The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS.

It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.

And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.

I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.

>So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.

I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.

But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.

>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.

Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.

Breaking the seal and demonstrating the capabilities, and getting it into the hands of consumers set the conditions for the Steam Deck's success. The Steam Deck exists because the Steam Machine existed, and it's in this context that the Steam Machine succeeded. You don't need overnight instant success for the program itself to succeed.

Dark souls exists because Demons Soul existed. But if you ask Sony or even FromSoft, they'd never say Demons Soul was a success. It just didn't bomb so dosasteroisly as to prematurely cancel an entire sub-genre.

You can have disappointments and even failures while Also admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was all I was saying.