam Machine!