Even if you only used your Steam Machine to play Steam games it's still probably a better deal. Multiplayer and cloud saves are free so you don't need something like PlayStation Plus. Games are generally cheaper and Steam sales make them even cheaper. You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
> You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
I've recently played through all the Dragon Age games on the same PC. A PS5 can only do Inquisition and the best one, Veilguard.
Before that, I played Psychonauts 1.
We forget how many insanely good, solid games existed even in just the PS3 era.
I also played through all the Dragon Age games on PC recently! Origins needs a small patch to run on a 64-bit machine and it doesn't scale very well on a 4k monitor without 3rd party software but other than that it's a great show of backwards compatibility.
> the best one, Veilguard
I assume that's sarcasm or you're the first person I've heard to say that :)
Actually the reason I finally played the series is because my buddy worked on Veilguard. I'll give them credit for assembling something as cohesive as it is considering it went from a single player game to a multiplayer game and back to a single player game during development.
On Linux I can play games going back multiple generations as well as emulating other consoles
Ehh, but on Linux nowadays it's whichever gen, plus modding, multiple frontends and storefronts.