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 en
d 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 al
l 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 getti
ng 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 communicatio
ns 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 GameD
iscoverCo 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 taki
ng 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 launc
h 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 game
s, 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 Ste
am,
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
spe
cial 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 th
at 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 hab
its. 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 an
d 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 eventu
ally 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 game
s 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
m
ade 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 o
f 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 thi
nk 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 fa
r), 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 r
unning 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, platf
orming, 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
tim
ed 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. Bers
erk 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
stori
es 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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