They ran off even their most loyal players one by one with their asinine moves. Lame games, vendor lockin, nickle and dining.

I was die hard for Xbox. Had every one, dozens of games, more probably. Have fond memories of lan parties and friends coming over to play split screen. I remember playing through halo 3 the night it dropped into the early morning, and getting the beta from Reach.

Then they killed off split screen. And lan gaming. You had to use Xbox live to play with your friend in the room. Oh no they don't have Xbox live. Oh no there's an update. Now they don't have their password. They can't join my party. The audio doesn't work. It became a hassle to play with people

Steam just works. And it's a fair price

Re 2, I was and am angry about how MS handled the Xbox exclusives. They spent the 90s making games for the pc that were great, and then the Xbox drops and the pc market is ignored for years. "just buy the console" makes no sense when I have a far superior machine right here, and when multi-player is behind a subscription. I was gifted an Xbox a few years after launch, along with Midtown Madness 3, the only game I wanted - and never gave MS a cent of my own money. I stayed on Halo 1 for years, then when Halo 2 finally dropped for the pc, I got it and enjoyed my first playthrough on my computer. My first playthrough of H3, ODST, and 4 weren't until the MCC dropped on steam. I got Forza bundled with the Xbox, but it wasn't until Horizon 3 released on pc that I got into it.

I fucking despise the 15-year window where MS just abandoned their loyal customers on pc to milk people with their inferior box and subscription bullshit. The smartest move they have made was re-embrace the pc as a customer base. And 8 year-old me could have told those moronic C-suites in 2001. They isolated a core customer base for short-term profits, and they have earned nothing but resentment for it.

The Xbox should have always been a product for "I don't understand computers, but I want to play games", while the pc should have remained a "I know what I'm doing, and I don't need a walled garden". MS fucked up massively, and lost out on revenue trying to force their hand for a decade+. The fact that they release on both is nothing but positive, as they get customers from both camps, and they finally are undoing a bit of the hate and resentment they caused.

Crazy saying that Valve doesn’t operate in the same spot as Microsoft when Microsoft makes Windows.

Personally, I was never interested in Xbox as a PlayStation killer. Its entire appeal was that it was a consolized PC.

Then Valve went ahead and made all PCs into consoles.

I use Steam Big Picture.

Specifically, I have a desktop PC, with an RTX 3090, hooked up to my TV.

Now I don’t recommend doing it this way anymore. It’s probably better to buy something like a Legion Go, hook it up to an eGPU, while you dock it to a TV.

But probably your bigger question is, “Why do I use Steam Big Picture?”

Because I specifically want to play PC games on my TV. Half my Steam library natively supports gamepad. And of those that don’t, I can easily adapt keyboard controls to a gamepad—if community-built options have not yet been made.

Truly, Steam is what Xbox should have been.

been using Big Picture for years. it’s a better experience than the ad-riddled UIs of the xbox and playstation.

Pretty sure Big Picture uses the exact same interface as the steam deck nowadays, which is a much better experience than the old thing. At least when I stream through Moonlight, I haven't manually launched big picture in years.

When was the last time you used Big Picture? I have a micro ITX build hooked up to my TV running Bazzite desktop, and have Big Picture loading at boot.

It’s a console. And it’s fantastic. It also lets me mod it so I can make it look like a Wii U if I wanted.