News Steam Deck Hardware Analysis: A Potent Handheld for 720p Gaming

[TommyTwoTone66]

Why won't it play GTA5, Cyberpunk or CoD? How can you be so sure of that? Have information we don't? If your angle is the DRM side, Valve is working on it. On the other hand, you could just install Windows and play them there.

Also, while portable emulators have been a thing for a while, they aren't full fledged portable PCs that, well, give you much more than just one thing; this is to say, the Steam Deck is not a "one trick pony" like Consoles and/or Emulators.

If it's not for you, that's fine. That doesn't mean this product is a bad idea or that it won't succeed. Your main argument is Valve's support. Do you even own any Valve hardware?

Regards.

Many portable PCs have come out over the years that weren’t laptop shaped. None of them ever succeeded. As soon as you plug a keyboard into it you’ve already lost. Running full blown windows 10 on it so you can install Origin and Battle Net seems laughably silly.

I still don’t want yet another emulator handheld even if it is a “full fledged PC”. I have a raspberry pi with plenty of emulators on it which is loaded with 10,000 games across 100 emulated systems, is as portable as I ever really need, and which, honestly, I’ve touched maybe twice in the three years since I bought it and installed all the roms ever on it.

If (a big if) they do get around the DRM limitations and get it to run COD on Linux, it won’t be pretty. The graphics performance will put a lot of casual gamers off, even at 720p and assuming everything works flawlessly on it.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

You quote that number a lot... Have some information we don't have?

Also, funny you mention $600 "toy". Is not a gaming PC a toy? Isn't a console a $400 toy? I have a Valve Index with the accessories; that's ~$1600. I'm sure they've sold about the same number you quote? Maybe a bit more? Is it not a successful product? Is not the Quest 2 a successful product?

Regards.

I’m not saying people wont buy expensive toys, of course they will. But only if they do something cool and awesome.

Playing a limited selection of Steam games at 720p, the best of which are already out on the Switch, is not particularly cool or awesome, you can buy much better toys for $600.

 

[-Fran-]

I’m not saying people wont buy expensive toys, of course they will. But only if they do something cool and awesome.

Playing a limited selection of Steam games at 720p, the best of which are already out on the Switch, is not particularly cool or awesome, you can buy much better toys for $600.

So your point boils down to "Switch > Steam Deck"... Yeah, agree to disagree.

Regards.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

So your point boils down to "Switch > Steam Deck"... Yeah, agree to disagree.

Regards.

I see nothing it does that is superior to having a Switch and a handheld emulator deck like the Dreamhax. With the switch at $200 with good exclusives and the dreamhax around $100 with better controls it’s difficult to justify anything that the steam deck does that those devices don’t being worth what it costs and the sacrifices you have to make.

 

[-Fran-]

I see nothing it does that is superior to having a Switch and a handheld emulator deck like the Dreamhax. With the switch at $200 with good exclusives and the dreamhax around $100 with better controls it’s difficult to justify anything that the steam deck does that those devices don’t being worth what it costs and the sacrifices you have to make.

You forgot several additional costs to your calculation. Also the space and other things you won't get in either separately.

It's fine; not for you. I'll stop here.

Regards.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Oh I fully understand who would want it and why, what I’m saying is that amounts to maybe 100K people in the entire world, so it’s not going to be a success. There aren’t enough indie game enthusiasts and contrarians with $600 to burn on a toy for this thing to turn a profit.

Technology has a well known history with people who go "it will never catch on." Unless you have a time machine and you're from the future, your guess as to how successful the Deck will be is as good as anyone else's.

Its great that there’s finally the battery-powered pc of your dreams in the form factor you want, and super that you plan to buy one, but you alone aren’t enough of a market to make this machine a success. 100K sales might make a great Kickstarter project, but for a company the size of Valve, it’s a big fail.

You keep saying only 100K people will buy this. Are you from the future?

Even if it's a failure for Valve, I would rather have a company that has something printing money for them at least try other things. I want companies or people to have projects that fail, because it means we can take what they've made, see what worked and what didn't, and apply elsewhere as appropriate to either make something that's better or improve what's already exists

To be a success at this scale you need mass appeal, good marketing, good features and some kind of unique selling point (for example exclusive games or VR support). Something that would set you apart from the rest, not just some crusty old games that people already have on their PC.

On PCs that aren't portable or are inconvenient to use in the same manner as say a smartphone or portable game console like the Switch. And sure, the Steam Deck itself is hardly unique, but it has other traits going for that other products like say the GPD Win do not:

• It's backed by a large company with plenty of capital to spare and an alternate means of generating revenue. GPD and others are only selling you the hardware, so they have to sell it at a profit. Valve can undercut them and sell the Deck at a loss because they can make it up elsewhere. Which by the way, you think $600 for a toy is bad? GPD Wins go for $1000 at the minimum and higher end models easily go for $1500 at current street prices.
  
  
• Valve has a lot of software development chops. You can peddle your hardware all you want, but it's no good if the software that runs on it is ho-hum. Sure you could say competing products already run Windows 10 and runs everything that it runs, but they don't own or support any of that software. So I expect the quality of that to be ho-hum and support to be more or less lackluster. Especially from presumably smaller companies.
  
  Valve has an OS distribution they "own", they have an ecosystem they own, and they've made strides to optimize and make compatible software their ecosystem is expected to run. So Valve has a stake in this and I would argue that would drive the quality of the product even more.

 

[TerryLaze]

Technology has a well known history with people who go "it will never catch on." Unless you have a time machine and you're from the future, your guess as to how successful the Deck will be is as good as anyone else's.

Oh this is definitely going to become a common form factor in the future, there is no way around that, the only guessing is on how long it will take.
The only reason smartphones became that popular was because PCs just couldn't be made usable so small but now we are on the verge of this being very doable.

You keep saying only 100K people will buy this. Are you from the future?

Even if it's a failure for Valve, I would rather have a company that has something printing money for them at least try other things. I want companies or people to have projects that fail, because it means we can take what they've made, see what worked and what didn't, and apply elsewhere as appropriate to either make something that's better or improve what's already exists

This isn't supposed to become a financial success for valve, gabe already stated on the announcement that the price hurts them, my guess would be they don't make any money at all on the $400 version, just compare to the atari vcs to see what $400 gets you on the open market if it has to be profitable.
As long as valve can get rid of all the units he will produce without losing any money it will be considered a success for gabe because of the publicity and extremely likely uptake in steam sales that the deck will bring and if so then he will do additional runs.

 

[tq45]

And assuming you can install Windows, well, your repertoire explodes as you can run emulators in it, which, believe me, you will be able to.

You don't need to install Windows just to run emulators. Dolphin and Yuzu and retoroarch etc all work fine on SteamOs (ie Linux). In fact, most emulators are developed on Linux and ported to work on Windows as well.

 

[-Fran-]

You don't need to install Windows just to run emulators. Dolphin and Yuzu and retoroarch etc all work fine on SteamOs (ie Linux). In fact, most emulators are developed on Linux and ported to work on Windows as well.

That is true. I completely forgot that.

Regards.

 

[tq45]

That is true. I completely forgot that.

Regards.

And don't forget

https://lutris.net

Also this looks like a promising Epic games launcher for Linux (and Windows and MacOs as well):

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher

The latest release including screenshots:

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases

😊

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Yeah it’s great that there’s more diversity in devices, and cool that Linux geeks get another overpriced toy to play with. I’m not knocking the Steam deck at all, it looks fun. I would probably enjoy using one and get a kick out of it, but I am a part of a tiny proportion of the gaming audience who is also a programmer and PC hardware enthusiast. We are a minority, a very small one.

All I’m saying is that it has extremely limited appeal, and won’t sell well.

Valve are more or less unique in the gaming industry in that they aren’t afraid to risk their reputation and waste time and money on vanity projects like this, because ultimately it improves their cachet with the nerdier side of the games market whether it’s successful or not, which has always been very profitable for them.

Appearing to support and embrace Linux brings them popularity with Linux users, an extremely vocal and problematic portion of the gaming market, which is important for legitimacy. While at the same time this project should not divert resource away from or impact sales of Windows software at all, which brings in 99% of their revenues.

 

[tq45]

Appearing to support and embrace Linux...

What do you mean by this?
They have poured and are currently pouring a LOT of resources into Linux development, both in graphics drivers through the RADV Vulkan driver and by developing Wine and Proton. How can they "support Linux" more than they already do?