Other companies do the exact same though, Nintendo controllers don’t support non-Nintendo devices (although they’ve been reverse-engineered for Steam and Linux).

You don’t have to play every game through Steam, switch to the controller action set in desktop mode and and it’ll work as a basic controller for any game.

All of the Steam Controller’s actually distinguishing features wouldn’t work with XInput though. If you’re not interested in that stuff you’d save money going for a basic Xbox controller or third party one.

I imagine it’s like the Deck where desktop mode has 2 modes so you can switch to use it for non-Steam games.

Ultimately the EGS has shown 12% is not profitable, a lower cut would be nice for smaller devs but I don’t see why Valve would when every other platform of Steam’s size also takes 30%.

The problem with a price war is Valve is “just” a multi-billion dollar company, very impressive for their size but a $100bn company like Sony and especially a $3 trillion company like Microsoft could squeeze them out of the market.

And they would have to subsidise the cost by far more than Sony/Microsoft do due to the smaller scale of production and more expensive newer contracts.

As long as it’s comparable price or cheaper than a pre-built of similar specs or building a similar build yourself, they’ll be a market for it. There’s always people looking to get into PC gaming and existing PC gamers who want their Steam library in a console form factor.

Problem is there’s been reports about memory providers cancelling contracts, as the premium AI companies will pay is far higher than breaking the current contracts.