Please, anyone, desperately anyone, literally anyone, please, for the love of god, make a competing headset that doesn’t have this deep Facebook integration bullshit.

I do not want to see this become the Oasis.

What about Valve Index?

Don’t bet on Valve. They don’t have a killer business instinct. They take their sweet time to get anything done. Plus their Steam machine “console” idea was crap, anyone could see that from day one.

It's amazing how shortsighted & wrong one smarmy glib post can be.

Valve is kicking ass, leading massive technical charged doing great & fantastic work with none of the typical Service-as-a-Software-Substitute slimeware that everyone else keeps falling to. Great novel hardware with very high bandwidth & compelling input, best if not only useful end user drivers out there as we see with projects like Monado XR that are practically unimaginable elsewhere.

You're damned right they don't have a killer business instinct. They have a nurture protect & help instinct.

They aren't on inside-out tracking, not yet, they are building far more reliable open systems for outside-in, & that makes them more costly. But you know what you are getting & you know the raw data right out of the sensor is going to be great.

Valve is hilariously stagnant. The Steam windows app went ignored for nearly a decade until Epic came in and started eating their lunch. The mobile app looks like a contracted out app from 2009. Seriously, go download the mobile app. Half the products or ideas they’ve come up with abandoned, never release, or are mediocre. They lack any clear vision, strategy or direction as a company. They seem like they would just absolutely rest on their laurels and do absolutely nothing if it weren’t for pesky competitors ruining their laziness.

The only reason Valve is in business today is because DRM forbids consumers from transferring their owned games to another platform. If I could abandon Steam I immediately would.

What stodgy complainy whininess.

I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Big Picture works great for a console like experience far better than anyone elses.

Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

I'm sorry the you doesn't meet your high pop culture desires? It feels much less glossy-plastic & more direct to me than Epic. That's just me I guess. The thing is, that is way way way way down my list of concerns. Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated. The lack of mainstream highly visible overwhelming successes doesn't bother me. Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

>Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

The Steam Controller is dead.

>I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Steam OS is dead. The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve. Valve has supported Linux in the (hilariously) limited number of titles they've released in the last decade, and has added some support to the open source community. They are not the driver behind Linux gaming.

>Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

Steam Link is no longer in production. Legitimately, have you ever tried other remote play alternatives? There is just no way you can say this with a straight face. The Valve apps are truly crap.

>Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated

What? This isn't a difficult problem to solve. There are a dozen game libraries similar to Steam that do the same job, but significantly better. The only thing Steam has going for it is the DRM stickiness that they acquired by being the only player in the PC space for so long.

>Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

Legitimately, tell me how they are innovating in "radical ways."

This is comically absurd take that is utterly divorced from reality. Half of what you mentioned to love about Valve is related to canceled or abandoned stuff.

Valve are not the only ones doing anything for Linux gaming, but they are a pretty fucking big contributor: - Releaseing Steam for Linux, which has encouraged many games to be ported. Yes, the Steam Consoles are cancelled (or on hold), but even the promise of a new market (and the convenience of not having to have a separate distribution channel for the Linux version of your game) has changed the Linux gaming landscape from a handful of titles to more games than anyone can play (depending on your tastes ofc). - Employing/contracting people working on different parts of the Linux graphics stack (SDL,radv,dxvk,more). - Developing Proton. I mostly play native games, but Proton has been huge for many. Yes, it's based on Wine (that is a good thing, NIH syndrome is way too common is bad) but Valve have improved the parts needed to get a good gaming experience and packaged it up in a nice way that is dead simple to use for anyone. Just click a button to play your Windows games. - Lots of other small things. For example Valve's Plagman has been working on https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope which is godsent for thos of us with ultrawide monitors or other uncommon resolutions and aspect ratios that gamedevs like to pretend don't exist.

And best of all, most of those improvements have been open source and available even to those who don't want to use Steam. That's surprisingly open for what is esentially a DRM company. So saying "The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve" doesn't even make sense when Valve are part of that opensource community.