It may or may not actually pan out, especially since there’s a good chance that Valve will outlive Gabe Newell. And that’s why it’s really good get your games on GOG and Itch before resorting to Steam. But sometimes Steam’s the only game in town, and I’m wishing for the best for my library.

If Steam ever shuts down, an old Reddit post had info about a customer experience message chain where a Valve representive said they had contingency plans if that ever happens.

If there’s third-party DRM on top of the regular Steamworks DRM, the game you bought has much worse odds of actually working offline if Valve goes out of business or the devs abandon it. That’s why I try to avoid Denuvo.

That being said, I’ve played Denuvo games on my system and any performance drops have been minimal at best. YMMV on that, but I’m a mid-end gamer at best. A certain athetic woman will provide alternative access to the game if you really want to skip Denuvo, but it should be fine.

But Denuvo is just silly and pointless. It sets out to be an anti-piracy measure, but it’s not actually preventing games from being cracked at all. Game studios should prevent piracy by making a high-quality, consumer-friendly product. I would never pirate a GOG game, but I can’t say the same for Ubisoft.

I’m hoping the new Deck prices are due to a small production run, and that the Steam Machine will have economies of scale to bring the price down at least a little.

It’ll be at least $1,000 now for sure, though. I doubt it’ll be more than $1,500 because the more powerful base model Framework Desktop is that price. I’m just really hoping Valve doesn’t seriously delay shipment or announce price hikes for the many people who won’t be able to afford it on launch. Having to wait over a year for a Steam Deck due to their preorder system was painful.