Is Valve Taking On Microsoft? with Steve Burke

3 Dec 2025 · 39 min

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Podcast Episode Summary: Better Offline - "Is Valve Taking On Microsoft? with Steve Burke"

Episode Overview In this episode of *Better Offline*, host Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus to discuss Valve's latest hardware announcements: the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame. The conversation revolves around their potential impact on the gaming industry and how they might position Valve against competitors like Microsoft.

Key Topics Discussed

  • Introduction to Valve's Hardware:
  • Valve's Steam Machine is described as a small form factor PC intended for living room use, operating on Linux and Steam OS.
  • The Steam Frame is Valve’s entry into VR, combining standalone functionality with streaming capabilities from gaming PCs.
  • Comparison with Consoles and PCs:
  • The Steam Machine offers the openness of a PC while being consumer-friendly, unlike traditional closed consoles.
  • Discussion on how Steam Machine may help promote Linux gaming and reduce dependency on Windows.
  • Technical Insights:
  • Features of the Steam Machine include modular components and a focus on gaming performance.
  • The Steam Frame utilizes innovative streaming technology, including foveated streaming, to maintain quality while reducing bandwidth usage.
  • Market Position and Timing:
  • The conversation highlights the current state of Microsoft’s Xbox division, suggesting it is at a low point which could allow Valve to capture market share.
  • Comparisons are made to historical market shifts, particularly referencing Sega's decline in the hardware space.
  • Consumer Sentiment:
  • There’s a noted excitement surrounding Valve’s new products, with a sentiment of relief that they are focusing on hardware that enhances gaming without the complications of AI-related hype.
  • Hardware Specifications:
  • Details about the hardware specs of the Steam Machine include an RDNA3 GPU and Zen 4 CPU, emphasizing a more powerful performance compared to gaming handhelds.

Key Takeaways

  • Innovative Approach:
  • Valve is positioning itself as a serious competitor against Microsoft by providing open-source gaming solutions, potentially revitalizing interest in Linux gaming.
  • Consumer Anxiety:
  • There exists a consumer hesitance regarding prices and the impact of current economic conditions on hardware costs.
  • Future of VR Gaming:
  • The Steam Frame’s streaming capabilities represent a significant step forward in the VR gaming experience, with potential challenges regarding latency.
  • Implications for the Gaming Industry:
  • Valve's strategies could signal a shift in the gaming hardware landscape, especially if Microsoft continues to struggle with Xbox.

Conclusions The episode ends with a positive outlook on Valve's new hardware endeavors, emphasizing that while the gaming landscape is currently tumultuous, Valve's focus on genuine innovation and consumer-friendly products could create a meaningful impact. Ed Zitron and Steve Burke express their shared excitement for what these developments could mean for the future of gaming.

Links and Resources

  • [Gamers Nexus YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus)
  • [Steam Machine Sales](https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine)
  • [Steam Frame Sales](https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe)
  • [Better Offline Merchandise](https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline)

For more insights and discussions, check out the *Better Offline* podcast on platforms like iHeartRadio and Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript

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0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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1:54Call 844-844-IHEART. Call Zone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline, I'm your host Ed Zitron.

2:14Better Offline And I'd like to announce that much like Nvidia revealed in a recent leaked memo, we are also nothing like Enron. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus, who's going to talk to me about, I know it's a thematic shift from the show, about something that actually exists. And we're talking about an announcement from a few weeks ago from Valve about the Steam Frame headset and the Steam Machine console. Steve, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. Quick question. What was the Enron thing? I think I didn't see that one. This is important. So NVIDIA had an internal memo that they put out, And they said, and the headline from Barron's was, I'm just going to pull this up right now because it's one of my favorite I've ever read.

2:57NVIDIA says it's not Enron in private memo refuting accounting questions. Good stuff. Good. That's what we want to hear. And they were like, we're nothing like Enron because we don't use SPVs to inflate revenue. It's also good. It's all real, Steve. It's all very real. I'm starting to have my doubts that this AI stuff is built on anything real. Although I did hear about the two data centers that are currently sitting empty because the grid can't support them until 2028. Oh, which ones? I think it was in Northern California. Hell yeah. I love this. We live in the future. But genuinely, talk to me about the Steam machine.

3:41What is this thing? It's like a games console? Walk me through it. yeah no i mean this stuff's actually it was a really nice break from everything else because like you said it's real they're actually doing stuff it's consumer facing so that's nice and there's some pretty some of these things have cool innovations in them so uh the steam machine is a small basically small form factor pc but it's kind of positioned almost like a console at least in terms of uh sizing the intent to be used with a tv or in a living room although it could be used desktop but instead of being a more closed down console it has the openness of a pc in terms of you have access to bios and things like that some modularity of components and it's running on linux it's running on steam os and so right now we've had some hands-on time we had interviews with the engineers we have the specs haven't tested it yet you know can't make any value judgments or anything at the time because they haven't even given us a price uh but it does there's some cool things i think that regardless of how their launch goes with the steam machine um it is in the very least very promising for linux which helps to maybe get people unstuck from microsoft so yeah so what makes this thing unique though is it just like a because steam for those listening who don't know steam is a it is not really a monopoly but it's like the best way to download games and keep track of them i would say but it does also involve paying a one company yeah but is that really it is it just a big pc is because you've you've at least messed with it a little bit yeah i mean it's it is still i i think it still qualifies as sort of just a computer but But really what they're doing is, I guess in the same way that some handheld devices are technically computers.

5:43I mean, a lot of the modern handheld gaming, we'll call them consoles, are actually just handheld PCs. Some of them, a lot of them have Windows on them even. And so it's that concept except applied to a cube. I mean, people have been jokingly, I don't know who coined this, and I wish I did, But people have been jokingly referring to the Steam Machine as the Gabe Cube, as in Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve. That's really good. Yeah, I saw that and I was like, goddammit, I wish I'd thought of that for a video. That's a banger. Well, so is it like a kind of consumer-friendly UI? How much of a chance have you had to play with it?

6:25uh we had in total i think it was about five or maybe six hours with valve and um so in that time we were able to speak with engineers and you know mess around with it so yeah it's a steam os which is on the steam deck so the steam deck is a gaming handheld device that uh these have existed for a long time but the deck was kind of the first one in recent years to really breathe life into the gaming handheld market outside of nintendo and um that's not necessarily because everyone bought the deck but it's because all the other manufacturers saw like oh this is real like steam is a serious uh venue you know to move games and people will buy stuff and so uh asus and lenovo and all the other competitors jumped in so the steam machine is building on that because the Steam Deck uses SteamOS, which is an Arch Linux-based distribution, and it has a lot of optimizations that solve long-running problems with Linux and gaming in general.

7:34So that would include, for example, translation layers and things like this. So they build on that. And then, yeah, as far as the user experience goes, it is a basically a sort of big picture mode or desktop mode you know operating system but it's computer it's just you kind of navigate it more like a console i guess did you play it at all only a little bit yeah we tested the new um steam controller what yeah talk talk to me about the how does that feel in your hand because i'm i have peculiar hands myself and that thing looks straight it's got like two little touch screens at the bottom and yeah it is large it's so the two it's basically a uh screens but you know yeah touch uh touch pads track pads so it's got two track pads and they function like um like a laptop track pad except there's haptics and things like that there's a gyro and what's it like buzzes kind of like kind of like you get on the switch as well yeah yeah yeah you'll get like the haptic feedback like you would get you know yeah and a phone and um yeah so controllers to me it's interesting and um it's cool that they're trying it again they last tried a controller somewhere around a decade ago and uh it went with the steam the steam the thing that could mirror your steam pc right yeah they have the steam link the controller yes Yeah, I think there was like one more thing in that sort of round of hardware.

9:07I don't really remember it. Maybe the Steam boxes. But yeah, so the original Steam controller, I guess, went so well that they had to dump them on fire sale for$5 each. And they've memory hold it by releasing a new Steam controller with the same name. But how did it feel? Was it how does it feel in comparison to like a first generation Xbox controller? law yeah the first gen xbox was it's probably i think the xbox controllers are probably regarded as one of the sort of most um you know user-friendly layouts uh it's hard for me to say too much the stuff that i tested with it and the limited time we had with it was um related to some of the more unique inputs so i will say it is a little larger uh but um larger than the original xbox controller or like larger than like an xbox 360 larger than larger than a more modern yeah xbox controller i would have to put it next to the original but that um there's an idea for the future yeah but the some of the interesting inputs i guess so um there's a a grip sense where when you if it's enabled when you let your fingers off of the grip so you're still holding it but you're not like tapping your fingertips to the actual grip of the you know controller um it'll detect that and it can use that to uh stop input so you can rotate you know it's got a gyro you can rotate to turn in the game if you want and then you can uh basically lift your fingers off if you want to stop uh or kind of um stutter step the rotation as you move and so it's got it's got some like clever execution of input.

10:51It feels like it takes some inspiration maybe from things like the switch and stuff like that. That's cool. Yeah. And, and this is important, not a single time, literally not even once, did at any point anybody from Valve say AI in that order of letters. Oh, magnifique. Thank God. Not once. Not once. How delightful. Oh, God. no it's because they're building a real thing how do you feel about this so I was talking to my mate Casey Kagawa a friend of the show about this and he kind of put the thought in my head this could be a quite dangerous like this could be quite dangerous to Xbox especially because Microsoft is kind of just sitting there and letting that fester at times yeah I think this is probably the absolute best time for anybody new to try and get into like console or console equivalent type devices and in particular i mean valve is is a deadly combination with it but xbox is kind of at the lowest of its lows um you know they just they they can't seem to stop fucking everything up and uh their best new thing they have is just a rebranded asus rog ally handheld um and like that's doing well for asus but by microsoft numbers historically it's not impressive uh and so yeah i think microsoft right now it's they're in a compromised position their sales are awful i don't have the numbers offhand but they're easy to find and uh they're just not even close to what playstation's been doing they're losing control of the market and it just looks like they're kind of going the route of sega right now where yeah yeah sega abandoned consoles for anyone who doesn't know and they went full-on game publisher and so yeah i mean i agree i think steam or valve is in a position right now where uh this is before a new console launch cycle from the court of the incumbents and it's when microsoft's had its weakest with xbox so it's really good timing for them well i don't know why you're saying uh microsoft can't innovate any further because they're they're reading this now it's 24th of november and i read this uh xbox prices could go even higher because grand shortages they seem to be doing it it is really funny to just follow the steam machine with that as well oh yeah just being like hey guess what it was more expensive and it sucks more do you like it please god but and the xbox has been out for like a long ass time now i don't remember when it might be like five years already or something yeah the prices are supposed to come down and i know like some of these are whatever market factors they can't exactly control although even though microsoft does kind of have a big part in the ai thing that's making the prices go up but we'll forget about that yeah there's stuff they can't control uh but even still like consumers aren't going to want to pay more for a thing that is now ancient.

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17:28It just kind of, it feels like they've been spinning their wheels for the longest time because it felt like they were sort of moving away from Xbox by leaning on Game Pass. then it turned out giving everyone access to as many games as possible for$30 was not a good decision. So now they want to do something else. It does, I hadn't thought of the Sega comparison, but it really does feel like that. Like Microsoft won't die, but Jesus. Yeah, I mean, they're fortunate, I guess, to have their spying division with Windows. So they'll be fine, I guess. their ad revenue they get from installs of windows on laptops that take 10 minutes to turn on exactly yeah yeah no they're that'll keep them in business maybe better than what sega had when it left hardware but um yeah no they're in a they're in a bad spot for xbox i'm not really sure what the plan is over there and it doesn't seem like they're sure either so so i had a specific steam machine question so what's it doing gpu wise like is it doing is it doing like uh one of the amd ones with both a gpu and a cpu on the same diet like what what is the situation there it is so for the silicon the uh short answer to that question is it's an rdna3 gpu with 28 cus and i'll kind of loop back to that but um the silicon in general the cpu and the gpu are the only uh non-modular sort of normal components that you might swap in a computer so meaning you can't change the cpu or the gpu this is a big split from a normal computer they're using bga parts ball grid array so they're soldered uh to the board and that makes it more like a laptop in fact they are basically laptop parts they're semi-custom laptop cpu and gpu uh that are discrete and the right yeah the gpu so rdna3 28 cus that makes it a little bit smaller than Then an RX 7600, as an example.

19:34Off the top of my head, I think that's 32 CUs. And the CPU is a Zen 4 part. It's six cores, 12 threads. Their maximum advertised boost is 4.8 gigahertz. And they claim a 30-watt TDP. And so for reference, I mean, some of the other low-end. How does that compare to a gaming handheld, exactly? A gaming handheld, yeah, it's higher power than a gaming handheld. for sure so it is it is better than that you have the benefit of not worrying about a battery not worrying about skin temperature on the device uh because they're not holding it and so for those reasons they can run more power so i think they're in total somewhere around 110 watts for the gpu and then a 30 watt claim for the cpu so you know with with other miscellaneous devices and with inefficiencies and whatever you maybe call it 200 watts and i think the power supply is 300 watts And so compared to a handheld, I mean, at peak power consumption, which you're not normally at, this is significantly more power and will perform, I mean, significantly better.

20:46It's a big difference. Kind of, it almost feels inevitable as well, because the fall of Microsoft, sure, it's that they don't give a shit and don't seem to be trying in any way imaginable. but it's also at some point we were going to meet we're going to reach peak console surely at some point there's just how much more can we do with this yeah i think and you can this is this gets into like a broader interesting topic i've been thinking about lately too but which is um for gaming in general you know you you do hit a point where it's like okay the graphics are sufficient and actually now the kind of meta is you know more people are playing indie games that don't push the graphics to insane levels and people are kind of rediscovering that oh wait i play video games to have fun and it doesn't need to be whoa whoa whoa yeah what's that well no that's not why i play i play games to get upset yes yeah oh i have a game for you i need an investor right now actually it's ai company simulator and that sounds more fun yeah yeah yeah it's great uh yeah no i mean it's i think the the the thing with the um on the gaming side uh i think the steam machine on a technicality like it's it's more powerful than a lot of hardware people have, I guess, if you look at the Steam survey.

22:22In reality, it's a low-end modern computer, and I think they're probably going to be partly leaning on things like FSR upscaling to try and bridge the gap, the performance gap. I mean, one of the things they didn't say that I can remember when we were talking to them but they did say on the spec sheet was that the steam machine supports um 4k 60 fps with fsr and uh that's pretty good and fsr is the one where they use ai but yeah actual actual ai real stuff actual machine learning yeah like actually does something um yeah and so like i wasn't too happy about that when i saw that on the spec sheet because like saying factually it's probably accurate because it says with fsr there but um that's it has to always be there they can't just say 4k 60 because there's a big difference and this hardware cannot do 4k 60 without some kind of crutch which fsr would be but uh point being you know it's a low-end computer they say it's gonna be priced like a an entry-level gaming pc i don't know what that means anything yeah that could mean literally could cost seven million like what the fuck yeah it's a big range i mean it's you know in the old days like 20 i don't know 12 to 16 maybe you could build a super low npc for 450 bucks more realistically probably 550 that's kind of gone now so um so i think they'll have some pricing the the biggest concern is for sure price but at a hardware level um really i think the big story is the linux side and then what you're saying the microsoft side where it's like is this just kind of twisting the dagger on xbox i i hope so because microsoft sucks and my and the thing is pc gaming is cool like it's the the one like it's one of the great things about it in that there's such a great indie gaming gaming industry and i feel like steam is though imperfect is a great way to get into that in a way that i don't feel like the big consoles are yeah it's just indie games are kind of like the lifeblood of it now i feel like there's so much character in them and they're very accessible in terms of uh often price but also not being overbearing on systems you know requirements well my favorite game of this year was uh dead zone rogue if you have played that i have not but it is a it's a roguelike it feels like the and i realize there are numerous other sufferers who listen to this may not understand what i mean it feels like when destiny was fun uh in the single player it has that kind of very clicky very it's just very satisfying game indie game never heard of the developers don't know if they've ever made anything before fantastic game i haven't enjoyed any triple a that much unless you consider hades 2 which i'm not sure that counts i feel like that doesn't really count you know like it's yeah i feel like that that to me still feels like sort of the smaller um yeah side of things yeah and uh yeah there's a big market there and i think um i do think that big picture for some of these companies i was about to say gaming companies uh referring to you know nvidia intel amd but that's not really what they are anymore um but looking at these companies i i'm happy to see some of the success of indie games and i'm happy to see things like a steam machine in terms of hardware being capable of playing most of the games people play um because specifically on the cynical side it's like if you sell GPUs for playing games and the graphics have kind of peaked for a while and it might take a few more years to really reach another major peak where it's invalidating older hardware to a point where people feel forced to buy something new to keep the flow of money going for the companies in that situation cynically it would feel like you would need to invent a problem to solve so that people will buy your next GPU to play games unless you can generate sort of escape velocity from the gaming side and get into some other business which right now appears to be AI data center they you know they don't need to invent problems to solve for gaming because they're doing that for someone else invented one for the economy right but it's it's actually this is I feel like you thought this is just a question I had forgot to ask you can't replace anything inside the steam machine it looks like so you can do the ram the the oh that's not bad yeah the ram is uh so dim so it's laptop memory sticks and then you can also do the ssd it supports up to m.22280 which is the sort of standard larger form factor those would be the main ones i guess that's not too bad can you hard drives probably going to be solid state though yep yeah solid state and then it is very accessible.

27:35I mean, it's easy to remove the cover and the heatsink if you wanted to, you could pull, you could swap it. The fan is easy to swap and replace. The power supply has a blade connector so it's sort of similar to server form factor styles where they don't use cables but they use just a connector. And so all of these things from a repairability standpoint would in the very least be easy to repair and swap. Valve has a pretty good track record of making those parts available for the Steam Deck, so hopefully they'll do that here too. Yeah. Jesus, I'm not used to companies not just immediately being evil.

28:15Yeah, I mean, there's still time. Oh yeah, it could end up being$1 ,200. Like, that's where I could see them fucking this one up for me. Right.

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31:45Talking of successful industries that everyone loves, the Steam Frame. Yeah. what is going what is this meant to is it is it meant to be a vision pro situation is it meant to be like the like like what was the valve index like what is it steam frame is pretty interesting so the steam frame is a new vr headset from valve they launched uh the htc vive with obviously htc a long time ago now uh and then later the index and and then there was oculus rift that later turned into the meta quest so that's kind of the vr industry it's really just these are the um the the big milestones there have been a lot of other devices in between but valve's jumping back into it with what they're calling the steam frame the steam frame is pretty interesting in that uh it both has standalone functionality with uh basically an integrated we'll call it a compute unit that mounts to your face with the goggles and uh and then it's also got streaming capability where it streams content from an actual gaming computer and so valve is here leveraging the fact that it has a an unbelievably large library of games probably the largest ever to have existed and uh the fact that most of its players probably have a decent gaming computer and so they can render the game content on their computer and then stream it to the headset basically you're cat you're casting a video to the headset uh so you're not rendering locally and then that allows you to be tetherless and wireless from the computer which solves a lot of the problems this kind of vrs had historically um but it does on its own thing yes yeah so but the new problem if you're doing this is anytime they're streaming there's latency right yeah and so the concern just becomes if i'm streaming this from my computer instead of playing it with a wire plugged into the back of my headset uh am i going to notice that in actions in game and um the cool part i think that maybe this technology could apply elsewhere in some capacity uh but is what they're calling foveated streaming and so yeah so there's already a thing called foveated rendering but basically the concept is uh to preserve bandwidth and maximize uh sort of how much data you can get across without um causing major latency issues you know to keep the frame rate high and everything else uh what they're doing is they are targeting specific areas where the eyes are tracked to be looking uh and then rendering those assigning basically the maximum amount of bits to those areas yeah and everything else gets a reduced bit rate in the streaming uses less bandwidth and so it technically renders at a lower quality but in the quick testing we did you know I only had a little bit of a hands-on with it, but I couldn't tell.

35:03I mean, when I was looking wherever I was looking in the headset, it looked full quality. And then if I tried to quickly dart my eyes over somewhere else, I'm not fast enough. I don't know that any human is fast enough really to move your eyes quick enough to beat when it detects your change of focus and then reassigns those bits to the new area to maximize that area's resolution. So I think the response time is something like 8 to 12 milliseconds. But it is both like a Vision Pro and a VR headset. Yeah, in the sense, yeah, you can technically do like, call it productivity tasks and things like that.

35:50Yeah, I'm a Vision Pro truther. I actually think that I think it's a fun idea I wish there were more fun ideas like it but I also recognize I'm peculiar for that one and also I don't think Apple gave enough of a shit it's just it is nice to see Valve doing something I think I realize also talking to you about this how depressing it is to just be like yay someone did something else I mean that's how it felt it was like it's yeah I mean the VR side doesn't get a lot of love compared to when it started um but it does vr games as well though yeah it's it's primarily a vr gaming headset and then they are saying look if you want to replace your monitor with this you can do that um that sounds expensive though and of course they have yet to say how much this will cost yeah they said less than an index but they didn't say how much and an index.

36:51Yeah, there's a few SKUs. I think the commonly cited... Yeah. Yeah, they range like$600. I want to say the highest is$1 ,200 or something, but it's not going to be$600. It'll be$1 ,000 plus. And we don't really have an idea of when these things are coming out, do we? Just next year? Next year, the frame, specifically the Steam frame, the VR solution, they said early 2026, which in my experience early to a lot of these companies just means first half yes you excited? I am I'm oddly excited about both of them it feels like we're finally getting something in PC gaming again I'm excited for that same reason it's nice where it's like okay it's just the hardware and there doesn't appear to be a lot of bullshit so if we test it and it's not the best solution for the value, then fine.

37:52That's a really easy review. Maybe you say it's good, but it costs too much. But that is a lot better than saying what I'm kind of having to lately think about, which is, okay, when NVIDIA launches their next GPU, how do I handle the conclusion where do you get to the end? And you're like, other than the fact that they're partnering with Palantir, which has openly admitted to developing technology that is used on occasion to kill people, the GPU is pretty good. You're like, how do you cross that bridge, right? Like, it gets into really serious stuff. It's a problem across the whole tech industry because I think Google's working with Border Patrol.

38:31Yeah. Like, it's just... And I always had the theory that people were like, wow, I can't believe the tech companies are suddenly doing this. I'm like, they've been fucking waiting. Oh, yeah. They've been looking... Like, this is being, they're like, oh, goody, finally the chance to make all that revenue from the evils. Or they've already been doing it, and now it's just more in the open or whatever. Yeah. And I'm guessing that this is becoming increasingly a challenge even with AMD, who is increasingly, though I realize the evils are slightly different there. Yeah, I mean, AMD is not quite as boisterous, I guess, as Nvidia in that way, but they still a lot of the same concerns and see yeah with valve it's been i think that's why why the reception's been so good on this because there's no there's no hardware launch yet it's just announcements but the sentiment's pretty high and i do think that's because people just feel so kind of beaten down uh where it's just every ram prices are skyrocketing over 100 in several cases i think we saw one stick one kit that was like 185 percent higher than it was three weeks ago yeah um that's gonna affect gpus that'll right when the prices were coming down on those and and these will affect the steam machine but i think just like the the sort of hey it's just hardware that plays video games and i guess if you want to use it for other stuff you can too like that sadly is pretty exciting right now uh so so yeah i'm excited about it i think the steam frame i'm actually really interested in i um the original vr testing we did we did some really cool vr benchmarks a long time ago um and it just kind of did it a couple times never did it again i thought it was a cool idea uh but the setup for vr was just way too burdensome at that time i was still running the company out of my childhood bedroom and so uh room scale vr was like you you need to spend like three hours cleaning your house yeah the term room was a little bit fungible yeah yeah i mean it was like but now it seems like all of that has matured a lot and um as someone who has not felt any desire whatsoever to play any vr games for the last like 10 years i actually do really want to try the steam frame and uh i think it'll be pretty fun yeah it's so weird it's like we even i wouldn't say microsoft was ever known as a like a deeply quality company but there was at least at some point a level of prestige to it there was like oh microsoft would never just make a big pile of shit they'd never wheel out of i mean they might do that in their software but it felt like they were at least there was the brief period where we could humor ourselves being like oh that pretty i like my xbox not anymore fuck you customer i do I think you're right.

41:41I mean, I think the hardware, for a while, it was like, it seems pretty serious, you know? Their laptops were pretty well respected. I like the wind. They had the weird, I think it was Panos Panay, who's over at Amazon now, but they had like a weird thing where they were respectable for laptops. Yeah. And now, I don't know. It's all just, it's all eating itself, it feels like. It felt like after the Zune, they realized they needed to change something in hardware, and it went okay after that. And just to put it out there, I still have my original Zune. Hell yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah. I was a creative nomad guy myself.

42:29Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, creative got really screwed during that whole period. Did they? yeah just in the sense that it was like creative was kind of they were sort of there first or very early and they did a lot of innovation and they just got squashed by Apple like Apple did kind of the Apple thing where it's just this juggernaut they just dropped their weight on them I think there was even a lawsuit I want to say creative won it was maybe like a couple hundred million dollars or something I don't know I gotta look this up yeah that's It was one of those win or lose, you still lose. Yeah, yeah.

43:08No one's winning by the end of this other than Apple. Oh, boy. Well, on that happy note, Steve, where can people find you and what are some recent things they should go and look at? $100 million, 2006, by the way. Apple will pay Creative$100 million for a paid-up license to use Creative's awarded patent. Oh. MP3 players. Anyway, what was your question? Oh yeah, it's just where can people find you and what are some interesting things you've been covering recently? Most interesting, yeah, recently is, so we have a story coming up where I previously mentioned to you I would be going to the UK for something and you immediately said, I'm sorry.

43:50Yeah, that's the appropriate. And so we went over to London. then um we've got a really interesting thing we're finalizing now where uh i'm still trying to sort through who's right who's wrong all that stuff but like long story short there is a guy who uh bought sega nintendo microsoft and other game development kits and development cartridges from a scrapyard uh we visited the scrapyard we visited the guy and um he was uh arrested by the police and um sega was connected to it they had a private investigator look into the guy and basically all the you know the companies involved in the chain as far as we tell freaked out when they found out their game development kits and cartridges made it into the hands of a person even though they had thrown them out and uh we're basically trying to sort through where did stuff fall through the cracks and is this an overextension of a corporation into someone's home to work with the police on a raid over game development cartridges or is there any validity to it at least for old games right primarily yeah I think there's maybe like some Switch stuff in there which is I think probably what set the alarm bells off fucking Nintendo yeah anyway but well that so that will go up i'm guessing in the next few weeks so yeah and of course we'll link to gamers nexus but yeah thank you for joining us steve it's always a pleasure having you yeah thank you appreciate it and you've been listening to better offline you can find me at better offline.com uh who knows when this one goes out but in the next couple of weeks he says knowing that you'll have no concept of the time scale i'm talking about but thank you so much for listening everyone

45:49Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

46:54We'll be right back.

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From the publisher

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about Valve’s new console-like Steam Machine and Vision Pro-like Steam Frame, and what this means for the future of gaming.

GamersNexus:  
Valve Steam Machine, Desktop SteamOS, Steam Frame VR, & Controller | ft. Engineering Discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ 
Valve Steam Frame Engineering Deep-Dive: Water Cooling, Thermals, Power, Acoustics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSjvJDe6Ic
Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia 
https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus
https://gamersnexus.net/
https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social
https://x.com/GamersNexus
Steam Machine: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
Steam Frame: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe

YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.

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