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TulliusCicerotoday at 6:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing.

If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not PSN or Xbox.


Replies

PaulHouletoday at 6:44 PM

I don't know if I care about the features, what I do care about is the games and a lean-back experience which is not sweaty. I play games to escape the drudgery of software development and the last thing I want to do is mess with an .INI file.

I love the Steam Deck because it feels like a consumer electronics device: it has the reliability of Linux but not the sweat. The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that works 100% perfectly with Airpods, for instance, including Apple devices.

I was at Best Buy the other day and saw an ASUS device that looked pretty cool until I picked it up and saw a Windows desktop with fonts not scaled appropriately for the size of the device. Like, wazzup? Steam Big Picture turns my big Windows machine at home into a game console and does the same for my Mac Mini. How is it you can have the back of frickin' Microsoft and not be able to do the same?

Not to say that Steam isn't packed with features that are valuable to many gamers, but just having a great selection of games that "just work" and knowing I can enjoy my investment on the devices I have now and devices I get in the future is worth a lot.

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paradox460today at 8:23 PM

Xbox used to have remote play together, via mixer. You could allow any viewer to play along side you, from the browser.

Microsoft killed it