I’m confused, is that supposed to be good or bad? A lot or a little? That article seems to be making a heck of a lof of excuses. The hard pivot from “the Deck is an unmitigated success!” to immediately, quietly admitting it hasn’t outsold any actual handheld console is… kinda weird.
I like the Deck, and its influence in the market is clearly outsized… but it’s still a fairly niche product, and for the price I’m actually a bit surprised at how not-mainstream it remains.
It integrates better than Bazzite on it.
Which weirdly makes me annoyed at Valve’s lack of interest in expanding SteamOS beyond first party hardware.
It does mostly work, though.
It’s funny because a fascist regime just blitzkrieged South America.
MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.
Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.
For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.
The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.
Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.
Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.
By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998. BG1 you can make the case (but given that it was an Interplay-published, licensed game meant for relatively performant hardware, it was absolutely in line with AAA PC releases of the day). BG2? Absolutely not. Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all. And of course neither were independent games by definition.
For sure BG3 is absurdly large and the historical comparisons break down a bit in the sheer scale of what that thing is. But nobody in the late 90s was buying a top down D&D CRPG with the production values of BG (or an action RPG in the vein of Diablo the previous year) and thinking they were slumming it in the dregs of small budget gaming.
Well, yes it is.
That is exactly how being things and not being things are.
If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.
I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.
If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.
“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?
What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.
This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?
I hate this century. This century sucks.
Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.
As opposed to what?
Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.
“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.
I am screaming internally.
We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.
Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.
At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.
Literally everything “remains to be seen”. I’m confused about the source of distrust there.
I mean, the guy is taking this fully private. Technically GOG currently answers to even fewer people than Steam and has no financial commitments with anybody.
What “remains to be seen” in that scenario?
You can want better. Wanting better is good, actually.
What you can’t do (and expect to be taken seriously, anyway) is to take the best you got and give them crap for stuff that’s not under their control in any way. They don’t own the games getting delisted, so they have zero control over the delisting itself and they have better mitigations for this scenario than anyone else that make the situation actually safe for buyers. They may be “out of stock” of these games going forward, but nobody who bought them has to worry about not getting to keep them, which isn’t true on most other platforms, Steam included.
For the record, I also disagree on how “we’re seeing Valve’s practices get better”. They have their own set of priorities and while I like a bunch of them I dislike a bunch of them also. I don’t need to pick sides here.
Case in point, I agree that asking for a patreon-style contribution is a bad move on GOG’s part. I don’t need to like that in order for me to like their choice to stick to DRM free content or to provide downloadable offline installers.
I’m trying to be generic here. For these purposes I don’t particularly care about manufacturer customizations beyond "does it tensor math good and/or talk to DXR/Vulkan raytracing. I guess that accidentally includes actually useless CPU-baked NPUs, but I’ll accept that as being potentially part of it if someone actually used them for something.
For the record, even if I was wrong about or unaware of your kinda pedantic distinction, it’d still be irrelevant to the point.
I strongly disagree with that take, but also the actual alternative is not better for some of the people involved, so let that caveat be up front.
The alternative is a manually curated storefront, which is still being done in other platforms to some degree. You can absolutely sell entertainment or videogames without it being an entirely hands-off, algo-driven gig economy setup. Valve’s entire business model is cutting off all internal costs and automating the thing so it prints money by itself, but that’s not the only possible business model for media, as the previous century of media clearly shows.
Now, the caveat is that this doesn’t particularly help the small fry, which may be just gatekept out of the entire loop instead of being simply crushed by the soulless machine of making dream paste out of independent media. Whether that’s better or not I’m genuinely not sure.
Nostalgia tells me that the old industrial model where you only got to play in the pool if you could afford to do it right was more consistenly professional and less sloppy. Also that fewer things fell through the cracks, so if you wanted to make shovelware you at least had to put some work in to get it published, which was somebody’s paid job. Steam (and the similar mobile stores) have put all the cost and risk on the developers, especially since investment dried up and indie publishers have morphed from financers to service providers that come in after the job is done to sell you marketing and storefront SEO.
So I guess I personally would want Steam to hire a small army of content reviewers and moderators led by an editorial team that selects what to feature based on both business and creative considerations. But what I personally would want may not solve the problem the small indies this guy’s talking about have, just… maybe not allow them to get that deep into the hole by keeping them from being able to get started in the first place. Mileage may vary on whether that’s preferable. My personal choice is probably a side effect of being old.
Cool.
So, anyway…
(For the record, tensor cores don’t just accelerate calculations for raytracing, as is obvious from the entire AI bubble built on the technology, and I have no idea what GPU “performance boost” you’d want from additional raster graphics when you have RT-less stuff running at stupid framerates on current hardware and being consistently CPU-limited, but the Internet gets the memetic obsessions it gets. I suppose online nerds will pay for a 1080p 1000Hz monitor with no self-awareness as long as the two popular Youtube tech channels keep repeating the same memes and testing the same four games forever)
You need to clear the algo bars right away to make the New and Trending tab, and then you need to keep it up. If you drop off, you’re out.
So dropping to Mixed or starting soft gets you written off (barring viral late pickups or otherwise getting external promo to make your game blow up elsewhere). That means you need to hypermanage your launch and SEO the crap out of it to “own a tag” or keep above water with the trending tab.
I’ll say that at least that’s a tool for even a single person marketing owner to micromanage a Steam launch effectively, but it’s still SEO and algo gaming, which still leads to the same discoverability rat race mobile gaming has been stuck on for ages. And how survivable that process is depends a lot on what you need. I’d argue that very small devs that can make do with a few thousand copies sold may have an easier time there than slightly larger releases that need months of at least some sales to make their money back. Steam sales are either a flat line for a decade or a two week spike followed by zero engagement in your game forever.
I also didn’t realize they had done anything to it in a while.
Buuuut this is still the first thing I fire up on new hardware to test RT performance AND it’s still the best Id remake/reissue yet, and they’ve done a bunch recently.
FWIW, I’d rather support GOG than Steam any day. I’d just… rather also support some devs and get a game to play. I’d even consider a subscription blind box thing or whatever, if their concern is reliable income. The Patreon model is just an awkward fit, though. That’s even acknowledging that they’ve been doing more behind the scenes stuff and video content.
See, that’s the type of justification that doesn’t sit well with me and that the article is doing all over the place.
Is the Steam Deck a very successful handheld PC? Sure. Compared to the boutique stuff sold on Indiegogo by Chinese manufacturers it’s probably an order of magnitude larger.
Except it’s also not priced like one of those (or wasn’t at launch, anyway), it’s priced like a console, with the LCD model (while it lasted) priced right alongside the Switch OLED and a bit cheaper than the Switch 2.
And by that metric it’s done poorly, with best estimates placing it right alongside the PSVita at the absolute best, lifetime. The bar for success on that scale isn’t “selling millions”, it’s selling tens of millions, which the Deck has struggled to do.
So, all fanboyism aside: The Deck did well for a handheld PC, but kinda failed in the attempt to bridge the gap between those and handheld consoles. That, if you’re keeping track, is “reporting, not an opinion piece”.
This?
This is an opinion piece.