I had the exact same experience with the original Steam Deck reservation way back when. Valve is usually pretty friendly.

Too late.

Fifa Ultimate Team was already going strong on 360. Started all the way back in 2009, but the insane gambling player packs came a little later.

CS: GO cases technically started during Xbox 360’s life cycle (a little short of 2 years before Xbox One launched), although the game was PC only.

As others have mentioned - Oblivion horse armor DLC was already a thing.

Microsoft first introduced paywalled online functionality with Xbox 360’s Xbox Live subscription.

You could add some more to the list. By this time gaming was already going downhill. What you remember as the ‘last great console generation’ is probably just nostalgia. Although you could make a case that early Xbox 360 days were pretty great.

I’m sure it’s a great controller, but for me personally it’s just way too expensive. Also, I’m never gonna use the trackpads outside of a Steam Deck.

I’d consider my current controller (GameSir Supernova) to be the best one I’ve ever used. For the price of one Steam Controller I could get 2.5 of those. It also comes with a very convenient charging station, which you can plug the receiver into, and then it’s a 2-in-1.

I rarely criticize Valve, but their recent pricing is out of this world. I have no idea what their profit margins are on these devices, but I just cannot imagine them being competitive.

As much as I love my og LCD Deck, I’d never buy it at the current price. Same for the controller.

It should be noted that a lot of ‘unknown’ and even ‘unsupported’ games work just fine, so it’s hard to say what the actual number of ‘playable’+ games is.

As an example - Resident Evil 5 is currently marked as ‘unsupported’, but works flawlessly out of the box. So far I’ve played for about 15 hours and the experience has been perfect.

Textbook example of accessibility benefitting everyone and not just the ones who need it.

As mentioned in the article, supporting the Steam Deck greatly helps with UI/UX, but also potentially with optimization. Especially in 2025, with all bigger releases requiring workstation CPUs, 64GB of RAM and GPUs from fhe future, this is very much needed.