What’s important right now is converting people away from windows. I expect Steam OS 3 to be much more beginner friendly than any other distro. If an average PC gamers first impression of linux is constant troubleshooting, they’re not going to try another kernel; they’re just going to go back to windows.
Even if valve stops support later, they will have still introduced many people to linux in a beginner friendly way and wrestled the gaming ecosystem out of microsoft’s grip that much more.
It’s normal for old versions of an OS to stop receiving support after a new version replaces it. That’s not unique to steam OS. if I install an old version of bazzite, or any deprecated Linux kernel, modern apps will not necessarily be made backwards compatible with it.
But steam OS will have more installs than any other Linux variant just because of Valve’s brand recognition alone and the FOSS community will target it as their primary platform for software compatibility as a result.
Not every game is an MMO requiring vast server farms. A game like the crew 1 that is past it’s prime is not expensive to keep a few servers running for. It’s a negligible cost.
They could also put in the time to give players the tools to host their own servers, or simply allow offline play. This used to be standard for all PC games. They chose to do neither of these things in an obvious effort to force players towards the sequel or their other games. They should not be permitted to do anti-consumer things like this.
Concord suffered from being too safe and generic. There wasn’t a single thing about it that didn’t seem generic and played out. It was originally conceptualized around the time when overwatch 1 was super popular and then they took way too long to finish it. The fact that it was pursuing an outdated trend and doing nothing original with it is why nobody had any interest in it.
Gamers could have identified that it was going to flop from a mile away, but the people calling the shots were businessmen and shareholders, not gamers. The industry has been hollowed out and enshittified because it’s been taken over by non-gamers who want to turn all games into soulless child casinos.
It wouldn’t be the first artistic industry ruined by capitalists and it won’t be last.
Big name studios are usually publicly owned which means they have shareholders to answer to and they demand a return on their investment. That means no risk taking which means no niche genres. It’s why shareholders (ultra wealthy people) are the enemy of art and why publicly traded studios all go to shit after enough time.
And indie devs don’t want to touch the sim genre because it’s an incredibly challenging thing to make and would take most people years and years to get anywhere on it. Their only shot is having an angel investor to keep them afloat.
They’ll do that anyway. They engage only in ideological proclamation, not critical analysis. They think truth is dictated by consensus.
You deal with these people by disenfranchising them and removing their opportunities to gain power, not by engaging them directly in debate. Never engage with an echo chamber if you don’t want the ideology of that echo chamber to infect others like a virus.
And from ex-ubisoft devs no less; the undisputed king of mediocrity. It’s a testament to how utterly crushing the weight of shareholder influence and middle management bloat is on the people working there. Creativity cannot flourish within a publicly owned company that only seeks profit and nothing more.