It’s funny watching console gamers mourn the “death” of Xbox.
I was a diehard fan of the original Xbox and 360. But to me, Xbox actually died back in December 2012—the day Valve launched Big Picture mode. That’s when every PC suddenly became a console.
The only reason I ever bought an Xbox in the first place was because it brought PC gaming into the living room. The original Xbox was basically a stripped-down PC with a custom OS—and I loved it for that. Finally, I had PC-grade performance on my TV.
But let’s be real: Valve ate Microsoft’s lunch. And with the Steam Deck, they came back for seconds.
The good news? Microsoft finally seems to understand that Valve—not Sony—is their real competition. And now they’re answering with the Xbox handheld.
About time.
Who even uses steam big picture?
In my experience it has always had an horrible experience.
Also pc gaming has always been a thing.
It’s just that consoles have been harder to justify not only because pc gaming have gotten better. But because consoles have gotten worse. It’s no longer plug and play, now you have to do the same steps of installing, downloading things, checking if your version of the console can run that game… At that point big consoles are harder and harder to justify.
Sony will go behind of they don’t do some changes. Xbox fell sooner because they had a thinner base. But sony is not out of danger.
Nintendo is probably fine as they rotated to handhelds, which are a different niche than normal pcs. And because they hold massive exclusive IPs.
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.
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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.
Last year. It still had a lot of lag moving around in my machine.