Valve is Watching - Steam Deck’s HUGE Update

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There are two absolutely tremendous new features in the new update to the Steam Deck. They’re both somewhat niche but I belong to both of these niches so I’m incredibly excited about both of these. We’re also going to dig into the details about a Steamy lawsuit and talk about some really huge milestones for Steam and Steam Deck, the launch of the MSI Claw, not to mention why Valve is not done with the Steam Deck. I also want to talk about my game of the week but that’ll have to wait until the end of the video. Anyway, about this update. The first big update is Steam Families. This is a huge update to Steam Family Sharing and makes it better than it’s ever been and arguably the best family sharing on any platform. You can have up to 6 members in your family, you get parental controls that allow you to set limits and schedules, and the ability to monitor playtime on your phone. Kids can also do purchase requests which you will see on your computer or on your phone as well. But best of all is that when a family member is playing a borrowed game, it no longer locks your entire library. Previously, if my son was playing Hades, and I wanted to play Balatro (and both were in my library), I would have to go offline so that we could both play at the same time. As a result, most of my playtime ended up being offline. But now multiple members can be playing games in your library, and all of you can be online, so long as two people aren’t playing the same game. Or more specifically, the same copy of the same game. Let’s say 2 out of the 6 family members own Huntdown, which is currently on sale for $4. Well any 2 of your 6 family members could play Huntdown and still play online since the family owns 2 copies. Honestly, this is a big quality of life improvement for my family and I suspect many Steam Deck owners are parents and will benefit from a feature like this as well. The next big update is for gyro. Gyro has slowly but surely been taking over my timeline and it seems like more and more people are learning that it’s a great addition to your FPS repertoire. Well the March 18th client beta also added some new features to gyro including the ability to choose from a combination of buttons to enable gyro. So now enable gyro can be mapped to pressing both analog sticks in, or to pressing L1 and R1 at the same time, or to pressing two face buttons. For me, I’m fine with just using stick touch as my gyro enable button but this may be better for people that are still getting used to gyro aiming. They also added a default bind for the new Recenter or Reset Horizon action. So if you’re using flick stick and click the right stick in twice, it will recenter the camera for you. Nifty. You know, funny enough Tim Sweeney seemed to credit himself for Valve’s new family sharing functionality. That’s reason enough for me to talk about today’s next topic. You mad bro? I love it when game companies get sassy. As you know, Valve is notoriously reserved with their communications so whenever there’s a chance to get a peek at their internal emails, you’re guaranteed to find something juicy and that’s exactly what happened last week when some new documents were made public in the ongoing Valve vs Wolfire antitrust lawsuit. There are some really fun tidbits in here but ultimately it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be enough for Wolfire to win their suit against the steamy goliath, but we will get into all of that. A lot of the following detail comes courtesy of the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. The staff at GameDiscoverCo usually surface some really intriguing insights about game discoverability by mining the data that is available from Steam but this is a little bit different. Now that the Wolfire vs Valve suit has entered discovery, some redacted documents have been made public and this time, the staff pored over these docs to find some juicy details. Now if you’re unfamiliar with Wolfire vs Valve, Wolfire (a small game developer) is asserting that Valve is taking away freedoms from consumers, game developers, and competing stores, by essentially price fixing and ensuring that developers cannot price games for lower on a non-steam store than they can on Steam. This is actually one of the biggest things that comes up whenever I talk about Epic Game Store and Steam. Like - if I mention that Epic only charges a 12% fee whereas Steam charges 30%, many people in the comments are going to ask why don’t game devs pass on that savings to the consumer and launch their game for much cheaper on the Epic Games Store? Well - this lawsuit seems to allege that those game developers simply don’t have that option. They are not able to due to an unwritten rule, commonly known as a Platform Most-Favored Nation clause, that is enforced by Valve. Again, this clause would make it so that developers couldn’t price their games cheaper on Epic Games Store without threat of being delisted from Steam. So that’s the lawsuit in a nutshell but the most notable storyline, of course, is Tim Sweeney’s crusade against the industry-standard 30% fee that is levied by digital stores, like Steam. There is an email from Gabe Newell to Tim Sweeney where Gabe asks “Anything we doing to annoy you?” Well it turns out earlier that day, Tim Sweeney tweeted this: “Not sure why Steam is still taking 30% of gross. MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around [2 tenths of a penny per GB]”. In that initial email to Tim, Gabe also said “we’re guessing Sean Jenkin’s public dumbness might be part of it”. Sean Jenkin was a software engineer at Valve that had just finished posting something on the Steam forums saying they would deny key requests that weren’t worth it to Valve or Steam. He said: “at some point we start deciding that the value you’re bringing to Steam isn’t worth the cost to us. For example, say you’ve sold a few thousand copies on Steam but have requested / activated 500K keys, then we are going to take a deeper look at your games, your sales, your costs, etc.” In any case, Tim Sweeny said he hadn’t heard of Jenkin but that “Generally, the economics of these 30% platform fees are no longer justifiable. There was a good case for them in the early days, but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or [user acquisition] value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee. If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made.” Tim closes the email by saying he believes “the question of why distribution still takes 30%, on the open PC platform on the open Internet, is a healthy topic for public discourse.” Over a year later, when it’s revealed that Steam would reduce its 30% cut but only for top earners, Tim Sweeney is even more upset saying “Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people… Why not give ALL developers a better deal?” From there, it looks like Tim’s passion was funny enough to COO of Valve, Scott Lynch, because Scott replied internally to Gabe and Erik Johnson with a simple “you mad bro?” This is all pretty funny and it doesn’t seem like there’s much meat on the bones of this lawsuit so I don’t expect Wolfire to win but I will say one thing - I do wish that Valve would reduce their cut for smaller developers. The Apple App Store now takes a reduced commission of 15% for developers that earn less than $1 million in revenue and that seems like it would be a step in the right direction for Steam. What do you think? Is there anything you’d like to see Valve do better here? A public, general-use SteamOS image is finally here. Well sort of. I’ve talked about Bazzite a few times on this channel but Bazzite just celebrated their 2.4.0 release and it’s a big one. Notably, SteamDeckHQ and GamingOnLinux have reported that this release fixes some of the recent suspend/resume issues that were encountered on the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. And to be honest, I hadn’t tried Bazzite since I first saw Hi Tech Lo Life cover it on his channel a few months ago. I liked what I saw but it was still too early for it to be my daily driver. Now after installing it again and seeing how it’s progressed for the Lenovo Legion Go specifically, I’m pretty excited to give this a go for a few weeks and to see if it changes my habits. I followed a guide that I’ll leave in the description but the install was pretty easy. I can now dual boot between this and Windows and it’s using btrfs so it should make it easy to switch between the two systems but I mostly want to stick to Bazzite since I prefer the no-fuss interface and I mostly stick to Steam games anyway. My impression after the first couple hours are good so far. Suspend/resume works like a champ, onboard gyro works better than it does on Windows, and TDP controls and performance overlay seem to work fine. Sometimes the screen would go black when I would first launch a game and I had to suspend, then resume, to get the screen back. That was really annoying but can hopefully be addressed in later patches. This does feel like it goes to show that making a public general use SteamOS is just currently not high on Valve’s list of priorities. Ever since the Steam Deck was released, they have committed to making SteamOS more available to other handhelds and eventually making a general use version of the operating system but they haven’t done so yet. Thankfully the community was able to step in and do what Valve didn’t. Let me know if you’ve already given this a shot or if you plan to. Now would be a good time to point out that there is another gaming focused distro on the horizon as well. This one is called Playtron and it’s a startup that includes the developer of Box86 as well as some devs from ChimeraOS. Here’s the elevator pitch from the feature over on The Verge: “What if there were an Android of gaming, an OS you could install on any capable hardware to get a controller-friendly PC experience? Imagine an “Epic Deck” that could actually play Fortnite, a “5G Deck” for cellular carriers, or maybe a “PlayStation Deck” for Sony’s growing PC ambitions.” The CEO of Playtron says “If Valve can do this with Steam, we can do this with anything” and I tend to agree. This could be a humongous play in the scene and I could definitely see Sony or Epic eventually buying into something like this. Last week, the Steam Spring sale went live and Valve did something special for the Steam Deck since it’s been roughly 2 years since its launch. They published the top 100 games played on Steam Deck. Much of the top 20 to 40 games should be recognizable since we’ve seen them in the monthly most played games lists. Those are games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Vampire Survivors, Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, PalWorld, and Cyberpunk 2077. But there were other games in the top 100 that I found interesting. The first one that stuck out to me was Rocket League at the #100 spot. Rocket League is honestly a perfect Steam Deck game but it’s been delisted from Steam since before the Steam Deck released so it’s interesting to see that so many Steam Deck owners happen to own this title in their library. The next two games that I found fascinating were Apex Legends, and especially Counter-Strike 2. It’s great that these sort of games are getting so much play on a handheld and I’d love to know which control method the majority of people are using? How many folks are using gyro - I’d love to know. The last game I found interesting here is Street Fighter 6. SF6 is a great fighting game and certainly there must be a lot of people playing it right now given how awesome the recent Red Bull Kumite event was. Still though, I didn’t necessarily expect it’d be one of the top 100 played games on Deck so that’s great. Oh I should also note that Balatro has already made it into this list at spot #27. I’ve been singing Balatro’s praises and the dev team recently announced that they passed 1 million units sold so definitely check this game out if you have yet to do so. Steam itself recently broke its own record yet again. Steam has now broken its own record for number of players online 3 times in just 3 weeks. Early in March it crossed 34 million players online, then the next week 35, and now this past week it surpassed 36 million players online. This level of growth just as console sales are starting to stall is pretty unfathomable. This also seems to put into context the Hardware Survey where it looks like the Steam Deck is not growing as fast as it used to and even lost .2 percentage points in the last month if you go by the line item for the Steam Deck’s APU. Yeah that .2 percent doesn’t look so bad, when you compare it to a .2 percentage growth in overall players on Steam (well if you go by concurrent online players). So Steam got bigger but so did the Steam Deck too. GamingOnLinux.com has been tracking Steam Deck performance and this chart shows that the Steam Deck itself has been a consistent top seller since its release but it has been doing even better ever since the OLED was released. For just 2024, it has been in the top 5 sellers on Steam 7 out of 10 times. Even those 3 other times it was 6th, 6th, and 8th so it continues to sell well. One fun discussion I saw in the comments of that post was the question of how well do you think a Steam Deck 2 could sell if Valve could manage a worldwide and retail release for it. That inspired me to make this poll on my community page where it seems most people are voting that Valve would sell 5-10 million units. What do you think? In other news, the first impressions for MSI Claw are available now and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty disappointed. The titles and thumbnails of various YouTube reviews seem to tell the story thus far: Retro Game Corps was both excited and disappointed (so far), Jason Whitmore expected more, CJKnowsTech was heartbroken, and ETA Prime said the new MSI Claw is actually a fast gaming pc… when you add a powerful egpu. It’s really unfortunate but it does seem it was an uphill battle with these intel APUs. While there’s hope that some software updates will improve the experience, the gap between this and handhelds with the Z1 Extreme just seems too big to cover. Did you buy an MSI Claw? What has your experience been like? Alright there are a few big game updates. First of all, it is reported that the Final Fantasy 16 port to PC is in the late stages of optimization. Unfortunately we don’t know how well this will run on PC handhelds. Not to mention, it’ll probably come to Epic Games Store first so we’ll likely have to wait a while for this to come to Steam. Enshrouded has announced that support for the Steam Deck is on the roadmap. Enshrouded is a hugely popular survival game that would likely be a good fit for the Steam Deck if they can get it running nicely. According to Liam from GamingOnLinux, the current state of the game on Deck is terrible; and that was him being kind so this sort of support for the handheld would certainly be a welcome addition. Speaking of roadmaps, we also learned about the post-launch roadmap for Prince of Persia The Lost Crown. No announcement for a Steam release yet but they’re adding a Speedrun mode and Permadeath mode this month as well as a Boss Rush in the next coming months. There are new combat, platforming, and puzzle trials coming in the summer and finally some new story DLC later this year. I suspect that would be the earliest that we would know about a Steam release date. Likewise, Sea of Stars celebrated 5 million units sold and the dev team let us know that they are launching a 3 player couch co-op mode which is sure to delight fans of Secret of Mana. Personally, this seems like a fun way to play this game with my two kids and it might be funny to see if we all hit our cues for the timed hits mechanics. Sea of Thieves was also updated, in this case to add Easy Anti Cheat, but don’t worry - it’s still Steam Deck compatible. Microsoft has consistently shown love to the Steam Deck and thankfully they continue to do so with this update to their live service hit. And now let me tell you about my game of the week. I want to do a segment like this every week where I tell you about a game that was released recently that I’m enjoying on the Steam Deck. This week it’s Berserk Boy. Berserk Boy is normally $20 but you may still be able to get it for 10% off. This is an action platformer that takes inspiration from Mega Man ZX and has a soundtrack composed by Tee Lopes who worked on Sonic Mania, Shredder’s Revenge, and Penny’s Big Breakaway. There’s a focus on close quarters combat, and chaining combos which means that even though the difficulty is modest, there’s always reason to charge back in and optimize your route. There are also hostages to rescue and bonus badges to gain, so there’s plenty of replayability factor. I do think it’s a little too easy and the forms could have provided even more variety to the movement and combat mechanics. As it is, it does still feel a little one dimensional despite the replayability. But it’s entirely my kind of jam and it’s the only game that’s been able to pull me away, even briefly, from Balatro, so there’s that. Deck Gang, it’s been a fun week for the Steam Deck and PC handhelds. Let me know what you think about the news stories like the Wolfire Lawsuit or Bazzite hitting their 2.4 release. And don’t forget to check out the JSAUX RG dock using my links in the description. I hope you’re all having a wonderful week. Deck Gang out. Goodbye!
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Channel: Fan The Deck
Views: 78,873
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: PC Gaming, Steam Deck, Steam
Id: Q5IGOf94ups
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)
Published: Tue Mar 19 2024
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