That’s why incognito is good. You can have your normal logged in browser for whatever you need that for and still see the site without being logged in inside a separate browser. That way you’re not always logging back in afterwards when you need to be logged in.
Thanks for all the replies. With so many releases daily, it is hard to keep track of what is good. Harder when steam is telling you it thinks you want. I’d just as soon use incognito. Its not a big deal really. Audible does it too and its more infuriating there frankly.
No surprise here. The messaging was poor, there was little direction from Valve, and the boxes had an inexplicable Steam Machine tax that priced them out of the prebuilt market. I do think there’s a market for a prebuilt, small form factor gaming PC with a tailored front-end that mimics the console experience but it’d need to be priced at $500 or less.
I’m not aware of any steam machine tax. The (very) few steam machines that existed were priced around a hundred bucks lower than their Windows counterparts.
This initiative was doomed from the very start, because consoles cost $250 and equivalent steam machines started around $400. You can’t compete against custom hardware heavily subsidized by a billion-dollar corporation with an open platform and no subsidy.
Even if they got the hardware price and performance competitive with consoles, then you face a chicken/egg problem because there’s no critical mass of new games. So then you need to cajole developers and studios, and pay EA, Activision, etc, to port their crap over. And you need to get day/date releases too. It’s just a staggeringly difficult thing to do.
The Steam Machines/SteamOS were a hedge against Microsoft’s attempts to own all Windows game/app business by forcing it through the Windows Store. Since that failed and Steam’s been unaffected, there’s no reason for Valve to keep pursuing their backup plan.
I don’t know about “failed” as much as it’s just been a slow start. Sea of Thieves’ launch was a resounding success on Xbox/Win10 and the numbers on Play Anywhere for that title are “good” according to MS. Obviously, a lot of that is due to the $10 Game pass initiative, but maybe that’s all it takes to get people to switch? A $10 a month all-you-can-have subscription with first-run Xbox games on Windows.
That’s not what I meant. The original plan for the Windows Store was that it was the only way to get apps that use post-7 Windows features and then they’d use that to control availability, kill competitors, etc. That plan backfired and now the Windows Store is mostly just another storefront, albeit integrated into the OS. Of course Microsoft will probably go back to the plan if their store achieves a majority of the market, but that doesn’t seem likely in the foreseeable future.
Well a lot of my fear was from my prediction that MS would use the fact that all Xbone games were written as UWP apps to get those same games in the Windows store rather than Steam, because they’d be trivial to port over, leveraging their console marketshare to kill Steam on PC.
That prediction was right on target and made perfect sense, except for the fact that MS was and is too inept to execute on it.
I think even though MS failed, Valve cannot be caught resting on their laurels.
M$ have the money (see what I did there? clever huh?) to keep it the UWP trucking until it succeeds.
I don’t know, that feels a bit revisionist.
Your theory at the time was that nothing mattered except that UWP would save on porting costs. If people argued that the Windows store is crap that nobody wants to use, you’d say it didn’t matter. Nobody wants to lose the Windows 7 market? They’ll come around with time. Publishers would not want to give up the chance to sell games on Steam or their own stores? Irrelevant.
MS seems to have delivered on the only part you thought was important (cheap XBox → UWP ports), after a couple of early hickups. So claiming a moral victory on the prediction, and pinning this failure on just bad execution seems odd.
They didn’t promote it anywhere, including telling the devs/studios to do it. Changing that sort of thing requires outreach. They also didn’t incent or force cross-play and plays anywhere. They also had major quality problems early on with the windows store and specific games like Quantum Break, and they didn’t quickly address the problems and make gamers whole. The windows store was always a joke but then it was also seen as broken, and MS didn’t do anything to fight that.
Forcing Play Anywhere on third party is something they could have done if they had the dominant platform. They didn’t have that platform, so that kind of move seems mostly good for scaring away even the few third-party adopters they did get.
The same goes for the whole “telling devs/studios to do it” strategy in general. The whole point was that the cheap ports would somehow make this inevitable!
On the promotion side, they for example maintain their own UE4 fork with UWP support. Of course Epic wants nothing at all to do with that, so it’s never going to make it to make it to official UE4. That’s kind of the whole problem MS has. Basically no other actors in the industry want this to happen, so they’re not going to get any cooperation.
(Agreed on the quality problems, and that’s what I meant by “early hickups”. I seem to remember RotTR also having some kind of issues. But I haven’t heard any complaints lately even though there are clearly a lot of people using Windows 10 / Windows Store for playing first party Microsoft games).
They have tons of third-party adoption on Xbone, which is the whole point.
Yes, but all this time your theory has been that the ease of porting would be the thin edge of the wedge. They delivered on that part, and nobody cared.
That’s very different from “MS will not allow games to the XBox unless they are also published on the Windows Store”, or other forms of coercion. This was never a realistic option in the first place.
They totally could have offered incentives for that. But you’re right, the platform bit was the bulk of the leverage.
Valve buys Campo Santo :-O
Whelp!
No more Campo Santo games after Valley.
So that is how Valve will make single player games again, just buy studios.
I wonder what kind of hats Campo Santo staff will make? Or what kind of characters they’ll bring to DOTA 2?
I’m planning on getting in early on In The Valley Of God’s skin trading economy and gambling sites.