Don't sugarcoat it. Valve has to make sure this is advertised as a PC to keep the licensing good on the games you've bought and that they are allowed to sell. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have closed ecosystems with their consoles. Well, Microsoft seems to be throwing in the towel on consoles.
The Blu-Ray drive is basically no added cost since the games were already distributed on optical disks, it’s like how the PS2 was one of the most popular DVD players. The problem with the Xbone was that, at least judging on their marketing at the time, Microsoft was far more focused on broadening the scope of the device beyond games while Sony stayed focused on gaming. That’s why I bought a PS4 despite previously using an Xbox 360.
Xbox One/PS4 is when both sides standardized on BluRay.
When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.
PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.
Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.
The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.
> it’s like how the PS2 was one of the most popular DVD players
I worked for a Sony dealer when the PS2 launched, and they wouldn't give us one :-/
What I thought at the time was insane was that they were still selling a 200-disc carousel CD changer, and DVD version of the same thing (same box, different shade of silver grey, different drive mechanism, two chips different on the PCB) - but they had no plans to sell a 200-disc carousel PS2.
Imagine if you could have had all your movies, audio CDs, PSX, and shiny new PS2 games in one big box, tucked away out of sight, with your spiffy new 576p projector and 5.1 speakers hooked up to it!
Microsoft lost the console wars. Their new generation (Series S & X) sold almost 1/4 of what PS5 did because they basically don't have any exclusive game that you can only play in their hardware. Microsoft invested heavily in their Gamepass subscription (that has more than 35 million users) and they believe that the future is on PC. The newest xbox hardware, a handheld made by Asus, is a PC running windows. The next generation of xbox hardware that will compete with the PS6 will also very likely be a PC. The xbox console is dead.
Back in the 1980s you got your Mom to buy you a game console and you would have needed a logical naming scheme so she would know an PS 3 was better than a PS 2.
XBOX cultivates a "gamer" who is heavily invested in the identity and is well educated in the various versions of XBOX and how the naming scheme works and since they are an adult buying the console for themselves they don't need to explain it to outsiders.
sure i guess if you only want money from adults born in the 80s maybe it seems like an okay idea. abandon the market of humans born after the year 2000, should be fine.
Even before they muddied things with reusing the S and X names for completely different things, "Xbox One" was bad enough
I worked at a pawn shop when that console generation kicked off. One day a guy called in and asked if he could bring in his Xbox One. "Of course," I told him, until I had to turn him away because it was an original Xbox.
I feel like everyone lost the "console wars". Sony is not doing much better considering almost all of their former exclusives are on steam these days. Those next-gen Xboxes will have access to those sony games at discount pricing.
> Sony is not doing much better considering almost all of their former exclusives are on steam these days.
I still can't wrap my head around why they decided to do this considering they were in a pretty killer position coming out of the PS4 generation. I mean, it's probably a positive for consumers to have more options for platforms, so I won't exactly complain. But I do want PlayStation to stick around as a strong competitor because fierce competition is best for consumers in the long-term.
At first it seemed like they were just porting the previous game in a series when the sequel came out exclusively on PS5, as a way to get people into the series and then making them buy their console to play the next game. But now it seems like there's barely any wait between when one of Sony's exclusives comes to PS5 and the PC launch afterwards. If Sony is confused as to why the PS5 isn't selling up to expectations, the answer to that seems pretty obvious to me.
In theory you can run all your GamesPass games on a Steam Machine in the same way you can run arbitrary games through Proton, which is what Steam is doing.
What a wild world it would be, if Microsoft release a GamesPass client for linux so it can try and get a slice of all this new linux gaming happening on SteamOS.
In theory you can, in practice Game Pass games are distributed in such a way only Windows can run them. You can use Game Pass Streaming which is fine when at home, and entirely useless when on a train using a Steam Deck.
The ideal would be MS just selling Game Pass subscriptions via Steam but I expect we'll see that happen shortly after hell freezes over.
Also they state that the console will remain the centerpiece, they want to make Xbox a "platform" to reuse their own term. It becomes an ecosystem rather than a hardware product. They idea is that as long as you have a gamepass, you can play on whatever you want - except macOS and Linux...
