Steam

Whether or not you're the right customer for the Steam Machine, you won't be able to ignore it. Valve's upcoming device has enough overlap with consoles as well as PCs that almost everyone will have an opinion about it. The value proposition is there, the loyal fanbase is waiting, and the pricing might not be as big an issue as it seemed. What remains to be seen is how many people believe the Steam Machine makes sense in their living room.

This is the first one I wanted to look up, because I'm sure everyone's like "What's my embarrassing [number]?". Well, maybe not everyone has this reaction. I'm having this reaction because my most played game is Dota 2 by magnitudes. I'll tell you my number. Hours played, 2,101. My second-place game is Divinity: Original Sin 2, at only 241. I will say, though, that I played a lot of Overwatch before it was on Steam. And Final Fantasy 11, when I was a teenager, I was a seriously hardcore player of that game. I started playing [Dota 2] in my early relationship with my now-husband, who also loves

In case you think I'm making all this up, former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra recently claimed that Sony views Valve as a new competitor. Ybarra believes that with Xbox not active in the console wars anymore (Project Helix is still a ways away), Sony is bringing true console exclusives back, as it stops launching them on PC. He also thinks Sony is smart enough to see the promise of Steam Machine and its potential to be the biggest competitor to the PlayStation. In fact, most of the points I illustrated above were also mentioned by Ybarra in the same comment thread. He stressed Steam's 3-hour, no

So I've been playing Angeline Era on Steam Deck, and it's beautiful on Steam Deck … the last game I finished on the Steam Deck was Scarlet Hollow, and it is still installed. It's a visual novel by Black Tabby Games, the incredible devs behind Slay the Princess. I have to say that Scarlet Hollow is a masterpiece, and as a narrative designer, it's the kind of game that I feel very nerdy about because it definitely has the most complex branching structure I've maybe ever played in a game. I honestly can't think of anything that compares to it, except for maybe Christine Love's work. [It's] the ki