Valve already did the evil part, they were just so early to the game (pun intended) no one knew how to react or what it meant. They somehow avoided mass criticism, or I wasn't paying good enough attention.
I question a 30% developer fee for using Steam. Loot boxes in CS and TF2 to get and keep kids gambling. Destroying nearly every mod and skin community. I don't think I'm willing to sweep all that under the rug because they made it easier to open a steam deck.
I like Valve believe it or not, but I question a lot of these decisions.
While I won't argue loot boxes, and I dont know enough about mod/skin communities...
The 30% developer fee makes a lot more sense if you consider that steam is much more than a game store. They host forums, guides, achievements, cloud saves, multiple versions of the game at once with beta channel access, screenshots, remote play, extras like Proton support, a friends list that will show you when other people are playing a game (advertising). And the store page has all sorts of stuff like ratings, reviews... a shopping cart and ability to purchase more than 1 game at a time (didn't know that was a feature, but apparently it is). And top of all that, it's just frankly where PC gamers are, so theres a ton of built in marketing.
Not every game benefits from all these things. But it's hardly just a storefront. I would question Gamestop taking a 30% cut. I would question if EGS wanted the same 30% cut as valve gets. Gamers prefer Steam over EGS, and the reason they prefer it isn't just because "it's a nicer store front." It's a whole platform thing.
Technically no-one is being forced but network effects mean that not publishing on steam is essentially suicide for any dev without a huge marketing budget to overcome those network effects. This means that Steam is in a position where they can demand feeds in excess of what they could in a healthy competitive market.
Is there anything preventing a healthy competetive market for game stores on PC? Does Steam/Valve engage in behaviour that limits competition? Alternatives do exist - itch.io, GOG, Epic Game Store, and just putting an .exe file on your website.
If the market is not being artificially suppressed (I don't believe it is), and developer still think it's financially advantageous to pay Steam's fees, doesn't that indicate the fee is "correct"?
Another way to word that, is that the benefit that Steam provides through their distribution/passive marketing service is so large that it justifies the 30% price tag. If it did not, then developers would go find another service. It's basic economics.
Here is where I come in and recommend everyone check out Playnite: https://playnite.link/
When I care about supporting a developer or publisher and they offer their product on their own storefront DRM-free, I will often go there to buy. Or I buy from GoG which takes a smaller cut. Playnite lets me launch my Steam and non-Steam games in a seamless fashion. Steam still does a great job as a game installer/patch manager, and helps me discover new games. But I'm not locked into paying them a 30% fee, which is pretty brutal for some smaller publishers.
Literally people will look down on you if you don't buy an iPhone.
They back off when they find out my line of work, but you hear about bullying and peer pressure in school over bubbles. That does not end when you leave high school.
One VC said that people that buy Android don't have taste and wouldn't work with them. Now they say Android is for poor people. Freedom to sideload or install a custom os be damned.
It's not a high school thing, it's just amplified during that point in life; there is always pressure to conform.
I don't care about whether or not some VC thinks I have class either professionally or personally. Avoid people that jump to conclusions and you'll be better off, regardless of how fancy their personal titles are.
Apple knows this and has curated it. Why do people think that they had specific bubble colours for messaging devices inside/outside Apple ecosystem.
They even did deep, dirty tricks like this: https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-.... Not only that but Apple just love to lean heavily on their own custom functionality rather than coming up with open/reusable technologies. Apple are happy to use Wifi & Bluetooth standards to compete in the market, but not so much standards for chats/group chats (where Android users find things don't mesh as well/they don't have the same functionality as iOS users).
I can't for the life of me find it now, but I remember reading an article a while back on how Google found a way to trick iPhones into accepting Android messages as "blue bubble"/iOS messages by dumping some string onto the end or something. I'm sure it was a HN post but I can't find it, which sucks cause it was pretty funny reading.
I mean, $800 is kinda cheap for self-worth, if we’re honest. Cheaper than a sports car or house with a view or own apartment or even one vacation someplace fancy.
But yeah, ideally one shouldn’t tie self worth to perishables.
What’s your line of work that you need an Android phone?
I find dealing with Android users from iMessage tiring but everyone I know who uses Android also uses WhatsApp and that works just fine cross platform.
SD is ultimately a linux computer, so you can still throw on another store if you really care. It's also a relatiely niche device, so not quite prone to monopoly effects anyway.
You can install other game stores on your steam deck. You can directly install apps outside of Steam. You can even install a different operating system if you want. It's not locked to Steam in the slightest.
according to polygon gamestop's margin on new games was around 25%. So that's not massively different and steam absolutely provides more value for the developer than gamestop.
I don't really get the GS comparisons. GS was from a different time where your options for distribution on console was selling in brick and mortar stores or barely selling at all. they 100% can't justify 25% in 2023 as digital purchases supercede physical, but that's not when these rates were negotiated upon.
Other features steam develops for you with that 30% cut: Multiplayer friends list apis, cloud save apis and space, wide open VR apis (that get turned into Unreal Engine apis, game streaming, voice chat (though it's terrible by today's standards), workshop (modding and UGC) apis storage and management, Free keys to give out on other platforms which actually decreases that 30% cut depending on how much you use that functionality, built in "markets" for in game items, steam remote play apis and functionality, remote play together api (streaming gamepad stuff over networks without needing any crazy configuration or special programs), the new input system which is just incredible and can basically eliminate any work an individual game developer has to do to support powerful input tools and accessibility, free selling games on linux with very little dev work needed to support it and way less demanding bugs from linux users, built in customizable (but purposely bad) DRM if you only care for a minimal implementation, etc
"Steam" is not just a game store. It's like if walmart built an entire industry around maintaining, supporting, and extending anything you sold through them. 30% is a lot, but Valve is the only company out of basically the entire retail industry actually providing value to sellers and buyers alike, rather than just a storefront.
The CS:GO child gambling problem is HUGE though, and unconscionable. I don't know how Gabe feels about that, but I don't care. It should be exceptionally illegal to give a child access to a "gambling like" game that ever touches real money.
It can be worth it to them and still be egregious. At 50% it’d likely be worth it (to the extent it’s still a viable business) because that’s where the largest market of PC gamers are. It doesn’t necessarily mean anyone would be happy with the fee.
They also host the game download and all its updates allowing buyers to (re)download whenever they want.
30% is the standard retail cut if I’m right. So if you sell your game at Walmart, they take 30% too.
Edit: There is actually a way to bypass Steam’s cut - provide by Valve strangely enough - if I’m right. As developer you can mint as many API keys for your games as you like and sell those through other means. Your customers will still download and play through Steam but Steam gets nothing - i.e. you use their infrastructure for free; of course they would get their cut from copies sold via their store.
yea, I don't get how people complain about Valve. Google, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft all take roughly the same.
The difference is people actually like using Steam. They actually want to be locked in. I'd rather by a game on Steam vs Gog. Consider that. DRM free, but people prefer the lock-in. That's because Valve is nailing it.
Imagine people saying the same about Microsoft, Epic, EA etc.. Nope.
Many games on Steam are DRM free. You have to download the game through Steam... but from Gog you have to download the games from Gog too. One uses their app as a gatekeeper and the other uses a website. KSP is an example just off the top of my head where you can download the game, delete steam and keep playing. Not all games implement Steam DRM.
But also yes. Steam has made the gaming on linux process so much easier. Using steam is the easiest way to game now and I definitely prefer all my games to be there.
They all do. You can argue it's too high but the issue is that they all own those platforms and the hardware you develop on (except Google). Valve, not so much.
>The difference is people actually like using Steam. They actually want to be locked in.
yup, and that's where the danger starts. People like being locked into Apple as well. the consoles all conditioned people to being locked in. I understand it, but don't think it's a good thing.
Microsoft does technically have a lock in with PC, but they have enough historical lawsuits on those issues that they are lax on what is hosted on Windows. The reckoning for Apple/Google is definately coming, though.
> but the issue is that they all own those platforms and the hardware you develop on (except Google). Valve, not so much.
Console manufacturers charge a separate per unit royalty for every game published for their consoles, typical in the range of 10-20%.
That’s how they make most of their money before online stores - the console is sold at near break even typically but they do earn on extra accessories.
On one level, it's evil lock-in. On another, it's all-products compatibility with very tight integration.
I don't like being locked into Apple, but I can't argue with the extraordinary convenience of doing it their way. New iPhone or iPad? Just set it next to your old one and it will pull everything over. New Mac? You can clone from a backup of a different Mac. I started with an iPad, got a Mac a few years later, and finally got an iPhone after Google released the amazing (loved the fingerprint reader on the back for unlocking) but disastrous (the battery would decide to go to hell one day, no warning, and you were losing 30+% of power per hour) Nexus 6P.
No. Valve was never against legit developers using their infrastructure for games sold elsewhere even if Valve dont get any cut. If you have game that sold 1000 copies on Steam you can still generate 10,000 keys for selling elsewhere.
What they clamped down on was developers who built $0.01 game for trading cards farming. Now Valve just have some fair usage rules so developer of game that sold 10 copies on Steam can't request 1,000,000 keys for it.
Disclosure: I am indie game studio co-fouder so Steam keys is something we deal with.
I found it - in February 2023 it looks like added some limits and are enforcing that Steam customers don't get a worse deal than customers who use CD keys.
But yes they have clamped down on the fake games for trading card farming too.
It was a news in February 2023, but Steam had this as part of their ToS for decade or more. Basically Valve want you to run the same discounts on Steam as you run on other stores.
AFAIK it's perfectly fine to temporary run something like lowest-ever price outside of Steam on a condition that within some timeframe (not sure about timing) there will be similar sale on Steam.
Note that this was after Valve was taken to court and was ordered to pay fines for violating consumer protection laws by not offering refunds.
> Valve must pay a fine of AU$3 million (about £1.6m/US$2.3m/€1.8m) for misleading Steam users in Australia by stating they were not entitled to refunds for faulty games on Steam
Australian laws do not apply to the rest of the world - and a $2.3m fine is pennies anyway. So no, that is not why people in the US can get a refund after playing a game for up to 2 hours...
The only thing I get mad at Steam about is that the client updates (baseless accusation incoming) WAY too often and/or desperately needs to have some sort of incremental update system. I am, however, not a game developer. But as a consumer it's been very good.
Feels very apple-esque when people spin up compliance to government regulations as "pioneering". Then Epic has the same spin every other company does and they are ground to dust in the internet discourse.
But yeah, difference is Valve knows to be good to consumers (mostly) but make dev support a nightmare if you're not big enough.
> That, and Steam hasn't really burned many folks, ever.
I think like many new things it got off to a rocky start in 2003 and 2004 (especially with the launch of Half-Life 2). I only started using Steam on 2007 I think and I've never had an issue.
One major plus with Steam is buying a single copy of certain games and having a friend join instantly via remote play.
Also nice to be able to buy some new games and run them on an old laptop, can't do that on my xbox 360 anymore. My library all runs on my latest computer too. At least xbox makes a fair amount of the catalog backwards compatible, it's not a thing on Playstation.
edit: plus I can give friends access to my entire library, providing I'm not using it at the time.
Another fun thing about steam: There's no setting for the game developer to enable/disable the networking, so if a steam game uses steamworks and doesn't have multiplayer through steam, it can just be modded in and works great.
This is fair, but it's an oddly mixed bag on Playstation for legacy reasons.
Free-to-play games can be played online without a subscription, but paid games require a subscription - I imagine as a holdover from pre-Fortnite days and cross-platform play.
I'm a subscriber for the game catalogue and only really play online multiplayers that are F2P anyway, but yeah it doesn't seem at all justifiable. It's a strange decision too - I can't imagine the subset of people who are NOT subscribers for the monthly games and/or catalogue AND are playing games online that are NOT f2p is big enough to be a significant impact to their bottom line. If anything it would be a deterrent from choosing the platform.
Gamestop has a single interaction with the sales process. Once I've bought my game, unless I want to return it, I never have to think about gamestop again. So while the "get the game to the store" costs more, the act of swapping money in exchange for the game is basically 0 work. Gamestop has logistics to deal with as their primary service.
Valve has a perpetual obligation. I might buy the game and then never even download it. Or I might download the game. delete it. download the game again next week. delete it ... etc... And take 1000 screenshots that I want them to host, and upload mods for a game that they have to host and people may download. And this may happen forever (or at least until Valve ceases to be a company).
Fable III isn't even available in the Steam store anymore... but they have a repo hosting the game files. And they still take updates (the package was last updated in july 2023, even though its been off the store for years). According to SteamDB there are 14 people playing it right now. Steam has been supporting a game that they haven't even sold in the past 8 years.
I'm willing to bet that if I ask gamestop for anything regarding support for a game from 8 years ago they'd just laugh at me.
tl;dr - physical distribution has cut and dry limited obligations, but steam has to deal with stuff forever.
>the act of swapping money in exchange for the game is basically 0 work.
you're still treating this as a software service. Remember that for a physical store:
1. you need to maintain the store. you can't have dirt bugs and grime everywhere
2. you need insurance to deal with various inevitable factors. theft, crime within store grounds, destruction of property, etc.
3. buildings break down faster than servers. you need to upkeep that.
4. security. Need to monitor the store in and outside of business hours.
5. yes, support. They manage memberships, pre-orders, process returns in or out of warranty/return period, check inventory for if older used games are around, and can route you to other locations for such product.
Its only cut and dry if you never think what is needed to maintain the norm for you.
That’s not a downside for Steam, and probably totally negates any distribution cost.
Imagine if you had to go to Gamestop every time you launched a game. They would kill for that opportunity. Steam has a captive audience who goes to their store every day.
That's fair. and there are plenty of stories of game devs that do moderate their forums being incredibly toxic themselves.
But point being, Steam is a whole platform. When THPS 1+2's "Upload a custom skate park" broke, I just hit shift+tab and clicked discussions, and bam. theres discussions about it being broken for other people. and I didn't even have to launch the game, I could just go to discussions from the game on steam to see when it was fixed. I didn't have to go googling for everything.
And the beauty of it, is that valve hasn't made all of it a walled garden. It's a nice garden, but they do a pretty good job of not keeping it completely locked down (which is the main reason why proton has been so successful).
So no, Steam won't moderate your forums for you, but they will host the forums and you don't have to have your own/none. But then again, that might be more of a benefit to the customers than to the devs who may not care.
Some example? I don't use Steam, nor play videogames nowadays but I played a lot the original Baldur's Gate back in the day, so I'm somehow curious about this (even simple pointers are appreciated)
Personally, I insta-bought Baldurs Gate 3 when it launched due to having played Baldurs Gate 1 & 2 + the video's of it showing the graphics looking ok.
I've not looked at them for ages as they were very toxic for a few weeks after launch, and I personally have no real desire to go looking again now. Maybe they've magically improved somehow, but I doubt it.
What do you mean, the game is objectively solid and is very much a continuation of the Boulders Gate series. It has flaws, but personally I think it's the best crpg i've played in years (and without nostalgia filters).
I'm guessing its probably related to the fact that BG1 and BG2 are T-rated, BG3 is both M-rated (in part for sex) and inclusive in a way that, well, more than one review or article suggested it might be something like “the queerest video game of all time”.
To be clear, I'm not criticizing, I just am not surprised that a certain segment of the BG1/BG2 fanbase is unhappy.
I see a thread of people talking about their experience of the game and how aspects of it made them feel. That's exactly what a forum is for, and a very legitimate way to engage with a piece of art.
Particularly for a game with strong sexual representationa and inclusion, it is legitimate to discuss aspects where the inclusion is still lacking. This may be useful for the Devs future plans, or it may change nothing but be useful for other prospective players to understand about the game.
You might not find the thread useful or engaging. I don't find the threads about compatibility with hardware I don't own useful or engaging. Not every thread is for every person.
>Not every game benefits from all these things. But it's hardly just a storefront.
yeah, that's my issue. but it's all or nothing because the only thing that really matters is presence. So you just suck it up or use another store (or distribute independently).
>Gamers prefer Steam over EGS, and the reason they prefer it isn't just because "it's a nicer store front." It's a whole platform thing.
It's really just network effects at the end of the day. We've seen enough instances in other places in tech where the de facto is shit and even actively ruining its product, but people stay.
Sad thing isn't how big it is, it's how hard it is to fail.
When they established a 30% fee they were on the cutting edge of digital stores and doing something very risky. So to make what they made work was great for small developers.
I would argue they still aren't evil (and Apple is, though I am a shareholder) because Steam, the Windows store and Epic can all live together on my PC as competing store / DRM. If a developer doesn't want to give up 30%, they have viable alternatives.
Hacker News has dozens if not hundreds of threads about people complaining about bandwidth costs on their static blog going viral and getting inundated with views. Some games taking up 100+ Gb and getting millions of downloads for week’s can’t be cheap.
This is a thread about steam charging a 30% cut and people asking about what costs they could possibly have?
If Steam didn’t take a cut then they would not be able to pay for bandwidth. And even a 100 mb indie game downloaded a million times is still a lot of bandwidth times that by tens of thousands of games and it’s more than just games, screenshots, saves, mods, forum posts, video trailers, patches, etc.
A one time sale of a 4 dollar game that could support 100 gb worth of mods with being able to delete, download, and reinstall dozens of times has ongoing costs.
Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.
>Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.
I think the point was that if you were hosting independently, your video game isn't going to be 100+ GB. You will handle the costs or build it into the price of the game.
Dunno how thin margins Valve operates on, but I think they can survive on less than 30%, especially since they offer lower rates to AAA studios.
Oh I was agreeing that Steam provides value, and supporting it with the suggestion that if they didn't people would opt out and just sell games without Steam.
Yep. Valve takes that cut and serves up your game (and its patches) on demand FOREVER. No need to fight for shelf space, or bicker with store management on product positioning or any other shit. When a gamer wants your game, they get it, and if they're looking for something that might be like your game, they'll find yours, too.
I also remember reading an article from way back when that said that brick and mortar revenue cuts were at _least_ twice what Steam was taking. Perhaps this memory is totally wrong... with today's Google I'll certainly never be able to find the source of the memory.
most indies don't (and usually shouldn't, unless mobile) target casual gamers, and they can't bet on "stumbling upon a random game" to sell.
That stuff isn't easy but fortunately Valve isn't the only one offering that, and pretty much every other storefront offers lower rates if that's important.
Sure, but when your game is selling in the double digits, that's not something you can bet on. Discoverability is a multiplier and if an indies' is very low, Valve doesn't help there. You gotta pay $100, so I need at least 14 people to "stumble" and buy my game just to pay that back. Then I need 140 people so I can get that $100 back.
If valve wants to earn those 3 dollars, they need to ensure my game can be discovered to begin with. "becsuse there's a lot of people on steam" doesn't cut it these days. That was valuable at one point but I'd say aroind 2014 or so it ceased to be so.
What on earth is this referring to? Steam doesn't inhibit moding at all. Heck, it has built in mod support that's used by games like Oxygen Not Included and Rimworld and it's huge ( https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/ ).
Steam also doesn't bat an eye at mods from outside of the client and there's no shortage of mod managers that work with steam - Vortex, CKAN, r2modman, etc...
I am with you on the loot boxes, not sure I agree on the rest. City skylines as an enormous modding community, on steam, for example.
I am OK with the 30%, because it's not a monopoly. You can use any other store, "sideload", whatever, without restrictions. I think, but I am not sure, that you could actually offer your game cheaper on other channels in parallel. But because people like the convenience of steam (which is probably one if not the best implementation of a software store) that many would pay the premium to have the game on steam.
Well, Source was the last Counter Strike game that allowed people to use custom skins. CS2 enforces sv_pure when playing on official servers, so you can't make up your own skin and use it. It sucks.
Using custom skins on official servers by modifying game files has always been forbidden since CS:GO. CS2 doesn't make it worse. Join a community server if you want to use your own skin you made up.
At one time[1] Valve even tried to ban community servers that offer custom models/skins. Though they doesn't seem to enforce it anymore.
It's worth pointing out that this is for cosmetics. The largescale lootbox outcries have been exclusively about gameplay advantages. Games that only provide cosmetics are usually praised for being fair. For example, Overwatch also has lootboxes - but for cosmetics only - and nobody gives a damn.
And then there's cards, which you earn for free, and can sell for a wallet balance in order to buy games.
> keep kids gambling
I don't believe this is their goal, even though they certainly aren't doing enough to prevent it.
Overwatch *had lootboxes. Now it has a BattlePass you buy, new heros are locked behind buying the BattlePass or grinding the first ~40 levels to get it for free, and also premium cosemtics in a FOMO-style "today's deals" daily rotation store. No lootboxes. I miss OW lootboxes. I'm not a gambler but the surprise/novelty was fun, and once I had most cosemtics I wanted I could also just collect them which was satisfying. I had >500 and double digits of every seasonal loot box at the end of OW1.
Actually they changed the unlock system, you have to win 10 games as the role the locked hero is in to unlock them now. At least that's what I had to do, might be cause I had OW1 since the early days and played a lot of it.
Blizzard had the worst luck. Their loot boxes were fair and most reasonable, but because they also looked so visually appealing, they were used in the thumbnail and header of every major article describing the horrors of loot boxes in general.
Las Vegas had the worst luck. Their casinos were fair and most reasonable, but because they also looked so visually appealing, they were used in the thumbnail and header of every major article describing the horrors of gambling in general.
Honestly I found it crazy that out of all the lootbox systems that existed, Overwatch got the brunt of the outrage. CS to this day has a much more predatory and in pretty much every way worse lootbox system than OW ever did. I don't think I spent a single cent on that game (other than the 40EUR or whatever it was to buy it) and I unlocked most of the things for my main champs through the natural lootbox drops.
It was such a neutral system and I literally never felt any type of FOMO or pressure to buy lootboxes, which can't be said for other games with similar systems.
Not true, the outcries are about the gambling aspect, be it cosmetic or not. When you can buy cosmetics directly (or convert real money to game money) the general consensus is that it’s fine, you know exactly what you get, with loot boxes you don’t (and they are always filled primarily with junk nobody wants to stack the odds against you)
Overwatch was more or less the worst possible implementation of cosmetic loot boxes and it’s great that they’re actually gone.
30% fee is fine? If you don't want to use steam you can put an ad in the back of 2600 Magazine and mail out CD-R or USB sticks like they did in the olden days. That's how Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem were sold for many years.
Valve charges 30% because customers want all the stuff that comes with steam. They work for that 30% unlike smartphone ecosystems that offer a closed ecosystem and can lock competitors out of their platform.
>f you don't want to use steam you can put an ad in the back of 2600 Magazine and mail out CD-R or USB sticks like they did in the olden days.
you're free to. I will offer Itch.io as a modern alternative: https://itch.io/
almost zero restrictions on games you can upload, and they let you set your own share, even down to 0% if you so please. I think the default is 10%, which seems reasonable.
>Valve charges 30% because customers want all the stuff that comes with steam
not really. they charge 30% because they can leverage their 90% market share on small devs. In fact, they already relented and offer a lower share if you sell more than like, 25m copies. That suggests that they do need to work to keep AAA stUDIOS from making their own stores (again).
It's all about market dynamics. And I bet many steam users just use it for network effects.
It's not even just loot boxes, but them letting people gamble with the items (which can be worth a lot of money!) on unregulated gambling sites that allow minors. It's insidious stuff.
There’s so many options for distributing PC games that the market clearly sees the 30% as fair. This is an ecosystem where you could sell a game on a website with a payment portal and nothing else…
Plenty of publishers do try ditching Steam for their own storefront. They always come back to steam. Ubisoft is currently doing this with the latest Assassin's Creed game, PC sales are Epic and UPlay store only.
I remember some pushback when the Steam store was launched, with people pointing out (rightfully) that with this you don't really own the games you buy
There is a tendency for people not to see evil where they don’t want to. Lego, for example, is responsible for producing a ridiculous amount of plastic every day. I am expecting to get downvoted just for mentioning it.
They do know what they are doing to the environment themselves, though, despite the public’s blind eye they are making at least some effort to research more biodegradable materials.
30% was more reasonable in 2005-2006 when steam was getting it's first third party games on the platform (and games were cheaper as well, a selling point for digital distribution at the time, which has no longer existed for many years due to greed) and when compute and bandwidth was massively more expensive than it is today. These days the cut should be closer to 5-10% at most.
> Destroying nearly every mod and skin community.
I miss those days so much. When I was a teenager there was always new maps and mods for hl1/hl2 to try out. Now modding in pretty much every game and it's community doesn't compare, most developers won't ever release tooling for their engines and will sue people who reverse engineer their games to make third party tooling. Even 'mod friendly' developers like paradox and bethesda don't like people making changes that affect core gameplay too much and will strip out functionality to prevent people from doing it because they would rather pump out shovelware DLCs to make money.
Valve lucked out by doing all the enshittification in the late 2000s/early 2010s when their reputation was at it's highest. If they had cultivated this same following today and then rug pulled in the way they did in the past they would have killed their business entirely. Imagine if CDPR/A ctiblizzard/EA announced they would never make a game again and would only sell third party games through GOG/Battlenet/Origin, their distribution platform. Their business would be gone in a matter of months.
> These days the cut should be closer to 5-10% at most.
It's interesting to see this randomly thrown out, I'm curious if there's any basis for this? Epic Games currently takes 12% and five years later they're still unable to turn a profit. That's for a store that wrote a brand new launcher that's worse than Steam's and they don't have nearly half the features Steam does.
I believe Humble takes 5% and they're also not doing that well.
5% would hardly even cover the CC fees. Not to mention refunds.
Yeah I think it was publicised a few years ago that Rockstar had a special deal for Grand Theft Auto V at least.
It may have been all developers get reduced fees at certain sales tiers but I don't remember the exact details.
Yeah, facts here. Valve is of course already evil AF. And braindead gamers jump on that Epic hate train and defend the Valve money making machine that steals 30% from devs just because they can. I do not think Epic is great either, owned partially by Tencent ... but at least their competition and lowering devs fees and going to court vs Apple and things like that benefit the actual devs in the end.
What does Valve actually make with all this money? That rake on billions for basically doing nothing and like since HL2 the amount of games they actually developed was very low. Alyx was a niche game for VR only. Maintaining and improving CS and calling it 2.0 is hardly anything considering what they could do. Dota 2 they just bought it. Steam machines failed and it was never that they actually sell hardware with a loss. So seriously where is all this money going?
I can only assume straight into Gabens and other high level execs pockets at Valve.
Don't you see the topic? They developed Steam Deck platform, with paying for FOSS developers and opensourcing/upstreaming. I haven't expected such a great thing done by a private game company.
Well that's all great and all and I like Proton but they only use it for their own game. Its totally tight to Steam and its not recommended to be used with non-Steam games. So this is THE OPPOSITE of doing it the nice way and good open source should be done.
The also did not start from scratch and just used Wine and build upon this and payed the guy who did DXVK ... its hardly eating up billions to come up with something like the Steam Deck and Proton. Steam OS is basically just Arch Linux now so its hardly anything revolutionary from scratch.
Do not get me wrong I like all these things but I stand by what I said. I fail to see where all the money is going. Take a SINGLE AAA game where Valve rakes in 30% of the profits for a few distribution servers and a few forum mods. They have invented a money printing machine and for like 20 years the have been printing money and there is nothing visible for anyone to actually see. They do not even make games. Other game devs do not have billions at their disposal and develop games with high budgets and at a 100x faster pace. I stand by what I said, the money goes straight into Gabens and other exec pockets, the have nothing to show for it. The Index is expensive AF its not that they made a loss with it. They make profits with everything they do, especially the Steam Deck.
Steam controller also failed but its not that they wasted billions on that failed product either. I never tried it, I think the idea was great but the layout was wrong, buttons should not be on the bottom.
You tell me where all the money is going. Like do you really think they spend even more the a tiny tiny fraction of that they made on paying open source devs and deving the Steam Deck? The already had their money printing machine loooooong b4 the Steam Deck was even an idea. WTF did they do with it?
> there is nothing visible for anyone to actually see
> You tell me where all the money is going
> Other game devs ... develop games ... at a 100x faster pace
> Steam controller
> The Index
Steam Controller gave us Steam Input, which works with:
- Steam Controllers
- Xbox 360 controllers
- Xbox One controllers
- Xbox One S controllers
- PS3 Controllers
- PS4 Controllers
- PS5 Controllers
- WiiU Pro Controllers
- Switch Joycons
- Switch Pro controllers
- A bevy of other third party controllers
All with shareable layouts, hosted by Valve.
The Index gave us Steam VR, which supports:
- Valve Index
- Oculus Rift
- Oculus Rift S
- HTC Vive
- HTC Vive Pro
- HTC Vive Cosmos
- Razer OSVR
- Pimax 4K, 5K, 5K Plus, 8K, and 8K Plus
- Dell Visor
- Samsung Odyssey and Odyssey+
- Acer AH101
- HP WMR
- Lenovo Explorer
- HP Reverb
- Varjo VR-1 and VR-2
Along with their support for OpenXR.
Not to mention Remote Play, and the variety of platforms they support with that. Or the hosting for cloud saves.
I'm not saying this costs billions, but I do think you're missing quite a bit of what Valve do when they launch something. There's quite a lot visible for people to actually see and use.
You are deeply ignorant of how much money and effort Valve are pumping into the FOSS Linux ecosystem. The names of their employees as well as their contractors can be found attached to submissions on a wide swath of projects. The project lead behind Proton was an employee of CodeWeavers, essentially the people who made Wine. A partnership! Insinuating that they're all take no give is just ridiculous.
The do increase shareholder value, just in exactly short-term. The problem with publicly traded companies is not as much wanting to increase the value, but how short is the time horizon, when most owners don't have any understanding of the bussiness other than just handful of numbers every quarter.
I was a teenaged boy when I first started playing Counter Strike. Maybe I’m a Luddite but the game is still fun; I feel like you don’t have to gamble or buy 48 cosmetic collectibles to enjoy it.
It's explicitly not aimed at children being rated M / mature and with obvious themes implying as much. Obviously children still play it, but there has to be some level of responsibility on the parents here.
Whether or not children play CS:GO/CS:2 is irrelevant. It is a game where 50% of the time you play as terrorists shooting law enforcement, it's very obviously not aimed at kids.
The only way for kids to gamble in CS at all is to either steal a credit card, which is obviously not Valve's fault, or for them to have a Steam gift card. If anything is to be done about the children, I think Valve should just 1) require a users to have a credit card on file in order to buy lootboxes, and 2) require re-entering the full credit card details if the user makes several purchases in a short period of time, in order to stop kids who, for example, memorized the CVV of a card already on file in Steam.
Keep in mind that uploading a government ID would have issues, seeing as in the US a driver's license is not universal, not to mention IDs all across the globe. Maybe there's an alternative form of ID that would work that I just can't think of, but anyways, I'm against needing to upload a government ID to access anything unless it's specifically for governmental purposes.
Ok but as a society we’ve settled on letting fully grown adults partake in some forms of gambling. Are we really equating loot boxes in a mature rated game to casinos that will empty your kids college fund in the span of 12 hours?
My point is that the "think of the children" angle is redundant and reductive. We simply don't need to go there to have a discussion on the pros and cons of lootboxes.
Gambling is very different from csgo cases and pokemon cards. One of the insidious aspects of gambling is that people can delude themselves that they can actually get rich from it
I'm aware and I'm not going to deal in absolutes because I'm sure there are a few people out there that do think they can make money from csgo skins but it's absolutely nothing compared to actual gambling.
I'm a former gambling addict, it is very very difficult for me to lose the amount of money I have lost at craps or blackjack playing magic the gathering.
I don't think we can classify all variable reward systems as gambling. Even competitive online chess with elo and matchmaking could be classified as gambling.
> Gambling (also known as betting or gaming) is the wagering of something of value ("the stakes") on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. Gambling thus requires three elements to be present: consideration (an amount wagered), risk (chance), and a prize.[1] The outcome of the wager is often immediate, such as a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, or a horse crossing the finish line, but longer time frames are also common, allowing wagers on the outcome of a future sports contest or even an entire sports season.
CS cases ticks all of the boxes. I'm really curious what your definition of gambling is.
Most children who had pokemon cards bought for them likely don't consider the act of buying and opening pokemon card packs to be life altering or ruining events. I also doubt the average person considers buying packs of pokemon cards gambling. So while it fits the literal definition, it's considered different colloquially.
This is very much unlike slot machines and blackjack which can and do take over people's lives.
Gambling in a casino also doesn't have to be life altering either. In fact there are people who have destroyed their lives opening pokemon card packs. Reddit is literally full of stories. Here is the first random story I clicked on: https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonTCG/comments/14uucxy/im_in_3...
People who were raised from childhood with a particular form of gambling as a regular thing seeing it as different than “real gambling” generally isn't surprising, but it doesn't mean that there actually is a real meaningful difference beside personal acclimatization.
For me, if there's some good way to gate kids from participating then gambling with loot boxes should be perfectly accepted. Not that it's good game design, but adults can vote with their attention/money
> if there's some good way to gate kids from participating then gambling with loot boxes should be perfectly accepted
There already is, you gotta have a credit card to buy lootboxes. And while I am not aware of the situation all across the globe, in most places you gotta be 18+ to get a credit card. For a debit one you might qualify a couple years earlier in the US (and probably some other countries), but an easy solution would be for Steam to just ping the bank for info on the age of the customer. However, I am not sure if that would be easily possible, especially if we are talking about API-like approaches.
The only current workaround is using gift cards, but I somehow doubt that kids resort mostly to that instead of using their parents’ credit cards. But at that point, it is on parents, because there are all sorts of ways to solve the problem on an individual level (e.g., get a card with a low limit just for steam, use a paypal account that you have to manually log into for every transaction on steam and don’t give your kid the credentials, etc).
Unfortunately, there is no way one could feasibly stop some parents from just handing their kid a credit card and mentally checking out. And any other solution to the problem that won’t massively inconvenience adult Steam customers seems to be difficult to imagine.
At least here in Australia, Steam vouchers get sold in supermarkets and any one at any age can buy them. I'm not sure if those vouchers work on the Steam market but I'd assume they would (I've never seen anything in the Steam UI to suggest that deposited funds will only work in some places).
Oh same. I think it is far, far worse. Sports betting has a really gross social component where the group applies social pressure to push casual spectators to "put their money where their mouth is", I don't think sports betting at a venue should be illegal, but I also don't think letting anyone place bets with a booky from the drunken comfort of their friend's living room is at all beneficial for society.
I kind of get the argument, even if I'm not fully convinced, that betting is something people are going to do anyway so you might as well codify it and keep it honest, but if nothing else, advertising sports betting should absolutely be illegal, and sports betting should probably still be illegal.
Gambling is literally anything where you pay money to have a chance to win something. That includes all these loot box things in literally any and all of its forms.
As someone who was once addicted to these games, they should absolutely be illegal. We really should not allow corporations to print money with drug dealer methods.
That definition is very reductive. Any competitive tournament with an entree fee is gambling?
Also, the reason I'm against banning such games is because when you look at all the things we find fun, you will be sad to see that a lot of them just boil down to variable reward. That variable reward aspect is what makes it fun.
You're right. Steam also charges an atrociously high % of revenue, and yet people bitch endlessly when they have to use Epic Games Store or other marketplaces EVEN THOUGH we espouse so much about game developers being constantly fucked by big companies.
Increasing profit margins is a reliable way to increase stock prices, which is (at this stage of capitalism) the most powerful force directing the allocation of capital. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop with far-reaching power throughout the economy.
Allocation of capital matters for startups. Most large companies aren’t issuing new stock, so profit margins only affect secondary markets for their stock.
You're trying to muddy the waters by calling it gambling. Gaming and digital loot boxes are different. Even if they share some similarities. Gambling is far, far more destructive than digital loot boxes in games. No need to conflate the two.
Please, downplay the impact of serious diseases some more. I'm sure your "it's not gambling even though it's basically a rigged lottery" argument will convince everyone here. Even plain old video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis by the WHO, to say nothing of literal gambling.
Every TRANSACTION involving a CS:GO (CS2 now) skin gives valve a cut. An entire offshore gambling INDUSTRY exists around treating these skins as value bearing tokens you can deposit, gamble away, and cash out. They then take the enormous profit that unregulated gambling always generates, and pushes it towards degenerate gambler streamers who regularly have thousands of literal children watch their stream, where they often gamble with a rigged account made for them by the gambling companies so they can show artificial success to, once again, 12 year olds.
They pay these streamers millions of dollars, up to and including one of the streamers moving to a different country with more lax gambling laws so they could continue to gamble on the companies dime (because they are a degenerate gambler) in order to hook children on gambling.
The skins work exactly like crypto in this case, except the on-ramp is a game that millions of children play (I don't care "it's not aimed at kids", you don't need to be 18 to buy a steam gift card at the store for the skins, and the game itself is free, which is a huge lure for children without an allowance) and it is entirely unregulated.
This entire system is being used to purposely trap gambling addicts at a very young age to milk them for as long as possible in the gambling industry, for every dime they are worth, and until they have used up all possible credit they can find just to keep pressing that addiction button. Twitch is in on it too.
How is it not gambling? You put in something you need to buy with money to receive an item you can trade for money. Sounds awfully similar to me like you go to a casino, get some chips to wager and then later trade the remaining chips back for money. Regardless of whether the "official" law states it's gambling or not from a moral perspective they are pretty much identical.
> to receive an item you can later trade for money.
A person could reasonably argue can be exchanged vs primarily intended as a stand in for cash is important. If the items are intended as actual items people value then that's more defensible than say chips that only exist to be cashed out. (And I'm not familiar enough to know whether that's the case here)
I would maybe agree with you if the marketplace were not operated by Valve. But it is. This makes very clear that the one of the intended use cases of the skins is to be sold. Which is understandable, it's very likely Valves makes in the order of a billion dollars just from the marketplace.
Valve's a software distribution company, not a hardware company.
The steam deck exists primarily to expand their targetable market.
It's of no benefit to them if people's devices fail - they just stop buying games (unlike Apple, where the devices are intended to slow down or stop working altogether).
Valve may not be a hardware company on the scale of Apple, but they do design/prototype/create/repair hardware products. Also, they do a lot more than just distribute software [0].
I liked the direction you were going, but I don’t think you made the right comparison. iPhones, for example, are used 30-60% longer (4-10 years) than a Samsung phone (3-6 years). Apple provides software updates for all of their devices for 6+ years.
I’ve had very few devices containing lithium ion batteries that didn’t require a new battery. I have devices from the early 2000s from Sony, HP, Dell, Nikon, and countless others whose batteries have failed.
I don't think Apple is the pinnacle of repairability by any means, but they have been making slow improvements in this area (like replaceable back glass in the new model phones, the entire mainboard doesn't need to be replaced for common repairs as often now, etc).
I think Apple essentially sells disposable, glued shut, one time use electronics while grandstanding like crazy about the environment.
Lisa Jackson has probably the hardest job at the whole company, to drum up the stats and relativism to make it look like they are trying at all in any meaningful way, and not just lying about their portfolio of dystopian horrors and banal inconveniences.
* always had the longest software support lifecycle in the industry. Only recently has Google tried to match them. My six year old iPhone only just stopped getting support for the current iOS release; it will still get security updates for a few more years.
* can be repaired quickly from parts likely stocked in repair shops almost anywhere in the world thanks to the relatively small number of models, whereas a local repair shop is unlikely to have parts for an Android phone, unless you happen to have a phone that was sold in large numbers in that locale
* can have its battery replaced with legitimate OEM parts, retaining waterproofing and whatnot, by Apple or third party shops who have been certified to do the repair correctly. No Android manufacturer does anything close to any of this.
* was one of the first phones to throttle CPU speed when it detects rising internal resistance from battery aging, thus prolonging the device's lifespan (which everyone shit on them for, claiming it was designed to 'force' people to upgrade, when it was exactly the opposite - it kept people's phones working longer than they otherwise would)
* has a charge/data connector much more durable than standard USB connectors, and it's still not placed on the motherboard like nearly every Android phone does; it's on an easily replaced board. The whole EU USB-C debacle about consumer rights. It was about other companies eliminating Apple's competitive advantage with the Lightning port, denying consumers the right to choose a different connector other than the planned obsolescence USB connectors. And you know what else? Nobody's iPhone has ever been fried by a Lightning cable, but there was a huge debacle over USB-C cables that would fry anything they were plugged into.
There's a reason iPhones retaining their value in the used market for years - and Android phones depreciate like a lead balloon.
> lying about their portfolio of dystopian horrors and banal inconveniences.
I understand that you want to feel good about your purchasing decisions, but you just are not seeing how low you are setting the bar.
I use these products and am deeply invested in them. They are good, but much farther from perfect than you think. All of these stats are hollow relativism.
If two companies were detonating atom bombs in your neighborhood, but one provided you and your family with super solid umbrellas to catch the ash, you'd probably be swollen with praise for them as well.
There I go demonizing again... I really shouldn't be comparing a corporation with greater market value than the GDP of some countries to a nation state with the power to instigate generational environmental disasters. Totally different, not worthy of comparison at all.
What does one time use mean for a phone? You make one call and dispose of it? I used my last iPhone for 6 years, including a 3rd party screen replacement and battery replacement.
One person uses it, for a pre-determined amount of time dictated by security updates and software based gatekeeping, and then its time of usefulness has passed, and it can't be meaningfully put to any other use. In parallel, parts and service become scarce.
If you're advocating that the average user, or differently abled users get comfortable with the tweezers and pentalobe screws in order to extend the lives of their devices, I'm afraid you've lost the plot.
My house is full Apple products, the average device is well over 5 years old. The gaming PC I built after the MBP I use is virtually worthless now, as the motherboard is fried and buying a new socket LGA 1150 motherboard just isn't worth it.
All electronics are the result of dystopian horors, and they generally don't have a very good shelf life. Are you aware of how many SuperFund sites are in Silicon Valley?
Pretty dull newsflash, this is the exact kind of weak, destructive relativism I was talking about in my post.
Apple's the worst, except for all the rest? I should lay off Apple because they're doing better than their competitors?
You're not opening any eyes by saying everyone is doing terribly, you're just responding to dissent with tired whataboutism and false claims of futility.
The market and regulators and device builders and customers could do better and should.
Apple wants to claim be leader in this space, they should do so with substance.
My substance was that my Apple products consistently out live every other electronic manufacturer's. I have an iMac and a MBP that are both over a decade old now and run great. The hardware is excellent after putting a new battery in the MBP and an SSD in the iMac. Especially the 2013 MBP with Retina display, its still an awesome machine even at 10 years old. The biggest problems with old iPhones are banking Apps and cellular connectivity.
Until we find a way of mineral extraction and purification that isn't terrible, electronics are going to be bad. Could Apple work to improve that? Yes, and they should too. My point, which I'd argue is pragmatic, is that Apple makes the longest lived devices you can currently buy, and not by a little but by a lot.
Demonizing the current front runner in a competition you care about? ...well lets just say you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar
I have a strong grip on the meaning of these words and the organization I have observed as a customer and user for decades.
How about you get a dictionary and encyclopedia and learn what dystopian horrors and banal inconveniences are?
Then look at Apple's factories, mining operations, glued together, locked down, borderline unrepairable products, and a big old pile of lightning cables and see that is an apt, fair and even charitable description of their activities.
Or you can just take yours and grip them to your chest and cry, whatever works for you.
> they glue it shut when they don't need to (bad).
Disagree. Glue isn't really that hard to deal with and likely makes the phone substantially more waterproof. It's really not hard, at all, to deal with glue, it's typically dissolves in acetone and only requires mild heat to overcome.
I'm using "glue" as a stand-in for all of the measures they use to lockdown their products when there is no physical need for it.
Nonetheless, you're selling "typically dissolves in acetone" as a user friendly, easy to repair, best in the industry experience? Should we give them a special award with text that is flanked by sprigs of wheat?
You don't realize how low you are setting the bar here.
Apple has a billion dollar PR engine trying to convince you that privacy was Apple's idea or repairability was their idea. It wasn't. Its them trying to get in front of regulation in the EU and outmaneuver their competitors.
Do you think the iphone 15 being USB-C was Apple's idea too?
Woz himself has spoken out against Apple's anti-repair stance.
For a few gens now "simple" to swap out iPhone parts like screens need to be purchased directly from Apple and authorized to go into the device that's being repaired via IMEI. This kills off tons of third party market options. Imagine if vehicle manufacturers required that you buy all replacement parts from them. In the case of vehicles, there are tons of used, reconditioned, and third party parts available that work just fine as replacements.
This kind of behavior is why I'll never "buy" an Apple device; you never truly own it and can do what you want to do with it, from both hardware and software perspectives.
I don't know on which planet you live but every new generation is worse than the previous one.
My last macbook needed to have a battery replaced during Apple Care (after only 2 years) and they just gave me a new body (no dents, same specs, same keyboard layout, transplanted the ssd - or transferred the data, not sure) and plugged it to the old screen.
Citing something that's been the same way for all Apple laptops for at least a decade doesn't really support your assertion that it gets worse with every generation.
Your repair was probably done by moving your laptop's motherboard into a new lower case (with a corresponding new battery glued in).
Is there any real justification for glueing batteries in beyond obstructing replacement?
It's not as if there's any space for them to slide around, they're a fairly tight fit in a compact device, and there's got to be plenty of other options to keep them in place if there is a little bit of looseness to deal with.
(I guess they'll use safety as an excuse, to reduce the risk of the damage to cells. But it's not the real reason, is it?)
The case isn't so tight the batteries can't move. LiPoly batteries expand and contract when they heat and cool. The case needs enough space for that to happen without putting pressure on the battery.
When the battery is at its most contracted state it can move if it's not fixed to the case by some means. Movement of the battery puts stress on the connectors and can lead to a short (or worse).
Gluing the battery in the case is a safe way of fixing it in place inside the case. Screw tabs would give the opportunity during assembly of puncturing the battery casing with a tool or screw. They could also work themselves loose with the thermal expansion cycles.
But people like the thought-terminating "Apple bad" narratives.
Its crazy stuff. You are telling me they cant think of a secure way to use a mechanical, screwed system that is able to cope with the thermal expansion. I find that hard to believe. I believe it is mostly cost and profit incentive, MAYBE safety, but I also doubt that last one.
I think adhesive and screws are the only two practical options for securing a battery well enough to prevent repeated cable flexing, which is probably much more of a concern than screws coming loose.
Those batteries are glued in to their own rigid case, which makes swapping them out of the laptop trivial but also didn't leave much room for expansion inside the battery pack, and the battery pack was pretty thick compared to any recent Apple laptop.
Replacing the cells inside one of those packs would have been similarly difficult to ungluing and replacing the batteries in more recent Apple laptops, but there was a lot less reason to rebuild those battery packs.
Apple is going back to how home computers used to be, before Compaq got lucky with the IBM PC cloning.
They were consumer electronics devices, most of the expansion possibilities were via external devices connected on an expansion port of some sort, and that was about it.
Naturally this model offers better margins than selling PC components on thin razor margins, which is why even the PC world is going into that direction, leaving custom PCs for hardcore gammers and servers, where OEMs can also enjoy higher margins.
By "real" console you mean a locked-down device that can only run software approved by the manufacturer and restricts running arbitrary user code?
Why would anyone ever want that? If you buy a device, you are supposed to be able to do anything you want with it, including running emulators or whatever.
Thankfully, even when vendors want to prevent people from doing that, they often screw it up and leave exploits that allow people to regain control. Even funnier when they then try suing random people for that to compensate for their engineering skill issue/make an example etc.
I'd rather have companies putting out emulator-friendly devices than re-charging for the same game every time a new hardware generation rolls around. The steam deck is just a computer at the end of the day, people are going to run emulators on it.
sure, but most other console makers actually sell at a loss and rely on selling and re-selling software to make profit. And users who buy consoles don't want to mess around with emulators anyway.
Valve didn't sell hardware for half its lifetime, and the hardware it sold were on small margins. Steam Deck is a success selling a few million, the vita was a bomb selling 10m (very conservative estimate. you'll see 15m when googling). Economies of scale
I don't believe so. I was just explaining that a console needs to justify every generational bump. And if remasters are valuable enough, they'll do it.
Nintendo make great games that I pay for. But the way they drip feed their back catalog and price gouge on N64 is a red line for me. The entire NES to N64 catalog (licensing permitting) should be a part of the base Nintendo Online subscription.
I'll give them a pass on Gamecube and later as that generation can still look pretty good.
I would probably subscribe if they got the back catalog right. But it's no bother to me really, it's trivial to emulate their games right up to the Wii U.
I don't have an Xbox or PS so not really bothered about what their services are. I guess a trickle rather than a drip feed is OK, it should be a lot faster than it is now though.
Knowing the majority of the NES > N64 Nintendo back catalog is coming at a reasonable pace would be a reason to subscribe to their online service, assuming it is all available at the base sub price.
You are aware that the vast majority of Steam games work on the Steam Deck? There are literally more games available on Steam that you can play on it then probably every console in existence.
Are there stats on what proportion of Deck use is piracy? I have a Deck, half my friends have Decks, none of them have mentioned piracy as a use case that I can recall.
A 40 year old with a twenty year back catalog of Steam titles gives me plenty of things to play.
Emulators are not illegal, nor are compatible clones of consoles. It's actually weird that there aren't many alternative implementations of consoles in current times. There were plenty in the NES days.
They are legally dubious enough that Steam had to take down Dolphin. I think that's the real kicker.
>It's actually weird that there aren't many alternative implementations of consoles in current times
where's the allure anymore? the PC and mobile hardware can do that just fine. those alt knockoff consoles came at a time where owning a PC was a huge premium.
That said, there are a few modern alt consoles to consider as a hobbyist:
I think "had" is too strong a word. I don't think a US court ever forced them to do it. As far as I know, they asked Nintendo what they thought about it, got the standard Nintendo "it's illegal" spiel and took it down of their own accord to play nice.
These things are "illegal" because these corporations can afford to turn the justice system into a legal bullying mechanism. They don't like what you do? They threaten to set your money on fire if you don't stop. Most people just obey because they don't really want to impoverish themselves fighting them.
There's no telling what would actually happen if it actually went to court though. I've read too many court cases where these game companies lost to just believe them when they say it's "illegal". The problem is always the fact they win in the end simply by having deeper pockets: the other party often gets bankrupted despite the victory. Bleem and Virtual Game Station come to mind. True justice would have been these alternative implementations of the consoles competing with the real thing on equal footing on day one.
> where's the allure anymore?
There weren't clones of any of the consoles of the previous generations though. Modern consoles are basically glorified PCs but a PS2 and NDS weren't.
I think that's pretty reductive. They have a whole category of games that are great on Deck. I love playing Streets of Rage 4 and Katamari reroll on it.
strictly speaking, yes. But I hope we can both agree that a large share of emulator users aren't taking their legally bought copy of a game and creating a backup rom out of it. Nor manually dumping the bios from their legally obtained piece of hardware.
Engineering wise, Torx was always superior, particularly small screws that would strip easily. People hated it because of the patents, and getting good tools were extremely expensive because of the licensing.
I'm confused by the idea that torx could be superior. I don't think I've ever touched a device or car with torx heads that didn't end up with half of them being stripped.
I have tinkered on cars both with and without torx.
Torx sucks, its also not uncommon for dimensions to differ on included torx tools so when you use a size 3 on another products "torx 3" it will strip away.
Philips used to be the "good" one because although it's a pretty bad design, everyone had it. Now that lots of people have torx drivers, they're better in pretty much every way. They're a lot harder to strip, they don't cam out as much etc.
Are they still covered by the patents that made them unattractive initially? Patent expiry could very well be the reason for their increased popularity.
Wikipedia tells me the original Torx patent[1] was filed in the 1960s, so anything related should have long since expired. (There’s apparently also a “Torx Plus” patented[2] in the early 1990s around the time the original patent was expiring, but I don’t believe anybody deliberately chooses that one. Expired in 2011.)
Torx patent expired in 2011, so that's increasingly likely why it's taken off.
Edited to add: the "Torx Plus" design's patent expired in 2011, which was put in place in 1990 as the original Torx patent was expiring then. Some more nuance, but there ya go.
My understanding is that the patents for Torx (and Torx Plus) have expired. They're an ISO standard, "hexalobular internal" (which is much more fun to say).
I think it may seem like Torx has more sizes than say Phillips or flat-headed screws due to the fact that with those you can generally get away with a screw driver that is "close enough" in size, whereas with Torx you really need the exact size the screw is using.
If you want to strip your screws, you can do that. And then there's the Pozi vs Philips thing that people tend to get wrong. Torx is kind of a pain in the ass because you always try the wrong screwdriver first, but it's still way better than philips/pozidriv
It's because philips drivers are wedge-shaped. They properly fit a range of screw heads. This means that there's only two or three commonly used driver sizes. With torx the sides are parallel so the driver size is directly related to the screw head size.
Also, Torx takes the guesswork out of determining which bit to use. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Phillips can be a pain in the ass to figure out which bit to use.
I'd argue that putting the USB-C charge port directly on the motherboard instead of a replaceable carrier was an equally poor choice. One booboo or too many accessory plug-unplug cycles requires a motherboard replacement, RMA, or a hotplate and hot air at a minimum. There are contacts that are under the USB-C port module, so it's not even possible to change it with an iron. Better a separate daughterboard connected by FPC. Mine has a magnetic wearout extender on it now.
Yeah my old intel macbook (touchbar) is pretty much unusable because the usb-c ports no longer 'click' so keeping a power cord plugged in is incredibly frustrating. I asked a guy at the local non-apple mac store and he said in my model they are soldered directly onto the motherboard and are a bitch to replace. Apple just wants to replace the whole motherboard. I think now they put them on daughterboards but i'm not sure. Thankfully the m2 I replaced it with has magsafe (or you can use usb-c to charge if you find yourself without a magsafe cord) so far less cycles on the usb ports.
I prefer steam’s openess as an incentive to sell games versus companies that manipulate you, spy on you, prevent repairs, steal your data or use all sorts of dark patterns. Steam is simply a company that builds products the right way. They deserve my £.
Oh and that sexy support of Linux. It won a loyal customer for life (or until they get acquired and get enshitified to death).
Small observation, I think they got the idea for a limited edition see transparent case after seeing how many people were interesting in modding theirs with an aftermarket one, and also probably a reason they made it even easier to take apart. The steam deck has seen more hardware mods than any other consumer hardware device I can think of in the past decade.
if your hands cramp when using a switch, the deck might be good for your hands. I've had the same issue with the low stick placement on it and the deck has been an ergonomic joy.
I've found the Deck quite uncomfortable to hold, with the rear buttons being the lowest point. Lots of pain in the curve of the palm, plus the stock plastic is slippery which makes you try to squeeze harder. Propped up on a stand with an external controller is my preferred way personally.
Well not sure about the Steam Deck, its all nice and fine but if the original device is not very durable its still sucks of you need to repair it often.
I do not know if they are going this route with the Index, that thing is notoriously bad build, and it breaks for people after a very short lifespan all the time. Basically almost every serious reviewer complained how their Index broke after X months. I do not think its easy to repair at all and does Valve sell spare parts? It should life longer in the first place.
I have owned an index for 4 years with heavy daily use during the pandemic, and the only issue I've had is when I smashed a controller in a wall playing beat saber (and even so only the thing that retains the elastic strap broke).
I've also spent a while in VRChat where these issues would be discussed and I've never seen anyone mention that the index in not durable.
Hmm, given the chassis changes, what are the odds the OLED screen can be dropped into existing Decks? It would probably hold back adoption but I'm unlikely to upgrade so soon anyway.
There's already "DeckHD" after-market upgrade kits, a 1920x1200 OLED screen for $100.
Looks like a pain to install, though. Saw a time-lapse of the process on LTT and it looked like it involved removing just about every single screw and fastener in the entire device.
Do you know if the plastic casing is any easier to open? I damaged the edges of mine with the spludger when prying it open to install an SSD, the plastic is quite soft.
Valve: Install whatever you want from wherever you want - hardware, software, operating system.
And they provide you parts and schematics in case you need to repair/mod your device.
Never thought I'd see a day when linux gaming would be as good as what I get via my steam deck these days.
Kudos to Valve for embracing such an open approach to gaming/portable devices in general.
Prior to having a Steam Deck, my overall video game time was fairly low since it took time to boot the PC and start everything up. With the SD, it's much easier to grab it and get a small session in, and I've purchased a number of games (and will even buy games on Steam at a higher price than elsewhere) because of the Deck. It's the price of convenience, but well worth it in my opinion.
It's not just about trying to get more people to buy stuff on Steam but also safeguard their own future, while carving out their own experience and a niche.
Back when the whole Steam on Linux started, they saw Windows 8/10 as a real threat to their existence. (Windows S?)
It's just that the way they went about to solve this in an open way is what's nice.
They improved the graphics drivers situation, invested in Wine and other open source projects, put in a lot of effort to create a user experience they wanted on a handheld device.
Ultimately this gave them a real edge over their competitors. Was surprised to see random youtubers making videos on how to install steam OS on their more powerful Rog Ally/Gpd/Home theater PC etc ..
And it's absolutely working! So far I've spent 566€ directly on Steam this year and my willingness to spend money on GOG or EGS has dropped dramatically considering what a seamless experience I get with Steam and the Steam Deck.
Me as well. I've on Linux for years, but there was a time where I was preferring GoG for their DRM-free policy. However, Valve went all in on Linux support while GoG refused to even make a Linux version of their launcher. I still occasionally buy things from them, but Steam gained my business.
Yeah, the cdprojekt/Linux story is a weird one. They even released witcher 2 on Linux. But after all the hate they got , for it being a bad port, using some translation layer, it seems like they dropped the Linux use cases.
At least they don't go out of their way to block heroic games launcher/Linux and I'm happy with that.
It’s much easier and safer for a company to officially not support Linux, but keep an eye on issues and not block it, than to officially release a port.
Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that no public traded company would ever do this, or spend this much resources in things such as repairability or Linux layer improvements. It's nice that Valve is still a private company and can decide to focus on things that actually good for the space and consumers, even if it's not the most optimal use of their time.
> Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that no public traded company would ever do this, or spend this much resources in things such as repairability or Linux layer improvements.
Google used to be like this once upon a time, long long ago... (That blocks phone, unlocked bootloader on all their Nexus devices, Linux improvements for Chrome/Android etc...). Not sure if things really changed or it's just in my head, but they no longer seem that way.
Well, Pixel is still with unlocked bootloader and is the only phone on the market with which you can bake in your own signing keys, lock the bootloader and have an actually secure boot chain controlled by yourself.
It's not impossible, and large companies do regularly contribute or create their own FOSS.
But yes, there has always been a big dose of NIH from corporate. Sometimes it is warranted, but many times it's extra work on this hope that they hoard valuable tech to themselves.
If that were the natural outcome Xbox would’ve “gotten it right” since it was the most PC-like console before the Steam Deck.
The moddability is a deliberate strategy by Valve, and I don’t see it as an inevitable move for every PC-centered company, Microsoft being the prime counterexample.
I think it's pretty clear that "PC-like" also means you need an open platform, with the possibility to install any software and operating system you wish, which the xbox nor any console from the major brands allows for.
It’s running Windows, and if you put it in dev mode, which is not much harder than putting a laptop off S mode, you can install anything. It works with a mouse and keyboard. Pretty close to a PC.
You can't install anything, only UWP apps that run in an extremely restrictive sandbox. You can get root on Steam Deck by switching to Desktop mode, opening the terminal and inputting a couple commands and you have full access to the hardware's bootloader.
XBMC and all the wacky homebrew software extended the life of my original Xbox by more than a decade. I still think the linksbox browser did alphabet input better than any other controller software I've seen. And it was always fun in college to host a Mario Kart 64 night (emulated on Xbox) in the dorms and see the expressions on people's faces when they looked from the controllers to the screen, and then back and forth again. :)
And I still use 2 original Xboxs at LAN parties here and there. Even with a softmod and Linux, it's still possible to system link Halo, Halo 2, Battlefront (2004), Battlefront 2 (2005), Crimson Skies, Metal Arms, and other games across at least three generations of console (Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One) with 16-to-32 people. Microsoft does backward compatibility like almost no one else, even on console.
It's getting harder to find replacement controllers, but I've found a local hardware guy in my city who can help find the right replacement parts as little pieces on the board start to fail. I plan on keeping both of mine running as long as possible!
Valve isn’t taking some moral high ground here, they are just trying to commoditize hardware and OS platforms. It isn’t a new idea: https://gwern.net/complement
Pixels have unlocked bootloaders so you can install whatever you want, including completely open source versions of android.
You won’t be able to do mobile payment and some other things because the companies behind those other things will only allow their apps to run on locked down devices.
Understandable, I was hoping there was some sort of board schematics or even block diagrams to aid in fixing blown up chips and other faults. I most often see failures on the main board and of course that's the part they don't sell you.
While no board schematic there is quite good selection of guides hosted iFixit (Valve links you there from their website so it is the "official" source)
It most often seems to be the power management/charge/USB-C chip, with no particular pattern other than "playing a demanding game". Doesn't seem to matter whether plugged in or on battery, official charger or other USB-C charger or dock. I even had it happen to my own Steam Deck (while playing Minecraft of all things) which I sent into Valve and they replaced.
I haven't been able to investigate it too much but last I looked at the data sheet for that chip it seems like there's no way it should have a hole blown in it unless something was designed wrong.
The already have most of online PC games sales through their platform and take a very healthy chunky cut off it, they don't have any financial incentive to close their platform. I also doubt they sell Steam deck at a loss like console companies do.
>I also doubt they sell Steam deck at a loss like console companies do.
They (GabeN I believe) mentioned early on that it was "painful" to hit the Deck's price point. Unsure if this means sold at a loss or just a smaller-than-ideal profit.
albeit in software, but valve got a lot of success built on top of video game mods (see counter-strike and dota series).
they are far from saints if you zoom out (from lootboxes and fostering an official means to trade virtual items for money), but being an independent company still driven by gaming helps.
The upgrade to 90 Hertz is really good for a non-obvious reason:
In the Steam Deck userbase, the "Golden 40", playing games at 40fps and the screen at 40 hertz, is a pretty well-liked trick for getting the frame time right in between 30 and 60fps at 25ms while "only" needing power to render 10 more frames per second than 30, making for a much better experience than 30.
The only problem with this is if a frame is slightly late at 40 hertz, you're waiting the full 25 ms for the next one instead of 16.6ms at 60hz.
Being able to run the screen at 80 hz for 40fps games cuts that stutter time on a missed frame in half to 12.5ms, and will make a huge difference!
So does the Steam Deck not support VRR for the onboard display? I see articles saying support was added for external displays, but it’s not clear whether the onboard one has it. If it does, then it seems like it shouldn't be a problem for a frame to be slightly late.
Edit: I read some other comments that explain the situation. It sounds like there is no VRR for the internal display unfortunately.
No, it sadly doesn't do VRR and neither does this new one. According to the LTT video[0], it's because of the internal connector that the internal display is attatched with, because external VRR screens do work. They speculate that valve were just limited by what is available on the market because they are not quite shipping enough units yet to warrant fully custom designs / orders. Apparently there are hints towards this being the same supplier that also supplies the Switch OLED's screen.
Bloomberg says the supplier is Samsung.[0] Not entirely surprising because Sony is somewhat of a competitor and that only leaves LG who is not nearly as good at mobile oled which is one of Samsung's largest markets. This said I know eg. Apple uses multiple display suppliers for the iphone 14/15 base model so it could be the same here.
Sony isn't a supplier for a cheap OLEDs. LG, BOE, and other Chinese competitors are. Random game tend to have static HUD that is a risk for burn in. I imagine that Samsung OLED is a safe choice for game console thanks to Nintendo's verification.
Which other chinese suppliers besides BOE can achieve 1000 nits HDR 2? Even BOE can barely do that being they have been canceled from the iphone 15 supply chain due to their reliability. They were having issues with iphone 14 as well which was only
>800 nits max brightness (typical); 1200 nits peak brightness (HDR)[0]
The display uses a mipi interface instead of a edp. This is because the screen isn’t completely custom and likely used one from a manufacturer similar to the switch oled which also uses a mipi display.
If valve sold more units it might justify a completely custom solution but this is still way better than what people had to do to get a better screen before.
You can just open the Deck and look. It's not a 40-pin eDP connector, it's a flat ribbon, exactly like a tablet display. Also the natural orientation is portrait, which you can see if you turn off the boot splash.
Yeah, for games that don't quite run at 60fps. You set the screen to 40 hertz, the difference between 30 and 40 is HUGE latency and general smoothness wise.
It doesn't sound like a big difference but 40fps is actually about halfway between 30fps and 60fps in response times. Because 30fps is 1 frame every 33ms, 60fps is 16ms. 40 fps gives you 25ms.
It is only needing to produce 33% more frames for 40fps vs 30fps. Compare that to producing 60fps which is 100% more frames. So you are only sacrificing a small amount of performance to get 40fps but a significant amount to reach 60fps.
In practicality, most people can't tell the difference between 40fps and 60fps, or at least won't notice it in normal gameplay.
So you get nearly the same experience as 60fps but for much less processing power and therefore also better battery life, less fan noise/cooling, and you can crank graphics a little higher.
Most people are more likely to notice the difference between "Medium" and "High" very easily or "High" and "Very High", but won't notice the impact of 40fps vs 60fps. So that's why 40fps is generally a sweet spot between performance and experience.
Not unlikely. 15ms is about the threshold humans can detect latency. This takes you from 33ms to 25ms which is much closer to that boundary.
Also depends on context a lot - on a 7" screen it might be hard to notice the difference, but you can easily tell apart 120hz on a large monitor or in VR.
> 15ms is about the threshold humans can detect latency
I think this is an oversimplification. We can detect latency, meaning a difference between input and screen response, at around 13ms.
But that doesn't equate to a new frame every 13ms being perfect, latency-wise. First, it ignores all the other sources of latency such as from input devices. Assume 6ms latency on the controller, that means you have to get a new frame out within 7ms from receiving the controller input.
That aside, there's a lot more than latency involved in creating beautiful smooth images on screen. For example, humans can detect visual change unrelated to input at about 500hz or even higher, especially in grayscale. I've heard that about 0.5m, or 2000hz, gray to gray is about the limit at which further improvements would be meaningless.
Of course the law of diminishing returns applies here. The fastest screen I've tested is 360hz and I can't say that I see any benefits over a 144hz screen, although I can see the difference in artificial benchmarks on blur busters.
That actually checks out, because the color-detecting cones in the center of your eye are much less sensitive responsive to changes (framerate) than the rods in your peripheral vision.
There's a weird cult-like attitude around 40fps that I've noticed. Personally I run everything at the normal 60hz and almost everything I play runs fine, even at the higher resolution (1920x1200) of my external monitor. Counter-Strike 2 runs horribly and Baldur's Gate 3 was sub-60, but mostly I don't play anything that demanding (mostly indie, lots of 2D). It might matter more if you play all the new AAA titles that come out.
> There's a weird cult-like attitude around 40fps that I've noticed.
As someone who learnt about this public 40fps love just a few minutes, I'd like to add that this was something I had noticed myself years ago. 40fps feels "smooth" and closer to 60fps, than 25/30fps for some reason. Unfortunately my graphics card struggled but that's a different story.
I think I'm missing something with graphics cards. I have a 1060 on a i7-3770 and it can put out 120fps on most games. My M1 Macbook can play those same games through Rosetta 2 and Wine + GPTK at a similar FPS.
What are people doing that they have like a 3080 on a 12700 and can barely hit 60fps??
Anecdotally, I play recent 3d games on an ultrawide (not quite 4k but significantly higher res than 1080p). It's 3440x1440 pixels with a 144 Hz refresh. On a 4080 and ultra settings, most games can't get there. Thankfully DLSS makes it a lot better.
(Using geforce now on a MacBook hooked up to an external monitor).
BG3 is very smooth. Cities Skylines 2 stutters. Starfield was okay. Talos Principle 2 is laggy. Cyberpunk is laggy.
Normally I don't care about graphics all that much, so I'll usually turn the details down to medium or even low. But these days DLSS is so good that's less necessary.
Well, you havent mentioned your screen resolution. The people struggling with the 4080s are going to max settings and 4k, possibly with some RTX effects because they paid for the whole GPU.
It's not a cult, 40 is just a sweet spot between performance, battery life, and comfort for a large number of demanding 3D games. If you often play in docked mode, the battery life doesn't mattery so you can probably achieve 50 or 60 in some modern games.
There's a lot of stuff that can't reach 60fps but has headroom over 30fps, that's where the 40 comes from. It's a completely arbitrary point, just happens to be halfway between 1/60 and 1/30 s, and (external benefit for stuff like PS5 Spider-Man 2) it divides evenly into 120Hz displays without needing variable refresh.
I used 40fps on my steam deck for playing Death Stranding. It's not a fast paced game, so the smoothness reduction wasn't huge. But it is demanding and visuals are a big part of the experience, so being able to turn up the graphics a bit was great.
I guess I play faster games than most because I always put the graphics settings to lowest detail, native resolution, and aim for 144fps (my monitor's native refresh rate). Anything less than 90fps/Hz is pretty bad to me.
That's pretty reasonable. My phone screen is 120hz but my main computer monitors are only 60hz, so I more-or-less don't know what I'm missing. I tend to care more about color and viewing angles than refresh rate on a monitor and steer more toward the professional side than the gaming side, so I haven't had much exposure to very high refresh rates on a regular basis yet. My monitors are also pretty old now, but they still work fine. A couple HP ZR24w monitors I got refurbished from Newegg. I think of them as being like the monitor equivalent to a used-ThinkPad/EliteBook.
That's at least partially because of the mismatch between display refresh rate and frame rate - one of the things that makes the Deck's 40 fps mode on the internal display nice is that it also changes the display refresh rate to 40hz, making it look consistent and synchronised.
I limit Elden Ring to 35FPS to avoid stuttering and it basically feels as smooth as 60FPS on the XBox Series S.
As long as you get at least ~30FPS the framerate doesn't matter as much as framerate stability.
I’m a first gen deck owner and am constantly impressed by the quality of the product. The hardware is good, more than good enough, but the fact that it is running windows games mostly seemlessly is incredible. Yes, I know wine has been around forever, but with the deck you barely even notice that you’re running through a compatibility layer. Performance and battery life in all but the last few years of AAA games is also great. The improvements here are marginal, but it’s great to see them making smart, incremental updates.
I’d love to see how the market would react to a deck in a console form factor, with similar input options to the deck (pad plus touchpads) and an APU comparable to modern consoles.
The Steam Controller was killed off, and IIRC there was a patent infringement issue with the paddles on the back. I'd love to see a redesigned Steam Controller based on the Deck's controls. I play my Deck almost exclusively docked, but your average controller packs less functionality than the Deck's built-in controls, so it would be neat to not have to compromise.
I didn't know about the patents case, but I think the Steam Controller was considered pretty mediocre universally. It's got quite an unusual design, and it feels like an early (failed) experiment for the Deck control scheme.
The Deck controls are the best input method for games I've ever used. If they take the Deck inputs and stuff them into a handheld controller, I'd expect the end result to get popular quickly. The Deck shines where the Controller failed.
I still have my Deck and Link lying around because they were cheap (practically came free with a game) and because I liked the concept. I really hope Valve manages to get something like the Steam Machine into the mainstream, because they've got all the ingredients to become the perfect in-between for locked down consoles and messy PC gaming setups.
I bought a Sony Dual Sense EDGE controller for playing Steam games under Windows, and it's been AWESOME. Pricey, but AWESOME. I have a PS5, and used it to program a custom profile with the back paddles, but the build quality, weight, and "feel" are all better than the standard controller. Makes it truly feel like an upgrade to the stock model.
The switch has really proven that this hybrid handheld formfactor is the future. On the software side, Proton has been the savior that liberated PC gamers from Microsoft’s iron grip.
The space is getting really exciting now that there are a few alternative products to the Steam Deck, too (Ayaneo, ROG Ally, etc). Phone controllers are nothing new, but iPhone switching to USB C means manufacturers can now sell a single SKU for iphone/android, and we’re starting to see AAA releases on those platforms.
If I were running Xbox or PlayStation, I’d be a little stressed out.
> They already tried this with Steam Machines and that didn't end well.
They tried this in 2014 when Steam OS was immature and Proton didn't even exist (Steam Machines were relying on Linux Ports at time). Also, if I record well, we didn't had a Steam Machine 100% done by valve, only third-parties.
I bet that the market reaction would be very different today with first-party steam machines running Proton,
68k -> PPC -> Intel -> ARM has been seamless as a user, and the "Carbon" apps that ran on both classic Mac and on X.
It's pretty amazing to know "this app is calling all the wrong APIs, but they've been shimmed to match the right ones, and the device is fast enough that you won't notice the difference."
There was Steambox, which was their bid to get into the console PC gaming tower market. We got SteamOS out of that, but the product launch itself didn't go so great.
To my recollection the problems with the Steam Box were reliance on third party hardware manufacturers, weak hardware, and trouble with game compatibility.
If they were to do a reboot of that product line today I think it’d go quite differently. They have the chops to manufacture the hardware themselves this time around, and the game compatibility factor has improved dramatically (partially of their own doing). I think there could be a real market for a console with an APU somewhere in the ballpark of the PS5’s, but running SteamOS and embracing upgrades and modding like the Deck has, especially if they can price it aggressively.
> And... Is the OLED not VRR? That was my #1 wish for the original Deck (with #2 being an OLED)
According to LTT it is due to the physical connection. Basically the panel is the same as Switch OLED and thus uses whatever it uses which is MIPI and thus no VRR (need eDP for that). The hardware clearly supports it (just plug an external display with VRR support into the deck and it works)
Makes sense. The highest volume OLED with the right size is... the Switch's!
>Basically Valve doesn't do large enough volume to make proper custom display economical so they have to take whatever they can get.
Yeah exactly. I see a lot of online complaints (mostly outside HN) about no new APU or no custom display, but the capital costs of doing either from scratch are just hilariously high.
As they have identical sub pixel layout they very likely come from the same factory.
I think one side of the mother glass has a few extra pixels that you can just not cut off and end up with the 80 pixels more on one direction?
If you start from a panel that cuts perfectly to 8K or 4K TV panels and you keep halving it won't go down evenly to 720p as it is not half of 1080p (1440p is half of 4K and 1080p is half of 1440p so they come out nicely without any wasted panel/pixels by cutting in half)
Judging from the Digital Foundry video[0], it appears to have a limited form of VRR that will sample the refresh rate closest to whatever you're limiting for (eg. 40fps -> 80hz). It's not a complete solution, but it should effectively "solve" frame timing issues if your framerate is high enough.
For what it's worth too, my experience gaming on Wayland has been great from a consistency perspective. Once you dial in settings that work, the only performance blips you can notice are related to shader compilation. 144hz feels like 144hz, which has not always been the case on Linux.
What are you running exactly? I haven't been able to get a 144hz + 60hz setup working with KDE on X. The main monitor just doesn't want to do 144hz, even if I disable the other one via xrandr. My 1070 Ti has me afraid of wayland because the nvidia driver already breaks something once a month.
I just bit the bullet and moved to Wayland. I've heard mixed things about people on 10-series hardware, but things work pretty well on my 3070Ti. My guess is that the drivers are slightly different across generations, and parity still hasn't been a priority. I decommissioned my 1050 back in my x11 days, I wish I could tell you how well it worked with my current setup.
I'm also running everything on NixOS, so assume there's a fair bit of fairy dust blessing the config. Besides enabling modeset and cudatoolkit manually though, I don't think there's much special about my software setup.
I definitely noticed the driver issues increasing as my GPU got older. On windows I spent hours looking for driver versions that work with all my games and then didn't update for months.
If it wasn't for AI, I'd upgrade to AMD right now. But ROCm and the CUDA translation layer don't quite seem to be there yet.
I tried to get my 3090 working in Wayland/KDE/Arch for about a month (after repeatedly running into the same issues on my 2060 laptop) and gave up.
AMD IGP output it is... and I just game on Windows instead. But even then, neutering the leftover bits of the Nvidia driver (which I need for CUDA) that keep breaking electron/chromium is making me pull my hair out. I still hold my breath opening VSCode, wondering if its going to freeze or not.
That doesn't sound normal, even for Linux. It almost sounds like the issue is somewhere else. My first guess would be a PSU that's unable to source the 3090's current draw under load, given everything else running on your system.
Try using a dedicated rail or another PSU if you have one.
Its definitely not. I have a V850 SFX Gold, a single 3090 FTW3 and a 7800X3D, and its rock solid in OCCT's variable load test, even when overclocked (and its not overclocked on linux).
I have literally all the exact same issues on my RTX 2060 Asus G14 laptop, like:
- GPU rendering broken in Wayland Chromium/Electron, and sometimes Firefox
- Occasional black screen on boot, from some kind of race condition.
- Unpredictable artifacting on the KDE desktop and some apps.
And I still get some of that when Nvidia DRM is disabled and I'm just using the 4900HS/7800X3D for display out. Completely disabling the Nvidia GPU fixes all of it, every single thing, but then I can't use CUDA.
I'd like to do that too, but currently you have to pick between games and AI stuff, at least on Linux. I'd love to support AMD on this, but their CUDA story isn't great.
True, but I considered a bit my needs and concluded that smooth Linux support is much more important for me than AI. My work doesn't directly touch AI, so for my modest AI needs I can just use online services that probably do it better anyway.
The 7->6 move is also behind the modest shrinkage of the PS5 that preceded its new "somewhat slim" variant. (They did the shrink first with an unchanged case a little while ago).
As a Ally user, still not enough to get me to switch but I love the competition that Steam ignited with the handheld PC gaming market. Ally, Legion Go, Steamdeck, Ayaneo Kun, etc. A lot of great devices on the market.
I've played more PC games now than I have in the last 10 years.
Windows. They have a sub-par user experience because of that compared to the Steam Deck. Windows just doesn't work that well on small screens like these, and the custom UIs they have are the usual bloatware you find in "gaming" products.
Valve launched a Linux-based gaming platform called Steam OS in the early teens. Other companies made the hardware, and games had to be compiled for Linux - this was before Wine/Proton was good enough for gaming. It was open sourced, but stopped getting updated around 2018. SteamOS 1 and SteamOS 2 have public repos.
The Steam Deck launched with SteamOS 3. Many parts of it are open sourced (including gamescope-session, which lets you skip the window manager and go straight to the Steam UI), but there's no official "SteamOS 3" repo. There's a repo of unknown propriety called "evlaV" that claims to be a mirror of the official SteamOS 3 one. It's unclear where it comes from or how true/complete it is. https://gitlab.com/evlaV
SteamOS is an "immutable" Linux, which is to say that the system files are read-only. This allows ChromeOS-style updates without worrying about how someone has customized their system. It uses an application format called "Flatpaks" which skips the whole deb/rpm packaging debacle by bundling all the dependencies in a distro-agnostic container. It's a bit like how a MacOS .app folder includes everything the app needs to run.
There are also lookalikes that implement the Steam Deck UI with open source projects, like mimicking the SD's PIN unlock.
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Valve's main competitors in the portable PC space are Lenovo, Asus, and a bunch of Chinesium also-rans. They all ship with Windows.
There's also a vibrant community of people who buy them for the hardware, and try to replace them with as-close-as-we-can-get-without-official-repos SteamOS 3. They include:
- Bazzite: an immutable version of Fedora that uses GitHub Actions to "layer" packages on top. Basically, you write some markup that says what packages you want, GitHub mints an image, and that gets installed on your handheld. When a new version of Fedora/Bazzite comes out, your layers get rebased on top of it. (The whole immutable Linux thing is heavily influenced by Git.). Fedora is used for compatibility, but the gaming pieces (copied over from evlaV) run in an Arch container by way of Distrobox.
- Nobara: Fedora, as personally customized by a Red Hat employee to be better for gaming. His handle is GloriousEggroll, and he's also a prolific contributor to the Proton API compat layer that allows DirectX games to run on Linux.
- Jovian-Nix: NixOS, configured to run the SteamOS/evlaV packages on top
- Holo: The SteamOS equivalent of a Hackintosh: some guy in Russia modifying SteamOS to get it to work on a non-Steam-Deck.
- ChimeraOS: a distro designed for set top gaming and handhelds, derived from Arch.
US and Canada only.. guess it's more wait time for me.
> Why isn’t the Limited Edition Steam Deck OLED available in my region?
> Steam Deck Limited Edition is an experiment for our team, and we were only able to make a small quantity. That said, we hope this is a successful experiment and customers are excited – if we see there is a large demand for this kind of product, we will definitely continue to explore more colorways in the future.
As far as I can tell, there’s a “normal” OLED Deck, which is (or will shortly be) available in the full complement of countries (not including my current place of residence...), and the limited edition with a transparent case, which is NA only. So if you only want the electronics upgrade, you can probably get one.
Thank you. I will be reaching out if I decide to go for one. BUT I think the limitation actually applies only to the 1TB limited edition (with different colorway). So the 512GB OLED should be normally available as I've seen some people point out!
I am mildly tempted to upgrade to this, it seems kinda weird that the OLED is the same resolution? Doesn't it? Maybe I am just out of touch. But I guess at least that means it won't have a performance impact.
As much as I love my steam deck, it kinda sucks to use after using my OLED Switch after a while. That screen is just beautiful (especially for Mario Wonder).
I have been looking for alternatives for a while now, with the Asus Rog Ally or the Legion Go but the lack of the 4 back controls being vertical have made both of those a no go for me.
Kinda wish it was beefed up a little bit (technically it looks like it is, the GPU is no longer listed as a range if you scroll down, but I am not sure why that is).
I just want official word that the drivers and everything still work on Windows. I assume it will
> it seems kinda weird that the OLED is the same resolution?
Given the specifications of the rest of the device, I'm extremely happy the resolution remained the same! A bump to 1080p or similar would make games on the limited CPU/GPU that much harder to run at a reasonable frame rate while keeping a sharp image. This does not strike me as weird in the slightest - it's common sense to do here.
Not to mention how much hotter the device would run - you would be spending much more time at 15w+ in many titles, which is where the Deck starts to get hot/noisy fans spinning, and of course battery life drops.
I don't think it's as big a deal with Steam Deck using gamescope and system-wide FSR to upscale the image. It's already used if you plug a Deck into a 4k TV: the game defaults to running at 720p still.
With newer games having decoupled 3D render resolution and FSR2, a bump in output resolution no longer means an increase in CPU/GPU required. While allowing older games that aren't as resource intensive to run at 1080p.
For me it'd be a big deal as FSR1 looks awful and FSR2 looks bad - the whole "decoupling render resolution from output resolution" is a delusion for trying to push current GPUs to do things they are not really capable of doing. In 10 years we'll be looking back and make fun of how smeary, ghosty and blurry everything was.
> trying to push current GPUs to do things they are not really capable of doing
Sure, but until we get better GPUs, it's still the better solution to not being able to play it at all. Especially with the Steam Deck being battery powered, so you can't just brute force it with higher frequencies or more hardware. Even this new Steam Deck doesn't include a better GPU.
No, the better solution (IMO at least) is to write code that can run on current GPUs without relying on upscaling tech. Upscaling tech should be something to use once your GPU is old so you can run new games, not something that new games should rely on to run on current GPUs.
As for Steam Deck specifically, the current display resolution it has is perfect for its size, a higher resolution is going to have marginal results - and actually worse results if you need to rely on upscaling to reach it (at which point might as well stick with the current resolution and target it natively so you wont even have the upscaler's overhead).
Not just old GPUs, but also low-end GPUs. Which the Deck definitely is, that's why its target performance is 720p. I shouldn't expect to be able to plug it into a 4K screen and get performance without an upscaler. I also disagree with 720p being perfect for the size. I also have an Asus Ally which is 1080p, and it is a noticeable difference.
> actually worse results if you need to rely on upscaling to reach it
Not worse than just outputting the lower resolution. Otherwise there'd be no point of any of these upscaler.
I don't think comparing overhead to current resolution is 1:1 because modern upscalers also double as AA. Some modern games even force TAA, which upscalers replace. Especially at the lower resolutions, too less AA is more noticeable. And TAA kinda sucks.
Alan Wake 2 has FSR2 or DLSS instead of any other AA option even running them at native. Other games like Diablo IV give you the option of either TAA or upscaler.
> I also disagree with 720p being perfect for the size. I also have an Asus Ally which is 1080p, and it is a noticeable difference.
You can notice it but IMO the drabacks are not worth it. 720p will both perform faster and use less battery. The additional fidelity isn't worth the cost.
> Not worse than just outputting the lower resolution. Otherwise there'd be no point of any of these upscaler.
IMO it is actually worse - even on my main PC any game that has the option between "smart" upscaling and plain old bilinear i always choose the latter (assuming i can't run the game at native resolution at 60fps - which sadly seems to be the case with UE5 games and my RX 5700 XT) because the other options are both (slightly) slower and look worse. They look fine on static images or if the camera/objects doesn't move much, but fast changes create noticeable artifacts - especially on third person games where often the character model has a very visible "pixelly" outline. It looks like those 2D pixel art games that arbitrarily mix resolutions and as a result create a garish result. I'd rather have the consistent quality of bilinear upscaling.
Or, to be on topic, i'd rather have no upscaling at all and have the result be at the native resolution of the monitor with the latter being at a proper size so the underlying hardware can actually reach said resolution at playable framerates.
Exactly. Maybe my eyes are not good enough, but I've literally never ever wished for more resolution - and especially not as an immediate and unavoidable tradeoff to power/battery/framerate/weight/heat/noise!
I do not need same resolution on my 7" device as on my 27" monitor :)
TBH I don't buy that argument, we are talking about PC games that have handled scaling for a very long time. This is standard if you are making PC games.
The Steam Deck really isn't a console in any traditional sense of the word. With there now being multiple devices like this out there, I don't think that argument works.
On the contrary, I'd say that the Steam Deck has a lot in common with consoles, especially as modern consoles (PS5 and XSX) converge with PCs. The Steam Deck comes with a store integrated into the frontend, a verification process, and standardized controls and performance targets. It's basically a "pre-jailbroken" console. At the same time, the XBox Series S is showing a big reason why Valve might want to keep a single performance target for a longer than the normal constantly evolving hardware in PCs, and both it and the PS5 digital have removed any sort of physical distribution aspect to the definition of consoles.
I suppose I should clarify that I don't think they're likely to fully converge, at least not in the next decade (through the PS6 and whatever nonsense Microsoft calls their next iteration).
But it's increasingly similar hardware inside, consoles are increasingly supporting more general purpose computing (media apps, social networking features, web browsing, game/app stores), the experience is more customizable, patching has made it much less "the game is the game", and the stupid simple reliability has gotten much less stupid simple. I'd say that the distance between PCs and consoles has been gradually shrinking since probably the release of the PS3/360, mostly due to consoles moving closer to PCs, but the Steam Deck is a big jump towards a PC being console-y.
They absolutely are in lots of ways. Phones are too small to be convenient PCs, but there's not much left they can't do these days. If you look at the spectrum from phones, to phone-OS tablets (ipads or android tablets), to PC-OS tablets, to laptops, it's really not a solid line you can draw where things are dramatically different. The main difference is that the UX isn't designed to be good at being a PC.
A single performance target means devs can fairly easily make tweaks and fixes to get "Verified Compatible" with Steam Deck which means more games work on ALL steam decks and its easier for casual consumers to just pick it up, buy some games, and have a good experience without knowing anything about PC gaming.
The Ally and the Legion GO (and other power constrained devices/devices with APUs) will benefit from some devs' performance and power optimizations for steam deck, and SteamOS based devices will benefit from fixes that work around issues with proton, both of which would be less likely to be addressed if there weren't an entire market of consumers you can access by getting that "Verified" badge.
> The Ally and the Legion GO (and other power constrained devices/devices with APUs) will benefit from some devs' performance and power optimizations for steam deck, and SteamOS based devices will benefit from fixes that work around issues with proton, both of which would be less likely to be addressed if there weren't an entire market of consumers you can access by getting that "Verified" badge
IF that is the case, then the argument for why they would not increase the performance is not valid. They could have kept the same resolution but made it more powerful.
You can't say other devices will benefit and still make the argument that the steam deck had to stay at the same performance level. It's one or the other.
It's perfectly fine that Valve didn't want to upgrade it but I just don't buy the argument.
It's not one or the other because the concern isn't for the owners of the new Deck, its for the owners of the old one. Any meaningful increase in power will create a scenario where the new deck can play games that the old one cannot which would be confusing for consumers and would weaken developer incentives to create a good experience on the older deck.
When you factor in that the niche market of slightly more powerful $600+ handhelds is already served by 4+ different players I just don't see why Valve would need to jump into it at this point. The marginal benefit is not worth the risk of fracturing the deck community and burning early adopters.
Also I should have made it more clear, but only some patches targeting the steam deck will trickle up to higher performance devices. Some patches will be things like "low shadows look like crap but medium shadows are just barely too much for the deck, lets lower medium a bit so that it can run well". I only mention that some patches will help other mobile devices because in my view its a win-win for the entire market that Valve is committed to providing a common denominator.
Sure, but changing the resolution and changing the scaling means changing the performance metrics.
If one device is 1080p and one is 2160p, then even if both "render" at 1080 and one scales up to 2160 that is a change in performance. They don't want developers to have to test on multiple devices to see if it gets laggy on the one with the higher-res screen.
Seems like the back buttons are a worthy tradeoff if you're looking for a Windows-based handheld. The Ally is faster and has some nifty tricks but Windows holds it back, compared to the snappy, polished feel of the Deck.
For me it is not, I use my Steam Deck has a way to carry the games that I play with a controller on my PC or Console... mobile. I use an Elite Xbox Controller and rely heavily on the back buttons.
TBH I don't think Windows holds it back when once I am in the game (the part that matters) the experience is the same.
> TBH I don't think Windows holds it back when once I am in the game (the part that matters)
Being able to instantaneously[1] pause and resume games on the Steam deck makes for a pretty great experience. The non-gaming parts also matter a lot in a portable gaming device.
Valve tries to make it easy to run a proton-compatible anti-cheat system which I believe is built in to steam libraries, but developers still have to choose to use it notably Microsoft seemed totally uninterested in using a proton compatible EAC for Halo Master Chief Collection last time I checked earlier this year. I read online it should have been easy to switch to the proton compatible EAC but some devs might not want to.
It seems to be up to the developer, as many anti-cheat support Linux if the developer wants it to.
Elden Ring uses Easy Anticheat which works fine in Proton, but Black Desert also uses EAC and it doesn't. Phantasy Star Online 2 works with Proton-GE and it used GameGuard and now Uncheater.
Not by default. But you absolutely can setup dual boot if you care to.
I've used stock steam deck since its release and love it to death; but it's super flexible for those who want to install other stuff or play with it :)
I think this is important to prevent fragmentation -- it's too early in the steam deck product cycle for games to only run on "Steam deck OLED" if there was 10% extra performance.
I would guess it has more to do with current and anticipated future availability than anything else.
I don't work in hardware, but I've read some wild anecdotes about the extreme difficulty of establishing a stable supply chain if you want to keep manufacturing exactly the same product for N years. I guess this won't be any surprise to the HN crowd, but often when you buy an X, it will have some different parts to the X (identical SKU) from last year and the year before.
A bit disappointing that you cannot purchase just the new OLED screen and replace it in the LCD model, considering the dimensions are the same.
I wonder what the true limiting factor for this is? I'd love to upgrade, but ~$500 feels like a little too much for the usage I currently get out of my Deck.
Selling the unit as a whole almost certainly is a loss for them, but they make money by having people buying games from them. Selling parts like that would be unlikely to have a similar effect, so they might not be able to sell it at a price point that makes sense.
deckhd [1] creators (third-party 1200p screen for deck) said it's not possible, as it will require modifying main board (something about voltage regulation, if i recall correctly)
Also with the MMC option gone (so the PCB area can be reclaimed), thicker fans and cooling solution, different internal size battery and screen, I wonder if the entire mainboard has been redesigned.
With a lot of changes that probably can't be retrofit into a launch Deck, I see this as trying to attract new customers instead of old ones. Probably worth waiting on the next release with an actual spec bump in a few more years.
that difference is likely because of the smaller bezel rather than the display piece itself. they have said the screen protectors and other accessories will still work
Does anybody here have experience using a Deck booted into Windows with VR headset connected for playing Beat Saber? How well does it work for this purpose? Not finding too much info on that particular setup online.
This revision appears to fix my main gripes with the original model so I’d like to buy one, but if I could use it as an ultraportable Beat Saber machine it’d make the purchase more justifiable. While my Quest 2 can technically run Beat Saber natively, the Steam version is vastly more mod-friendly and PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.
i don’t understand why you want a portable beat saber setup that requires hauling around an entire VR setup + a steam deck + all of the peripherals that requires? imo you might as well buy a little laptop with a proper video card if you’re going that route. the deck’s video capabilities aren’t intended to drive VR or run windows, you’ll almost certainly have issues of a million varieties.
Mainly, it’s about maximizing usage of my devices.
At home most gaming (including Beat Saber) is done on a nice custom tower that outguns any reasonably priced gaming laptop, meaning that if I bought a gaming laptop it’d only get used when traveling and would collect dust the rest of the time. Unless of course I sell the desktop and go laptop-exclusive for games, but that comes with some notable tradeoffs (fan noise and longevity primarily).
The Deck’s form factor makes it attractive for at-home use scenarios that a desktop and laptop don’t fit as well, and a such has a better chance of getting consistent usage compared to a laptop.
It’s possible, but as noted in my other comment, the Quest version is notoriously unfriendly to modding and can chug with more complex custom maps due to weak hardware, which is problematic because I play modded/custom exclusively.
It's certainly possible, I've managed to make the game run playably on a base model 2019 macbook, but that was completely vanilla on the lowest settings I could manage. Beat Saber (especially with mods) can get pretty damn hard to run (it often lags pretty badly on my 3700X/RTX 3070), especially if you're playing noodle maps or with high poly custom sabres.
I haven't tried it but I expect you'd have a very bad time running a quest due to the encoding step, and also probably wouldn't have fun on anything newer than a vive/cv1 because the resolution is too high.
>While my Quest 2 can technically run Beat Saber natively, the Steam version is vastly more mod-friendly and PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.
The Steam version is not more mod friendly.
>PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.
The Steamdeck targets 720p 30 fps gaming. The Quest 2 useded the latest generation mobile processors when it released. Similarly the Quest 3 is using the top of the line mobile processors.
>One doesn’t need to mess around with sideloading and PC mods get updates more frequently
Sideloading is how you install any new software on android, so requiring it for installing modded beatsaber does not make it less mod friendly. PC updating more often is not because the PC version is more mod friendly. The reason it is slow to update on Quest right now is because modders are investing into making the next generation modding software instead of updating the coremods.
HN folks, I feel a FOMO for this OLED version because it's just so cool, but I already own a Deck. Would you say there would be an OLED version again, even if limited in stock, in the future?
This is probably a Steam Deck v1.5 before v2 comes out. I'm sure v2 will have an OLED option and the differentiator between major versions will be CPU/RAM.
FYI 2023 is the year of the linux desktop. Its going to be about 4 years before anyone noticed that was it:
>Microsoft flops on Win 11, anti-consumer features force a few casual users to try Linux Desktop again. They find Linux Desktop is robust AF, way less downtime than Windows their constant updates and their pestering. They shout the news from the roof: "The future is here"
>Steam Deck making it mainstream. More resources, more users, high quality linux rather than cheap chromebooks/raspi. (Love my raspi thou)
>Linux desktop being so solid. Fedora take my breath away. I cannot believe this is Linux. I can't believe Linux is literally better than Windows.
We like to joke about The Year of the Linux Desktop, but it's already been here for half a decade: ChromeOS.
As far as non chromeos/steamos based linux desktops, yeah it's not gonna happen, not unless microsoft in a fit of insanity breaks backwards compat, OEMs stop pre-installing windows, and even then the users will probably migrate to Apple, not linux.
My biggest complaint about my Steam Deck is the contrast ratio on the LCD screen. The backlight bleed bothers me more than it should, but I think I've gotten used to LCDs with very good contrast ratios over the last ten years. I'm considering upgrading, but wondering how much my current 512GB would sell for.
Really tempted to replace my current Steam Deck with one. Got one in January and I've put 215 hours on it so far. It's a fantastic piece of kit and the improvements sound like they could be worth the expense.
The one thing that I am wondering though is if the Wi-Fi 6E alone can boost download speeds. Seemed to me like the poor download speeds were also because of the storage bottlenecking. Although the Wi-Fi is definitely the weakest part of the current Steam Deck hardware, being quite unreliable at times, so any improvements on that front are welcome.
I have the 512GB model of the original Steam Deck and have put hundreds of hours in it as well. I'm personally waiting for the true successor to the Steam Deck. This is simply a refresh.
Yeah, I feel like there needs to be language to describe new versions like this:
* If you're going to buy one for the first time, the new one is the one to get.
* It's worth replacing your old one.
This is probably not worth replacing your old Steam Deck (unless you have a lot of money to throw around.) But it's really nice for people who haven't bought one until now.
Well, over half of my storage is on microSD anyways. But even with a wired connection over a USB-C dock, the download speeds were not that stellar. If Wi-Fi is 13 MB/s, then wired was maybe like 40? This is on a 1000 Mb/s connection.
I actually use my Deck almost exclusively in docked mode. If you just want a low-cost alternative to a PC for gaming, consider picking up one of the now-discounted LCD models.
I thought I would use mine docked more than I do, but the hardware shows its weaknesses when you try to drive too many more pixels than the built-in display.
Agree, though mainly just for newer AAA games. For example, Hogwart's Legacy (which has breathtakingly good graphics on capable machines) on a docked Steam Deck is much worse than my top-of-the-line Linux AMD rig. I wouldn't expect a $500 handheld to match a $3,000 desktop of course, but I thought it worth mentioning.
If you play games like Shredder's Revenge or Stardew Valley, the graphics will be identical. But if you play AAA games and you care about graphics, you might want something more powerful.
That said, the Steam Deck works perfectly as a remote console. I.e. docked to my TV, and then "stream" the game from the gaming rig. Nvidia Shield is also a great device for that and a big cheaper if you never plan to undock it, but being able to play less demanding games locally is a big feature that makes the Deck worth it IMHO.
Poke around in the TV's options and look for "gaming mode", which is the mode where it minimizes latency by not applying whatever nonsense visual filters somebody decided to implement.
I use mine docked almost exclusively, the only thing I do is (funnily enough) stop Steam since it uses quite a chunk of RAM which I'd rather have for more Chrome tabs.
I want a small, inexpensive gaming computer to connect to my TV and have been thinking about the Steam Deck or a mini pc like the Minisforum HX99G (Ryzen 9 6900HX). Would the two computers be roughly comparable?
I'm looking for something small because I don't have room for anything bigger. The Steam Deck is appealing because it doesn't seem very computer-y. What I want is a console that plays PC games. I've tried SteamLink between my desktop computer and AppleTV but it was a terrible experience.
Is there something better than the Steam Deck that isn't expensive (ie not more than $2000).
SteamOS is a controller-first environment, which will give you that console feel. It's just so well done.
I can't speak to performance but I've heard game streaming works really well on the Deck.
I play a lot of "couch co-op" games with my kids while docked to a TV. Low requirements and very console-oriented. Compared to the Switch, here are some things that I bump into:
1. If you have 4 identical controllers, figuring out which is "1", "2", etc is hard. The Switch uses colors and LEDs to make this easy.
2. You need to walk over to wake it up. A controller can't wake it up if it's sleeping.
3. If you pair one of your identical controllers to something else, pairing it back is clunky since you don't know which one needs reconnecting.
But on the positive side, my young kids aren't put off by the leaky abstraction over PC gaming. They actually kind of marvel at the wide range the little device has but admit the advanced wizardry (game mods, desktop mode) can only be wielded effectively by Dad.
> 2. You need to walk over to wake it up. A controller can't wake it up if it's sleeping.
If you have a Steam Controller you can do this, as long as you use the USB dongle and not Bluetooth to connect. I have the official dock with the dongle plugged into that, and the Deck wakes up with the controller just fine.
There are a very wide variety of Windows based handhelds more powerful than the Steam Deck. AyaNeo seems to crank a new one out every 4 months!
I came across a google doc a while back where people were obsessively cataloging them. There are many which have come out in the last 2 years. You have your pick of options. They usually run from 400 - 1200.
lol. I don't think anyone has tested all of these to be able to make such a recommendation.
If you want one which also docks and is a serviceable PC, filter that list for stuff which can run Windows/Linux and also comes with a Ryzen 5/7. Bigger number is better CPU (you'll notice above the 7k Ryzen series, it gets an A on Switch emulation).
Take a look at the spread of prices and battery capacity and decide what candidates are important for you, and lastly check the reviews to see if any of them have quality/usability issues.
No, the minisforum will be much more powerful. I think that CPU will be roughly twice as powerful and the GPU included (6600M) similarly roughly twice as powerful.
As the other commenter said, there are other handhelds, some getting better chips. But for your use case, you could also choose a small gaming pc or a laptop.
If you would get use out of a gaming laptop separate from attaching to your TV then that's pretty attractive choice because it does everything the mini PC does without that much more space.
The 6900HX has an RDNA2 GPU with 12xCU, compared to the Deck's RDNA2 with 8xCU. The Steam Deck is also limited by the power usage, the TDP is hard capped at 15W, while the 6900HX gets 45W TDP.
My issue with using the Deck as the benchmark is that it is designed for 720p. Even connected to a 4K TV, the Steam Deck by default will force the game to run at 720p, and upscale it to 4K.
If you're okay with a bit bigger, AM5 APUs are rumored to be coming out soon with BIOS updates that added support recently. I expect those to have RDNA3 like the laptop 7840HS and other chips. It'll be the first GPU update to desktop APUs since the 5600G. I'm excited and might build a new mITX to replace my own HTPC
Have you tried either Nvidia's or AMD's? I used moonlight on my phone for Nvidia it's free. You need fast wifi or Ethernet. I am planning on doing this for all my future purchases as a server to stream my media to all devices with as much performance as possible. I think this is a much better route than another dedicated device, unless you plan to use it outside a lot, and even then with good enough data and internet you can stream it from your computer.
There's an Xbone mount/clip that I really liked for $3ish (it's like $20 official) and they might have done the same with the PS4 or 5 designed just to add a BT/USB-C controller to your phone.
When I tried it (about a month ago) I was able to connect easily enough, but then the Steam interface went away for some reason and I was left staring at my (remote) desktop. I restarted Steam and started a game but the controller lag was noticeable and the framerate seemed low. It looked like a VNC connection. After about 30 minutes I gave up and started to look at Steam Decks and other very small computers.
I hadn't heard of Steam Remote Play so I googled it and it looks like it's using Steam Link. I tried Steam Link to my Apple TV and it was a terrible experience. Is the Steam Deck going to be a better client than the Apple TV?
Maybe I’ll have to give it another try. There are all kinds of people who say it works great. I must have had something misconfigured because it was not playable when I tried it.
Steam Deck has RDNA2 architecture which is pretty old now. They're probably getting rid off the last chips currently. I'd get at least Zen4/RDNA3 or, if you're in no hurry, even wait for what they release in the coming year. Especially if you want it to drive a high resolution screen...
In your opinion, are the mini pcs even worth considering? I kind of hesitate because I don't want another computer. I want a console experience that looks decent on a 55" tv (probably 1080p). The Steam Deck seems a little lo-res.
Why not get a minipc with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU?
Both of those have an integrated Radeon 780M GPU which should be better than steamdeck.
Price wise they will be come out similar.
The HX99G is more expensive than something like the UM780 (7840HS)
Kind of, they did the Steam Link which was local streaming only. They also had the Steam Machines which were made by third parties. From what I recall the Steam Machines were overpriced for what they were and SteamOS + proton weren't nearly as good as they are now.
I think that rumor was mostly based on an old screenshot from a documentary and the korean filings for a new WiFi6e device, which turned out to be this deck revision, so I'd put less weight on those now.
Are there any other clues about them working on the console?
I have been very happy with my Minisforum Venus UM790, though I use it as a mobile computer since I can just throw it into my backpack. It's been great to have access to AVX512 on the go.
I have been really happy with my steam deck - I would strongly consider it if you don't mind that the hardware isn't cutting-edge. I rarely use it connected to a TV, so the relatively weak GPU might look worse than it does on the small screen, but otherwise it has been fantastic.
It "just works," like a console. Which would be another good option.
Guys, c'mon, I know that you have to have a longer bullet point list for the premium, more expensive option, but you're making your actual advantages sound stupid by including this one.
Pretty sure you can mod in any startup movie of your choice these days. The startup movies just seem to be a way to get me to waste steam points I don't have any use for on some variety of startup visual without any effort. You're not wrong.
You can even go to the point store, get a url of the preview, download it from Steam servers, put it in an appropriate Steam subdirectory and set in Steam settings to be the default.
I have the current 512. I won't be upgrading as I can't afford right before Christmas (got to get the kids things) But I will say I love love love my steam deck and I've bought so many more games because of it. Esp indie games. I think it's been great for everyone involved the gamer, the small developer and Valve. I really hope we see them continue to innovate. They're killing it. I honestly think they could make a tablet with SteamOS that just lets you use Bluetooth controls my kids and I would freak out.
I have a Steam Deck, Steam Link and the Steam Controller (it does work) among other controllers. The ability to use any controller is awesome (Wireless DualSense is my fav RN). Steam Controller itself wasn't all that great, and I like the . And Steam Controller with a Dock acts as Link (unless I'm missing some other functionality).
I love everything about the Steam Deck except 1 thing.
I love that its Linux based, and that you can doc it and turn it into a real PC. The interface is polished and its fast. And it's Steam, so I have all my games!
The one thing - I can't play it for more than an hour without getting hand cramps. The ergonomics just aren't very good for me.
I play games all day for my job, and I know I can play an xbox controller or a ps5 controller for 8 hours straight without problems.
Lucky, because its a Steam Deck, I can plug any controller I want into it.
Despite the bigger overall size, the buttons on the Steam Deck aren't bigger than the buttons on a Nintendo Switch joy-con. That's why I like the Asus Ally more for having buttons that aren't too small for my big hands.
There are some aftermarket attachments that supposedly help with this. I haven't tried any of them myself, but I get the same problem as you and I will probably try some out next week.
I'm super tempted by it but I just bought my Steam Deck this year. I love it and have played almost daily (all handhold) and I've got a vast backlog of games to play (that will play well on the deck).
Resolution not changing is both a pro and a con but more-so a pro I think. OLED would be really nice as would the battery life but I don't need it.... OTOH that special edition looks really cool...
There is of course a lot of US-centrism and exceptionalism out there, but GP could just more benignly be noting that Valve is an American company, so it really would be strange for them to not launch in the US as part of the first cohort.
I'm in the U.S. and am getting the Available on Nov 16 button, but worth noting this note at the bottom of the Deck homepage:
> Steam Deck Limited Edition is an experiment for our team, and we were only able to make a small quantity. That said, we hope this is a successful experiment and customers are excited – if we see there is a large demand for this kind of product, we will definitely continue to explore more colorways in the future.
I'm getting that same message, but am in Australia.
From memory it's actually not available here, due to our government level consumer protection people not putting up with Valve's bullshit a few years ago.
Very excited for future hardware from Valve. Especially excited for the rumored VR headset that'll double as a set-top-box for your TV (at least that's what I've heard).
As a related aside: does anyone know of any companies or processes by which one can get low volume (think prototyping volume, i.e., single digit quantity orders) custom OLED screens? Bonus points if the OLEDs are able to be custom laser cut (the same process as the "hole punches" that are in smartphone screens).
My understanding of OLED vs LCD displays is that LCDs are more consistent in power draw, but OLEDs draw less power with darker pictures, but more power with brighter images. So it depends on the brightness and the colors in the scene.
It is not as a simple as "Linux does not support HDR".
The kernel's graphics API does expose functionality to use HDR. What is not there (yet) is Xorg and Wayland compositors using that functionality as well as programs written to target those being able to use whatever HDR Xorg/Wayland functionality would expose. For gaming Wine also lacks HDR support.
Valve is bypassing the above by using their own Wayland compositor (gamescope) which is designed to run X11 applications (mainly Wine/Proton) via XWayland and -IIRC- they hacked in a way to take over XWayland's output to force HDR so that Windows games running under Proton using Windows' HDR APIs will work under gamescope.
The reason they can do that is because they can modify and ship the entire stack, but it its otherwise a very gaming-oriented gamescope-specific hack (you can't use the same functionality to get a window with HDR content under an otherwise "SDR" desktop).
FWIW if you do have an HDR monitor (and perhaps an AMD GPU, not sure if this is a requirement) you should be able to use it on your own PC to run Windows games with HDR support - you'll just be limited to running them in fullscreen mode in a separate virtual terminal (i mean those you switch with the Ctrl+Alt+F<n> keys). I haven't tried it myself though because i'm using my own gamescope fork with some modifications i made and my code is a couple of years behind (long before the HDR stuff were added). Also while i technically have an HDR monitor, it isn't basically a somewhat brighter SDR monitor, not true HDR.
Joshua Ashton (Valve Developer) gave a talk called "Rainbow Frogs: HDR + Color Management in Gamescope/SteamOS" at XDC this year where he explained how they improved colour management on Linux when other people have so far failed.
Melissa Wen (Igalia) talked more about how they're gonna try and upstream the work, but there are lots of moving upstream parts and they all move very slowly in "The rainbow treasure map: advanced color management on Linux with AMD/Steam Deck"
Good, good. I have two gaming desktops and don't need it. What I need is something like the Legion Go. Not for gaming, mind you. Reading. A laptop is too big, a phone too small. I think it hits the spot real nice and people managed to get Linux working on it right away, which was to be expected. I wonder how much it weighs without the joypads
The reduced LCD Steam Decks are a steal now and you’re getting a marginally worse device. The 64 GB one is essentially the price of a Nintendo Switch, and you can emulate Nintendo Switch games on it as well as play AAA Steam games. No brainer.
Wow! This seems like a really good upgrade just for that screen and longer battery life. Time to finally buy the SD to play that ever-increasing backlog of games in my Steam catalog.
Performance isn't really better but RAM speeds are a bit better which boosts things a little. Digital foundry says it runs cooler and quieter. It does have better battery life but it also has a larger battery and more efficient screen.
Looks cool, gives me a slight pang of regret given the model I purchased 3 months ago is now the entry level and £120 cheaper than what I paid. But I guess I knew I was playing with fire a bit.
It’s good to see Valve is staying committed to the platform though, it’s an excellent machine and very cool to see active changes towards increased repairability.
I bought the 512 deck pre-order when it was released, remained sealed in the shipping package for 5 months on my desk, I am not a gamer, but had plans to use it as a portable ground station for robots and drones, got busy and never had the chance to do so, until one day my brother visited me and I gave it him.
Anecdotes tend to be over valued on HN so my distaste for them may come across as rude but man, this is a particularly boring story to share. Did your brother enjoy it at least? It starts off like a product story but winds up being irrelevant to the product. You don’t hate this product, you don’t love it, you are indifferent about it and didn’t even buy it for its stated purpose!
He did enjoy it being a gamer, and he got all sort of accessories as I knew later. I honestly had big plans for it, I even have few 5G Quectel modems and planned to integrate one, and add the SDR I have too so it’s truly a portable ground station, but that happened during a big project I didn’t have the time for any of that, I still might do it, or maybe inspire someone in here who’s into robotics to do it!
Doubt an ARM chip would work well with Valve's approach of using Proton (Wine) to run the x86 binaries. And also not sure if the iGPU really measures up to RDNA (since Apple doesn't build their chips for gaming.)
It's mostly going to be bound by the GPU, which would be a wildcard, but i reckon you could match the existing performance for the same power draw, but then you also have a properly fast computer to plug into a monitor in your bag.
I was really hopeful seeing this announcement, but they're not releasing this in Australia.
I wonder why?
We're a small market, but high income & high disposable income, no language barrier, similar business environment. I'd assume it was easy-as to also do business here.
I wish there was a developer workstation in this form factor (with split keyboard insted of joysticks, of course). Plus the holes so I can strap it around my neck
like we did with cameras many years ago.
I think it just depends on the games you play. Check to see how much space they'll use. Personally, I don't play a lot of "AAA" type games, I play more indie games, so 256GB has more than enough space for me. You can always upgrade the SSD or use a microSD card.
Space 100% comes down to the games you expect to play.
Also the 256 GB model isn't the new OLED model being highlighted by this post. You can still get the now-discontinued LCD 512 GB model at a discount if you're concerned about space and don't care about OLED.
I somehow managed to nearly max out my 512GB deck and 512GB microsd card. I was surprised to see storing stuff on the SD card had negligible impact on speed.
It really depends on the games you play though and size of your library.
> I was surprised to see storing stuff on the SD card had negligible impact on speed.
Yes this seemed to be the consensus on post-launch tests. There was virtually no difference in game loading times between internal drive and SD card, so everyone was recommending to just get the cheap model + a large SD (matching the highest SD card speeds that the Deck supports).
I'm quite happy with my steam deck. I use it as my personal laptop and do some web development on it. I just wish they'd support ROCm so that I can run stable diffusion on it.
This looks phenomenal. I love my current deck, but I'm buying gen 2, and I barely game anymore. For all their ineptitude, Valve sells products they obviously use.
Microsoft makes money by forcing the competing manufacturers to buy Windows. So far, it's actually worked; all of the Steam Deck competitors I've seen to date ship with a copy of Windows presumably paid-for by the OEM.
Introducing their own competitor would require them to invest deeply in doing so, and then subsidize their moneymaker (Windows) to compete at Valve's price point. It stands to reason that Microsoft would rather pocket AYANEO and Asus's OS fees and not even bother.
I was about to cancel my order for a Playstation Portal after seeing this. Considering a bit further though, I really think remote play is the future as long as you aren't concerned with using the device on the go. My PS5 can handle games way better than a Steam Deck, the device is lighter, and the battery lasts significantly longer. Still a bit torn though, the Steam Deck appeals to the side of me that loves gadgets. It's a tough call.
The Portal can only stream games over your local network, though, right? I think the SD would be a better use of money because it offers the ability to play outside for the home but it's definitely personal preference.
I had a Logitech G Cloud for a bit and found myself only using PS Remote Play because the other apps were too much of a hassle. The streaming from PS5 was flawless for me. I couldn’t tell it was streaming at all. Only issue I had was the game UI. Nothing was scaled up so trying to read anything was a task. I was not doing any multiplayer gaming though.
Disappointing APU upgrade, I've been waiting for them to refresh the device but this new version is significantly slower than the already available Asus ROG Ally.
They've been very explicit about not changing the performance in multiple years. Making this faster would have been a very bad decision, muddying the compatibility so soon after the original launch.
Sorry, but I don't understand your logic. Why would it have been a bad decision? and how would it have "muddied comparability"? PC games support granular improvements; support for a game doesn't discern anything. I also can't find anything referencing their "explicit" performance requirements.
Since they want to support a console like experience, a clear compatibility indication is important. Releasing new models with different performance characteristics every two years would make that compatibility discovery PC-like, not console like. So bad from that perspective.
> I also can't find anything referencing their "explicit" performance requirements.
True, but the new model lets you replace the entire screen assembly without even removing the backplate IIRC. It won't be like damaging your Switch or Macbook's display.
at what voltage do devices like this tend to operate? I was trying to estimate the ah of the batteries so I could then be frustrated at how they pack the cells in there.
well you can just look at the specs from an official supplier of replacement batteries like ifixit https://www.ifixit.com/products/steam-deck-battery this will give you specs for the old old battery, I'm sure valve would've gone with a bigger battery that runs at the sameish voltage for simplicity
So annoying how hard they are marking up the storage upgrade. I get the pricing model where they gouge the power users to make the entry level unit cheaper. It just sucks when every product is gimped on storage just for this idiotic structure.
Strange to be using Wifi 6 when Wifi 7 is right at the door. They could've waited a bit more and made something that has 4x the bandwidth over Wifi 6E.
Based on what assumptions? The Deck struggles enough to get decent FPS on many titles without careful tweaking - how do you think it's going to do if it has to push twice the number of pixels.
I'd argue the steam deck is equivalent if not better for couch co-op! You get to connect pretty much any bluetooth controller to it at the same time, you can pair a ps4 controller, a ps5 controller, an xbox controller and a google stadia controller, and they all work flawlessly.
(Of course, the switch has the nintendo first party library of party games, which is worth a lot)
Rear cover screws now thread into metal
Adjusted rear cover screw heads to Torx™, as well as other materials and geometry tweaks on the heads to reduce stripping risk
Lowered number of screw types throughout system
Reduced step count required for common repairs
Improved bumper switch mechanism drop reliability
Moved bumper switch to joystick board for easier repair
Improved display repair/replacement to not require taking rear cover off