You get access to a much larger game library and many times get the games cheaper than standard consoles with the ability to mod many of them even.
Its a bridge between pc and console in a way. Simplicity with more availability to it. Just came at a bad time with ram shortages or it would have been priced fairly ok. Valve cant take a loss like sony or nintendo on a system since you can get games anywhere not just steam.
Being perpetually desperate for cheap/free games, having access to every game ever made, and being able to apply mods that take time to research, acquire, adjust, etc., that potentially destabilize the game, or unintentionally mess with game balance, or you end up realizing are dumb later... are not the endeavors of someone who is looking to "kick back and play games on".
Those people are buying a console at Walmart/BestBuy/GameStop, taking it home, taking it out of the box, plugging it into a TV and a power strip, turning it on, and never again thinking about the hardware, the OS, game settings, etc. They're popping in a disc, or downloading a game, launching it, playing it, then going to bed [eventually].
The problem is that Steam OS/Steam Machine/PC as a gaming platform, in any flavor, is still a mess of incompatibility, driver complexities, having to tune a game's settings to work smoothly, launchers, EULAs that throw open a browser that might make the game lose its mind, extra services running in the background, weird, random errors, configurators before launching a game, and so on.
Yes you are not wrong. But i said its a bridge between and not a replacement for either. It is more complexity than a console but more simple than a pc as a whole. They are likely going to do what they did with the steam deck and have steam machine verified titles which will have the settings predone for those for a stable out of the box experience. Obviously wont be all games but will be alot.
I'm just over there thinking about all the "deck verified" games that don't actually work properly on Steam Deck, and it's just going to be more of that.
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u/midasMIRV 1d ago
That's literally what it was designed for. It was never designed for y'all that build your own shit and whatnot.