I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.

I’d actually bet it’s something different…

It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.

Yes, it requires it runs well with default settings, everything is accessible with the standard deck controls, that all the control displays use the steam deck icons, and it doesn’t reference controls the deck doesn’t have. It’s a very high bar.

It sucks, Halo was a big part of my highschool years and now it feels like a really shitty money grab.

This is just modern gaming. You could replace “Halo” with almost any sizeable game from that era, and you’d have the same thing - none of them remain except to be husks of their former selves, enslaved to a large money harvesting machine.

OSRS is one of the very few exceptions to the rule, and that only came about after having spent years as a money grab before realizing people actually wanted the original back.

You’re really showing that you have absolutely no idea what any of this takes. These teams take large chunks of people - their live service ops alone is probably 300 people, not to mention client application teams, teams working on new features, moderation teams, support teams, billing teams, QA teams, and then literally all the execs, management, PR, HR, finance, design, office staff, and the whole slew of other things every large company needs. The funny thing is the person already listed all of these out for you… It’s pretty clear you don’t know what this all involves and haven’t worked at a company like this at all.

I’m sure it’s over 1,000 people.

Seems like monopolistic practices rather than competing on services.

It literally is? They’re literally not competing on services, they’re competing via artificial scarcity.

And especially for the things that there are potentially thousands of on screen. And especially for things that are semi complex models. And especially for things that are small at a distance…

Claiming it’s “door in the face” is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the “bait” changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could’ve walked back to this.

Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would’ve looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn’t have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.

If this was what they were trying to do, they’d have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.

I’m more willing to bet they’re just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.

But claiming that it’s a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they’re overdoing it, crazy enough to think it’d work, etc. It seems way too contrived.

The guy who owns the company knows what it means for the long term stock price: a plummet. He knows that’ll come eventually if these changes go through.

Investors may react positively to the news, but when they see the damage it actually does, they’ll pull out too.

The guy running the company has shares that are valued way higher than when he earned them, he is sitting so high right now it’s far worth selling here instead of gambling on the response to the news. It’s just simple “quit while you’re ahead”.