I still use my Steam Link, and still love how smooth and easy it is to bring the game picture to my living room's TV. (wow that sounded like a commercial)
btw to this day it still receives updates!
But, what were people sideloading on it? any alternative usage that might be interesting to explore?
Its just a small computer, really. You can even run Steam Link on a Pi if you prefer (Steam Link are not made anymore AFAIK). So I suppose you could argue the reverse: run something on it which you'd otherwise run on a Pi.
I pay for software on Steam, too -- but it makes me incredibly nervous consolidating lots of purchased goods with a single walled-garden vendor who holds the keys ; and they never really earned my trust, they're just the only game in town for most titles now.
The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)
So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?
If you're concerned about losing your games, you can easily do backups from the Steam application, copying game folders, or using something like SLSK https://github.com/skyformat99/SLSK
Bypassing Steamworks basic DRM is easy. Other DRMs obviously require special workarounds.
> Valve are a lot more serious about Linux support though, going as far as employing graphics driver developers.
> GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure GOG has a hell of a lot less money than Valve. They don't benefit from any of the gambling-mechanics or multiplayer game "bling" sales that bring in so much of Valve's money, aside from having a much smaller share of PC game sales than Valve does. Valve's got to be way more profitable plus have much higher income, so have the margin to play with stuff like this—which is in their interest, because the weaker alternative operating systems are, the more Valve operates only at the pleasure of Microsoft.
> Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]
I'm not happy about these features requiring an internet connection, but they seem pretty minor. The alternative would probably have been that those features were left out of the GOG versions completely.
I've bought many many games on GOG for years because of this. Lately, GOG games come in installers made out of 20 or so parts which take ages to download manually. The only real way to download their games is by using their GOG Galaxy Client. Not that much better than Steam, which on the other hand has fantastic Linux support, while GOG can't be bothered to port their GOG Galaxy client to Linux.
Luckily Lutris allows me to somehow compensate for GOG's lack of interest in Linux, but still, I feel they really do not care about the DRM thing.
I only have 12Mbps DSL and an offline game system that I use a FAT formatted microSD card to transfer to so I appreciate the split files, even though it does get annoying with the huge games.
I agree that GOG's Linux support is minimal; often they don't even provide Linux versions that are available on other stores :(.
Two of the isses on the list account42 links to are more serious, although most are fairly minor (there are also a few issues not on the list). Not to excuse those exceptions, however I don't know of any other store that is anywhere close. I have no inside info but my my suspicion is that many CD Projekt investors resent the DRM-free aspect of GOG and would like it to change, while the people running GOG realize it is the major unique aspect of GOG and trying to change it could sink the business. OTOH, I suspect the CD Projekt investors mostly see GOG as a way to get a better deal from Steam for CDPR games. Hard to say what will happen in the future.
Out of curiosity, which Linux games on GOG are so difficult to install? I have bought many games on GOG and refuse to install galaxy and so far experienced no problems.
I haven't used Galaxy but I'm almost certain the answer is yes since Galaxy doesn't have DRM like other store clients and you see Galaxy related dlls in the standalone installers as well so I'm guessing the integration is the same either way and doesn't cause trouble without Galaxy present. As of semi-recently you can buy games on Epic via Galaxy but if they are DRMed you still need the Epic launcher to play them since GOG won't add DRM to Galaxy.
Which I've always thought was weird since I'd expect a store with their stance on DRM would be one of the first in line to at least have a linux client.
I don't need it. I install games by clicking on the provided .sh installer, then click on their desktop icon to start them (or find the app using shortcuts) and all of this is seamless on Ubuntu.
This is also how we used to install and play games on Windows, before the Steam era.
If a company pretends to support Linux, they should have a Linux client, whether I need it or not. They basically offer no Linux support, and all the Linux clients that come on their store pages come from developers' willingness, not GOG's.
They sell games that work in Linux, what is there to "pretend"?
I disagree that they "should" have a Linux client, for the reasons I explained. I don't have a use for such a client, and as such, I'm happy to ignore it (and love that it isn't mandatory, unlike Steam).
I've never received support from Steam for any technical issue. I'm resourceful and if there's a way, I'll make it work; but almost every help I needed with Steam games was taken from user's forums, within and outside Steam.
Case in point: I learned browsing Steam's forums that the Linux version of The Eternal Castle is glitchy and in many cases the keyboard input doesn't work at all; one user helpfully suggested just using the Windows version using Wine or Proton; this suggestion worked.
> Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way
Good for them! I hope it's optional, since I've no use for it.
What I love about Humble Bundle and GOG is that their games (mostly) don't try to take over your games collection, unlike Steam. I do use Steam and support Valve, but I'd prefer Steam was optional.
Yeah, they definitely don't have my trust at all. I have something like 600 games on my account, but unfortunately I'll never play any of those on my "old" Mac anymore because it runs OS X 10.10 ("Yosemite"), and Steam no longer supports that version. If I even launch Steam, the application will auto-update to a version that doesn't run anymore. Of course most of the _games_ run on versions of OS X as far back as like 10.2, but no, because Valve decided to lock me out, I can just never play Steam games on that Mac again. Cool, right? Of course everyone's response to this is "update the OS, it's free!", but I have software I need that doesn't run on newer versions of OSX.
I mean, all they had to do is let users disable automatic updates and keep running the old version of the client "without any guarantees" -- if the Steam APIs end up changing enough that I can't log in anymore, well, so be it. But to permanently lock users out simply because of a forced update… seriously uncool.
In what way, if I may ask? I am not aware of any controversy surrounding the steam store with that regard.
Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable
Some people are deeply upset that a gigantic storefront and distribution network [0] would dare take a 30% cut, despite that being well below brick and mortar rate and also pretty standard for a digital storefront.
But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.
[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.
I don't even know how to actually check what I have on my Epic account without going to past purchases. It's baffling how a company that's trying to take more marketshare from a platform as polished as Steam without focusing more on UX.
Any chance they had of getting me as a customer died when they started doing Epic store exclusives. I won't give them money to build another walled garden. There's more than a few games I haven't purchased because of those deals and by the time they finally come to steam I don't care enough about them anymore to spend the money.
Even though Borderlands 3 is now on Steam, I still refuse to buy it because of their exclusive deal... I own every other Borderlands game, but I will never buy that one
What’s the problem here? Check out reviews on steam and participate in the discussion forums, and make your purchase in Epic, to support the developers.
My personal number one issue with Steam (aside from the obvious fact that it's still DRM at the end of the day) is that I think their family sharing feature is kind of bullshit. You cannot let somebody play a game in your library and be able to play yourself another game in that same library at the same time.
There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.
This "feature" bothers me a lot. When my girlfriend tries to play Planet Coaster from my account via the family sharing feature, sometimes she kicked off even though I'm not even playing a game at all! I think this is a big reason cloud based services like Steam are a step down from physical games with no reliance on internet connectivity. Truth be told my friends and I were doing fine before Steam existed, even if it meant sometimes needing to get friend's IP addresses and troubleshoot firewall issues to play multiplayer games.
If it's of any help, you can play games at the same time if you go into offline mode in your main account. That way you can atleast play one multiplayer and one single player game at the same time
I'm aware of that workaround but there shouldn't be any need for a workaround in the first place. Valve shouldn't get to freeze my entire library when I want to share a single game with a family member or friend.
They take a bigger cut then most other digital store fronts and they have a history of using the loyalty of fans to do unpaid work such as translations and perform the majority of moderation on Steam.
> It was eventually scrapped due to no market demand for it.
Rather the opposite. I think it ended up as part of several compute clusters because the console was sold for less than it cost to produce, something normally offset by game sales. So suddenly Sony had a large market that only cost it money.
You know we're all bullshitting here apparently but my guess is that happened relatively little. The PS3 was too exotic of hardware to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.
I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.
I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.
Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.
My university had a few PS3 clusters. The CS department loved them because you could buy three of them for the price of a good server. The department even offered a crash course on programming for the PS3. I didn't take it, but from what I understand, it wasn't that difficult to program (for the department use cases).
The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.
A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.
This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.
Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.
Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.
> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.
There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.
It would be the same issue for whatever supercomputer code you want to run. If you don't specifically target for the Cell SPEs, you're left with a single PPE that could barely keep up with the Pentium 4s and Athlon64s at the time.
I remember reading an article about the US military using a PS3 supercomputer cluster for something, but it was so long ago I don't remember where or if it was a puff piece or something actually significant.
It was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer at its time and, according to[0] AFRL director, it cost them 5~10% the cost of a system made with off-the-shelf computer parts.
No, the real reason as I believe it, is because Sony wanted to eliminate a potential door to being able to unlock the console because this is something that was being very actively worked on by geohot and a few others.
I said I don't believe, not I've never heard of that.
I think it's an urban legend fueled by marketing, I've never seen any hard proof of that, except some BOM calculations from independant analyse, but I don't think mass production work that way.
No that feature was included to sidestep taxes in some markets (general purpose computers usable for research being lower tax category than game specific computers). They never intended it to be used by many consumers. The PS3 was cracked because the feature was removed.
AFAIK, they pulled it because geohot got an "exploit" running under linux (unlocked the GPU or something, can't remember now) and their reaction was it was too much risk that it could lead to piracy
This is the actual reason the "Other OS" support was pulled. The other speculation in here is pretty funny. It was also pretty limited for many purposes - you couldn't access the GPU at all reducing total system memory to 256mb IIRC.
It's arguable giving hackers a platform to explore the innards of the PS3 was the biggest contribution Other OS made to the PS3, and I'm not surprised it scared Sony management. In the release notes for the PS3 firmware update that removes "Other OS", Sony also state it was for "security concerns":
"...will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update."
The "security concerns" were of course geohot/others using it to crack the PS3 DRM.
Pretty sure the actual reason was console margins and non-gaming buyers. At the time [1], it was believed that Sony lost hundreds of dollars per console. The business case for the losses was that the cost could be recouped with games. But people and organizations buying the PS3 for its computing capabilities, running OtherOS, were not buying enough games to recoup the losses.
I’ve read the other replies but I remember well why it failed: only single precision floats.
You can’t run physics simulations on single precision. So the people who would have bought and tinkered and pushed it forwards were all turned off by it.
The military was allowed double precision; but there was no point making it a compute cluster otherwise.
I don’t know if it was a marketing or budget decision but basically all the early adopters who would have championed doing impressive things on there (I was so hyped at the time for the cell architecture) couldn’t do anything useful with it.
There's a lot of physics you can do in single precision. In fact, current gen climate models are mostly in single precision, and some of the next gen models are trying to do a lot of the work in half precision (float16).
I’ll give you it’ll be algo and scale dependent. I work with climate modellers and I think they’d get more bang for their buck with optimising for GPU architectures.
I recall I was very excited at the prospect of getting my hands on a ps3 for modelling, but all my work (1) at least required double precision and it left a long bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t to be.
i bought a ps3 and not a xbox to be able to install linux, and use it as a computer to see later that they disabled it in an update. jailbreaked it. will never buy again a sony product.
Interesting point. If they made a console or handheld, it could conflict with publisher's exclusive licensing deals. Making a PC and being able to defend it as a PC in court works around it, even if the form factor happens to be a console or handheld.
Console is supposed to mean simply a type of interface and form factor. The fact that incumbent consoles are all crazily locked-in and DRMed (that it requires to explain that this is in fact a PC and you as a user can control it) has nothing to do with them being consoles per se. So let's call it a console, but without all the garbage.
Arch Linux is amazing. The biggest surprise for me was that it's more stable than so-called stable distros, probably because the various packages don't end up drifting several months from each other when keeping up to date.
Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers. The learning curve is an absolute wall when installing, even after several years on Linux, but after that it's pretty standard.
Based on this trajectory I expect they'll be migrating to NixOS (or maybe Nix on Arch) in about 5-10 years.
Ubuntu was likely too difficult for Valve to keep modified and up to date for their needs.
Canonical doesn't have any reason to be friendly towards the specific features Valve needs to make SteamOS a thing, and Valve probably doesn't want to maintain their own fork of the entire Ubuntu distro.
Not to mention, a default install of Arch is tiny and minimalist. It's the perfect base to apply your own packages on top of without having to worry too much about conflicts with system packages, or anything else that might break between Ubuntu LTS version updates.
It means Valve can mostly have their own custom distro without having to do most of the work required to maintain a custom distro.
It also means Valve can deploy the latest package of something that boosts gaming performance (like some new graphics driver or whatever), again, without jeopardizing the core os. Arch is well known for being "bleeding edge" and getting the latest packages out immediately which is something gamers (the target audience for SteamOS) want (every single extra FPS matters, etc).
Nix's existing support for Steam is pretty reliable as it is. Using Nix to distribute Steam would be awesome!
I'm not sure how ready Valve would be to require not only their own game distribution mechamisms but a whole package manager, but Nix + NixGL would be a very reliable and low-overhead way to get cross-platform support and to make it easy for games that might depend on extra libraries or specific versions of them.
> Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers.
Pretty sure it won't. I bet it's going to use a self-made system upgrade facility and not rely directly on pacman either.
pacman is great for its intended use-cases, but it's not a package manager you want to use with no supervision of an experienced user. It may even silently leave a package in broken state just because the rootfs went full during the upgrade.
And at the very least, pretty sure they're not going to use actual Arch system repos but roll their own.
Because Valve's target is deterministic (relatively, hardware revisions not-withstanding) pacman is actually perfect for their use-case.
You can nail down a new release on your local hardware using a bash script that calls pacman against specific packages and specific package versions. Once your local dev works, push that to the update tool. Hopefully you caught all the bugs. :)
I'm not convinced packages need to care. Most config users care about on a SteamDeck is going to be Steam or game specific, so Valve are in a good position to put that on some mutable partition.
For the system data, which could be immutable, they could either take an A/B approach with two different partitions, or perhaps use either btrfs or ZFS to allow the new version to be applied over the old version as a 'diff' of the system partition. On a failed update, or to rollback for any other reason the system partition would simply be rolled back to the last snapshot.
Valve (as they did with Debian based previous versions of SteamOS) will maintain their own curated repository of packages, so they can control the versions of packages directly, no need to mess about forcing versions via pacman.
I just used the new arch installer script, even though I've gotten my install time down to under an hour over time. It took maybe 10 minutes. I don't have very complicated or unique needs, but it "just worked" on my 4 year old Thinkpad.
I just installed arch two days ago on my wife’s 2013 MacBook Air. I heard of a script. Googled around. Looked in the wiki. Didn’t find squat!
That being said arch on a 2013 MacBook Air is 10 minutes of cli and it runs like a champ!
When I built a new PC a couple months ago, my first OS on it was Manjaro - coming only from an Ubuntu/debian background. Linux has its limits but the experience is pretty seamless.
No, EndeavourOS is a nice, easy installer for Arch. You use Calamares and either select packages, or groups of packages in GUI, or/and provide a list of packages in a text file for Calamares to pick up during the install. You can even ignore Calamares altogether and just use Live OS to install Arch kind of the usual way, but from a comfort of a graphical environment; i.e., multiple pseudo TTYs, no need to configure WiFi, with a full-fledged GUI browser (Firefox), etc.
Manjaro Live OS can't be used to install vanilla Arch. Manjaro uses its own package repositories that differ significantly from the Arch repos, in terms of versions (which are held back for at least a couple of weeks) and in terms of which packages are available (quite a few AUR packages are present in the Manjaro's repositories).
I used to use Anarchy (or.. I think they had to change name?) but Arch itself has an installer new (as of last month or so), so I'll just use that next time.
I am testing it. Died on me when applying the desktop config, but I haven't been able to toy with it for long.
It is very, very promising. It spits a JSON that can be used for reproducible installs. It is also very flexible in which you can use the API with custom python install scripts. Very impressive and ergonomic.
Manjaro fired their treasurer for calling out misuse of funds. They tried to bundle paid freeoffice instead of libreoffice. They screwed up their SSL certs (twice). I'd avoid them.
There are different kinds of stability. For Debian it means version numbers stay the same as much as possible. For Arch it means software does not crash because bugs get fixed in newer versions.
>For Debian it means version numbers stay the same as much as possible.
I would call that stagnant rather than stable. If a version of software remains the same with the same bugs/issues not getting resolved, that seems unstable to me. Yes, not crashing could also be considered stable as well.
In production you want what-dylan604-calls-stagnant instead of running the latest of the greatest. Yeah, I get it that you run Arch Linux on your laptop which has zero production relevance (nobody cares if you blow it up). But on a production system, where other people rely on, you don't want sudden surprises. Or, well, maybe you do, but those people who rely on it certainly don't.
That only happens in old Stable, the previous version of Stable, or machines without internet, or machines which don't receive manual maintenance (otherwise you'd need apt install unattended-upgrades).
In Stable (what you call Stagnant) vulns get backported. Only the code fixing the vulnerability gets updated, the rest is left untouched. Its how Apple deals with older iOS versions, and it keeps their happy users of older devices happy.
If I run some old piece of hardware/software, there are a few things I want: I want it to keep functioning the way I bought it, and I want it to remain secure and reliable. So what I want is security and reliability fixes ie. what Debian Stable (and e.g. Ubuntu LTS) receives.
I was on about security and reliability fixes. These are applied when you run Stable, via Security repository, enabled by default. I was not on about Backports repository.
> For Arch it means software does not crash because bugs get fixed in newer versions.
....what. That is not how OS stability works.
Also, Arch is nearly impossible to use in production environments.
Let's say there is a vulnerability discovered in the version of lighttpd you're running in your production environment. On Debian, you pull that package, do some testing, and you're done.
On Arch? It's a rolling release distro. They're continuously updating everything, including system libraries. You can easily end up in a situation where getting a security bugfix means you have to update nearly the entire OS thanks to it being built against updated core system libraries.
Like Gentoo it's one of those OSs that is cool for linux nerds and a headache for people who actually need to practice proper systems engineering.
As someone who used Gentoo for over a decade, including in production environments - I disagree.
Its a falsehood pushed by old 80's thinking. It sounds nice, in theory.
In practice, what you often get are bugfix patches blindly applied to older codebases, oftentimes by people (distro maintainers) who are not very familiar with the codebase. As long as the patch applies, and it passes various tests.
Remember, most OSS projects - including some critical ones - do not have large teams of devs able to maintain multiple codelines in tandem. Usually, the dev(s) just work on the latest, and pay only cursory attention to applying security bugfixes to older versions.
After all, how is an OSS dev for proj X meant to know (or even give a damn for) which distro arbitrarily decided which older version is somehow the SECURE and BLESSED one.
The dev in question probably moved on from that version months (and in regard to Debian, probably YEARS) ago.
So in theory, what you said sounds right. In practice, no.
Production case study: ChromeOS is based on Gentoo.
I've also known a couple shops that run Gentoo as their distribution. Usually a central binary package host / build machine which makes it very easy to have a set of staging hosts. Just test package releases like normal before migrating them to prod.
Gentoo is perfect for proper systems engineering: Create a profile, and then manage what goes into it, in exactly the same way as you describe on Debian.
Just because it often works doesn't mean it's a good idea. Updating a single package is officially unsupported [0] and it's burned me personally on a number of occasions.
weel it's a bad idea unless you update just one package that doesn't have too many shared dependencies, things gets complicated with shared dependencies across their packages, so that's why it's better to run the full -Syu of course not automated but when you know what you are upgrading and possible manual interventions (if any) or caveats that you might have with the changes.
> Like Gentoo it's one of those OSs that is cool for linux nerds and a headache for people who actually need to practice proper systems engineering.
Fear not. As GKE is running on Container-Optimized OS which is based on Chromium OS which itself is based on Gentoo, you can safely practice proper systems engineering within the container environment :)
> The learning curve is an absolute wall when installing, even after several years on Linux, but after that it's pretty standard.
I'm surprised, I found it very easy to get into Arch linux. But I came from distributions like Slackware & Gentoo where it was common to do the installation almost entirely from commands in the terminal.
IMO distributions that keep the installation primarily command-line focused are a good way for beginners to get started, it gives them a real grasp of how linux works, and how to change things to suit.
I second this: Command-line and text files are more user friendly than it seems.
1/ You can search for stuff on the internet and get quick results (not a video)
2/ You can _paste_ a command and send it to someone to run it instead of a word document with instructions and screenshots.
3/ Once you learn to find and search for stuff in files, it is easy to discover where stuff is configured.
4/ Manual pages are great once you know how to read (I mean skim) them.
I really want to sell Valve on the Nixpkgs cross compilation work we've done someday. If anyone knows anyone there that would be interested in flawless Linux <-> Windows builds with all toolchain combinations, do let me know!
Currently we just support Unix -> Windows via MinGW. That's not good enough for AAA games.
But in the works is:
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/72366 Windows cross via LLVM and auto-downloaded MSVC runtime (you do need to indicate you signed the license, but that's it). I've heard of running cl.exe in Wine, and we could do that too
I’ve been following the nix-windows project, has there been any recent progress there? I already run NixOS on my home server, Nix and home-manager on my MacBook. It would be great to replace scoop on Windows with Nix too.
No progress on a nix-windows recently. I think the hardest part has just been keeping up with nix when we need to rewrite the build system.
However, https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3160 to switch to Meson, has gotten new life breathed into it. Pamplemousse, who is interning where Edolstra works, is fuzzing Nix and needs Meson to make that less burdensome.
If that does get merged, than nix-windows can just be about Windows and not also be about Nix's build system, which will make it a lot easier to finish.
I share your feelings about Arch, but I'm still running Fedora mostly out of laziness.
Still, I think Arch is an interesting choice for a console. I'd think you'd want stability (in the sense of very controlled changes / not requiring updates every day).
My guess is that Valve will keep their own mirrors and update from upstream only once their relevant packages will be tested for compatibility.
I have been using Archlinux for more than 10 years and from time to time some major upgrades can make things broken for a couple days until all the packages get updated and all the relevant compatibility fixes have been pushed upstream by the developers.
But in most cases this happens with some 3rd party desktop related packages or closed source drivers. I bet that Valve won't have that many problems with AMD since their drivers are open source.
I could also see them running a read-only system partition with snapshots for updates. And with btrfs send/receive you could do 'system updates' with just incremental snapshots, and the ability to rollback.
The problem with Arch is that Arch needs to be tinkered with when Arch wants to be tinkered with, not when you want to spend an evening messing with your OS configuration. "This evening I want to learn about X," becomes "this evening I am learning about the linux userspace ecosystem," for every value of X.
Steam bundles its own runtime for games (it can be configured to use system libs instead, but that's not the default). Games will often also ship with copies of additional libraries not in steam's runtime.
I bet that the underlying distribution doesn't matter much at all, and since this console is meant to also be a desktop (or living room) PC, might as well ship with a distribution that's good for that purpose. Arch makes more sense for desktops than Ubuntu, and has for a while tbh.
Agreed. I've used Arch for about 12 years. My system has been unbootable after an update maybe 3 times. That's not bad really, and that's just applying updates daily. Any additional rigour should improve this a lot.
> it's more stable than so-called stable distros, probably because the various packages don't end up drifting several months from each other when keeping up to date
What are you precisely referring to with "packages drift from each other"? Stable distros like Ubuntu (and I suppose Debian) don't do release updates at all, only critical/security fixes only. Only some software has special treatment (browsers first of all) and get full updates.
> Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers.
Funny you say that! Arch images now ship with an official installer as of a couple of months ago - which is comparable to the Ubuntu or Fedora installers in ease-of-use.
I think the thrust of sayings like "the learning curve is a wall" is to indicate that there is little to no slope, which is to say you don't get the benefit of time spent learning easier parts step by step until you know a lot of the system and can handle the more difficult aspects of it. Instead it feels like you either know how it all works or nothing about how it works, and it's hard to figure out how to start and get a foothold, so to speak.
That may be true now, but things have settled down a lot in general these last ten years or so. Before that things were often in a state of flux and things definitely broke on Arch regularly. The point is, Arch itself does nothing to give you stability. What you're seeing is just that the packages you're using are stable and bleeding edge doesn't mean what it once did.
Manjaro is nice, but last time I hit update the computer became un bootable until I found an afternoon to fix it. Kernel or grub iirc, not a big deal but still a bit disruptive. Ubuntu does this less a little less often
This brings back so many memories from around 17 years ago when I would try to do a dual install of arch linux with windows XP using the GRUB bootloader. Fun times! Can't believe it's been so long!
I highly recommend staying away from Arch and NixOS if you're not ready to commit upwards of 30% of your work and free time fixing and tweaking your box.
I've tried both, Arch Linux will routinely hose your entire install if you don't carefully read the update notes every time (even if most of the time there is no call to action for you). Unless it has changed, this is still the expectation of users.
NixOS promises stability, you just walk back to a previous version! Alas, i've had NixOS hose _all_ of my previous versions because of X server issues. Not only that, but the community of NixOS is hostile to getting shit done, if its not the NixOS way please stay away,
> I've tried both, Arch Linux will routinely hose your entire install if you don't carefully read the update notes every time (even if most of the time there is no call to action for you). Unless it has changed, this is still the expectation of users.
I'm honestly not quite sure what you're talking about. I've been using Arch as my daily driver for maybe 5 or 6 years, and I don't recall ever having my installation messed up from an update. Arch is fair bit along the spectrum of being a "build your own system from the ground up" type of deal though (although not quite as far along as something like Gentoo), so I don't doubt your experience, given how much two Arch installations can differ.
I've had Arch on 3 servers for 5-6 years also and only had a couple of incidents where Arch updates messed things up.
But one of those was a big compatibility breaking one that I hadn't done the prep for (because I'd missed the whole lead up for various reasons and was months late on the update anyway) and I still can't really explain the other.
Compared to Debian which I managed to break many times in the same time frame...
> Compared to Debian which I managed to break many times in the same time frame...
How did you exactly break Debian multiple times?
I've read about people doing crazy stuff, like replacing the default compiler entirely (rather than setting an alternative one) or forcing apt to install incompatible packages... and then complaining that the distribution is not stable.
Non-rolling distros are very very conservative with package upgrades, and they don't "just break", as little changes over a given version.
Generally Debian breaks come from a mission critical software that isn't really available and requires package updates beyond what your version does or from trying to force an update. Also twice dpkg just shat the bed for no reason, but that was 7 and 8 years ago.
> How did you exactly break Debian multiple times?
Alas, I can't remember exactly what happened but it was the late 1990s/early 2000s - no crazy stuff involved, just things getting confused / crashing whilst doing updates and leaving things half-arsed and broken.
You started using arch after it became stable. I've been using arch for a decade and Voxl's description of a `pacman -Syu` just completely hosing your system used to happen a lot more back then, but I haven't had an issue like that at all in the past 5-6 years.
> NixOS promises stability, you just walk back to a previous version! Alas, i've had NixOS hose _all_ of my previous versions because of X server issues.
I'd love to hear more detail about this, because `nixos-rebuild switch` is not capable of causing such a problem in a permanent way.
(It can arise temporarily, though, if you switch to a new configuration without rebooting, and that configuration requires a different kernel than you are currently running. Rebooting and choosing your old configuration at the bootloader menu fixes this.)
I've run Arch for years and this in no way resembles my experience.
Yes, Arch requires you manage and maintain your system, it's not a "just works" thing, but that's a few minutes of work here and there, it mostly just chugs along.
As to hosing your install, I've never had even the threat of that. Yes, you should check the news before doing upgrades to make sure there isn't something that requires your attention, but it's not exactly a big deal to check an RSS feed before you run an update command.
> I highly recommend staying away from Arch and NixOS if you're not ready to commit upwards of 30% of your work and free time fixing and tweaking your box.
I started using Arch back in 2011 and Manjaro (Arch-based) in 2018. Besides a day or two of initial setup, getting things how I like, I spend ZERO time tweaking or fixing my installation. Your warning simply does not match up with my experience.
I have my home server/router running Arch, update maybe 5 times per year, only one time a non-critical service(redis) failed to start due to a default config option change. I originally meant to run Debian on that, but when I bought the hardware, it's pretty exotic for Debian's old kernel, and Arch ran great.
I also have a Pi2 running Arch ARM at my mom's house, doing one or two updates per year when I visit her, also failed only once, and that's because of a corrupted SD card.
I'd admit I'm usually a bit nervous typing pacman -Syu on those two, but it's doing surprisingly great.
You’d probably have less overall risk on upgrades if you actually did it more often. A couple of times a year can result in quite a jump when using a rolling distro
I never read the update notes and the only time I've ever bricked my Arch system was by pulling the power chord during an update. I probably could have recovered from live cd, but it didn't seem worth it.
I bricked my system once due to not reading release notes (but that was closer to 2010 than 2020). Release notes were kind enough to outline solution for systems broken due to not reading the release notes.
However, I stopped using arch mainly because I was working with ROS at the time, where every boost upgrade triggered half-a-day recompilation of ROS and it's various plugins.
Arch Linux sucks. Its the default OS on the Pinephone which I use as a backup smartphone (main smartphone is Android). I'm used to running Debian, which is rock stable. Arch Linux? I get dependency issues when I'm running the software update installer. Not once or twice, all bloody time. I mean, WTF? How would anyone want such in production???
NixOS is more sane because it has roll backs, and declarative configuration is like a gigantic black hole eating everything which was known before it.
To be fair, that's Arch Linux ARM, which is technically a separate project. The pinephone arch linux arm repositories aren't even maintained by the official project.
That said, I've had no such issues running Arch on my pinephone.
I think its Manjaro by default but that's based on Arch. It follow exactly the same principles.
I've had the same problem on Arch Linux on my desktop. To be fair, I was using AUR, but without that there's far less software (less than Ubuntu I suppose). So what I did was trying out Arch Linux on a separate NVMe during some free time, learning some specific tools (it also has NixOS installed on another partition for the same purpose). I come back after a while, want to update my OS first because that is the first thing I do when I use any computer. What ya know? Boom, dependency issues. I really do not want to deal with that before I can use a tool. And every time I bring this up I get these replies "I never have issues with Arch". Sure thing, I must be special.
Look, I ran Debian Testing and Unstable for a while before Arch was cool (1999 - 2003 era). That way I could run Linux with tools such as a decent package manager, while running recent software. But this was a different time, and not mission critical computers.
pacman is pretty amazing package manager - I would be curious to know more about your dependency issues.
I suppose it could have been a temporary bug in Manjaro (which started as an Arch derivative but turned into a separate distro with links to Arch - the repositories are different).
I would recommend following the wiki and installing Arch Linux (I know, no UI) over Manjaro to have a true Arch experience.
That said, AUR is the reason I use arch linux, because there are scripts to install pretty much anything in a frictionless way.
When installing esoteric stuff the dpkg / apt repositories dance gets old pretty quickly on debian derivates. Often I would just install things on the system instead of creating my own deb. On Arch Linux I can often find a package in AUR (or quickly write a PKGBUILD).
Upgrading the system every few months and breaking a lot of things all at once (making a reinstall the easiest option) is also not very appealing in my book.
I prefer the rolling release model which gives me the latest update immediately and let me fix things once at a time.
That said, anyone has its own preferences, no need to bad mouth distros.
That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.
I hope they put some effort into anticheat on Linux for their own games. Team Fortress 2 has been barely playable for the past year because of cheaters running bots using widely available software which Valve seemingly can’t detect on Linux.
Not sure what the connection is between YOLOv4 and difficulty of detection? Isn't YOLOv4 about object detection? No matter how good your object detection is, you need to read the game and influence the input which is the part an anticheat is trying to detect, no?
There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today.
Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human."
It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement.
Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
There's a form of cheating I've heard about a while back called softaim. Basically the cheating software doesn't aim for you, but it can tell if you're aiming at the person and pull the trigger for you.
The YOLO stuff combined with softaim is going to be pretty hard to detect. The game can't tell if your video is going into the cheating device. Even if it can tell if there's a secondary input coming in for the trigger... people could just mod their mouse to take external input for the button. Someone pathetic enough to cheat absolutely would do this.
I honestly don't know how multiplayer will even work in a year's time or maybe even less!
> I honestly don't know how multiplayer will even work in a year's time or maybe even less!
It's easy, IMO: remove the incentives for cheating. If this is the only way forward, I might be more likely to actually participate in the industry, because it'll put the focus back on intrinsically-fun games, instead of treating games as merely a vehicle for chasing status/rankings/items/etc.
Multiplayer FPS (PvP) games are my favorite - could you explain how they can remove the incentives therein? Almost the entire incentive behind PvP games is beating the other person in any given battle/arena/skirmish. Even if ranks/bonuses/items were detached from "skill", most of the incentive still remains for PvP. Having encountered a number of cheaters over the years, I know they still get joy out of winning the objective of the game with no obvious side benefit.
I used to love playing multiplayer FPS games, without worrying about collecting rare items or my global ranking, because they were fun (e.g. Quake 3). Yeah there's still a "local" ranking (within a game), but the incentive to cheat is a lot lower since it's so localized. Yes people will still cheat, but some of these insane cheating methods won't be worth the effort.
I stopped playing most modern games because they stopped being intrinsically fun. I'd like to enjoy them again.
Some people will cheat in any multiplayer game, even when there are no persistent "rewards" for winning. They are just maladjusted losers who get off on being the center of attention at everybody else's expense.
Competitiveness is never going away its as human as breathing.
The way to defeat cheating is giving users exaustive options to watch and monitor other players and report them effectively. Half the damn games dont even have this sorted out.
You have a report system that weights users honesty based on usefulness of previous reports - so people.who just report good players get downweighted and their reports count for less, then its just a statistics exercise. Combine this with easily identifiable data for things like headshot % to help highlight players for closer review.
I don't have insider info and it's been a long time since I've played, so I apologize if my info is wrong, but my understanding is Riot Games tried to do this with League of Legends and ended up implementing a kernel mode anti-cheat system instead. Presumably, the reporting system either wasn't very effective or it was too expensive to run.
Is that really a way forward for the people who play games most affected by cheating? I can’t imagine CS:GO players flocking to Animal Crossing just because there aren’t aimbots in that game.
I get there are a lot of people who care about that, and that "remove the incentives" might be unpalatable for them. But it's definitely desirable for me, because I don't enjoy chasing social statuses in a gaming universe.
I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will be going back to game rooms, so you go to a place where you pay to sit in a fixed PC with no available USB ports or any way to use cheats, including cameras to catch anyone whose hands movements don't match his digital input, and there you play against other people in the same network/brand of game rooms (not necessarily the same physical location).
Just some of us, meanwhile the wealthy ones will live in semi-closed environments free of most damage made by climate change and other environmental issues.
> There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today.
Only in the "do these movement patterns appear human-like or not" sense. These aim bots can use assistive devices to input mouse movements and there's no way to tell whether or not there's a human hand moving the mouse.
There might be for now. You just have to train a second model that actually moves the cursor towards the target on normal player behaviour, eventually it becomes essentially perfect, and what then?
As far as performance improvements, oh it's going to make the cheat programmers even more money as they implement a skill ramp up period and get to charge more.
The only way in which I'm "gleeful" is that it might finally put an end to the spyware when we realize that controlling someone else's computer is a losing proposition. Otherwise yeah it does suck.
> "It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know."
Already long since passed that point for me quite a couple few years back.
Thankfully, it's not that hard to build up a little circle of gamer friends who are fun to play with these days. The messaging options alone currently available are many and featureful, making it dead easy to gather a little group and keep in contact with them to organize a game session any ol' time.
> It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know.
For me this has always been the case. I've felt the same since the days of Kali. There's enough jagoffs running around in games to spoil playing with the normal people. To the jagoffs, they're playing the metagame of cheats/trolling and the game itself is incidental.
Also, there is enough variance amongst human that eventually the generator network can actually slip under the noise floor and become 100% undetectable.
How about: every time you snipe someone from an implausible distance, you have to identify some crosswalks and traffic lights before the score is counted.
That's kind of beside the point. Classic aimbots work by reading the game's memory, which means that you can aim at things that are on the other side of walls, or behind you, or obscured by smoke or darkness, or so far away that they don't even render. "Only" being able to aim at things that are actually visible is a significant step down from what we have today, which is the tradeoff for being almost impossible to detect.
Aimbots only aim at things you can see, it's one of their main features. That way you won't snap into someone's head through a wall which would make everyone know you're hacking and get you banned.
I'm no expert here but surely aimhacking originally implied wallhacking? The alternative requires doing actual image analysis in realtime, which AFAIK has only become feasible in the last decade and is way more processor-intensive than just reading coordinates in memory and doing some trig to adjust your aim height. Maybe this is selection bias talking, but I see plenty of videos of cheaters who are obviously just snapping to heads through walls.
You don't actually need image analysis. There are tricks you can use to decide if an enemy is visible or not without it - obviously the game itself does it already to decide if it should draw the enemies to begin with :)
Also yes these were invented a long time ago because people got caught snapping through the wall when CS servers started recording demos.
Since you can check in memory where the enemies head is, you can obviously also check if theres a wall inbetween. Cheats for video games have had humanizing/cloaking forever.
That's not true. They don't send data in _regions_ your client can't see/hear, but if an enemy is for example close to a corner or on the other side of a door, you can have a wallhack see that as the client is still receiving it.
Thanks to latency & the realities of the internet, the server has to bias towards sending data the client can't strictly see/hear at that exact moment, but potentially _could_ see if they move. Which is enough to give a wallhacker a meaningful advantage still.
But what you can't do anymore is see where all the enemies are going at the start of the round and run to the weaker part of the map or whatever. So reduced effectiveness, but still a thing.
Only if it’s running on a separate computer and you’re passing your own mouse movements through that computer. I think it’s still typical for the ML aimbots to run on the same computer?
There was a recent demo of one that didn't. With modern hardware you can run Yolo on an RPi 4 with an 8$ capture card and a Teensy as USB HID for like 50$, you could definitely charge 200$ for it as a cheating appliance.
> "BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)"
I dunno … Mebbe you should run do that right now, before someone else does … Get that price down by around half and most every gamer everywhere can afford your shiny new "modern game genie"; Once everyone can cheat, the original cheaters have nowhere left to hide. They're on even footing with everyone else.
Non-gamer here: what’s the point of these bots? Is there money as stake? Or just a leader chart? But if you get your bot to #1, but you’re not able to do anything with it and it’s a bot, what’s the incentive?
Depends a lot on the game. If there is nothing to be 'earned' by being competitively better then it is nothing more than street cred. Think simple games or older games. CS 1.6 before rewards, knifes, and skins. A small few players might make some comp scene to get to some incentive but most are ultimately found out.
The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house.
In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices.
In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
> Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
I don't know about TF2, but for CSGO weapon skins & knives (and all drops) never come from gameplay wins. So there's no motivation at all to cheat for any monetary-related reason. Botting was a thing to farm for drops, but those literally just joined a server and spun in place to avoid being AFK kicked - that's it.
So CSGO cheating is purely about the human interaction components (eg, feeling good about winning, taking pleasure in making people angry, the thrill of getting away with it, etc...)
Gotcha. Haven't played CS since source so I wasn't sure. Are aimbots a common thing there nowadays? I don't remember seeing them much back in the day. Sure some of that is due to selection bias from good private owned servers. I would suspect that they exist but are not common.
On the other hand, PUBG does have Battle Point rewards linked to performance. And there it is very common. Almost guaranteed to see a cheater every 10 matches or so. And there was an easy means to sell those rewards. Contrast that against Sea of Thieves. A game specifically about PvP and stealing loot from other players. I don't know that I have ever encountered a cheater there. But there is very little incentive to do so. There just isn't many vectors to turn virtual work into real world profit.
Seems to me that the lower the barrier of entry together with the higher the real world value of the rewards\drops gives you a clear scale of the cheat potential\incentive\effort. I think there will always be a small percentage of those doing it for the LULZ. You can combat that by raising the barrier to entry. F2P games seem to have a higher rate of these types.
When the reward system cultivates an environment ripe for abuse, it moves from occasionally annoying to game killing epidemic.
China and it's 50k USD cap per capita restriction (probably lower and harder still now) practically become in infinite demand side pressure for these too.
They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
Most of the TF2 bots seem to be about trolling. They just kill players, spam chat and voice, and some have racist names (because Valve don’t check for Unicode characters in player names)
I expect the anti-cheats to require an unmodified SteamOS.
Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared:
> We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.
I'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.
On Windows, anticheat runs as root and scans processes like an antivirus would. As is par for the course with DRM/License management/anticheat systems it is more about making a token effort to increase the difficulty of the most primitive attacks than it is about actually stopping anything.
It's gone way past that. Some anticheat software runs in the kernel now. They are doing crazy things like looking for PCIe devices trying to DMA game memory.
I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality. Is it really worth spending dev hours on catching what I imagine is a tiny population of people, who you already know are prepared to use hardware modifications to circumvent anticheat? Or is it just a good marketing point?
I'm not a heavy gamer so don't have great insight, but it seems like you might be undervaluing the problem.
> I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality.
Let's say 1% of the population cheats. Maybe that's high
(or low, but I could easily see 1% of the real world population having less than stellar morals w.r.t. cheating). So you play an online game with 20 people in it. That means on average one out of every 5 games there is a cheater in it.
That ruins the experience for you (and everyone in it). Not to mention now because there are so many legit cheaters, people start mistaking really talented players of cheating. Accusing them, starting back and forth arguments online which worsens the experience even if they're not cheating. This adds to the frequency of assumed cheating. Then one of those 20 people decides the way they'll fix it is they'll download a cheat a next time someone on the other team cheats then they'll start cheating too. And so they do, but sometimes they do it when someone is actually just good an not cheating and so they worsen the game.
Overall if you're a company, trying to run an online game you need a positive environment where people will want to return to play. Cheaters very quickly ruin the trust in a game, and that leads to real financial impact.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear, I’m specifically talking about detecting PCIe cards that modify RAM, as the parent comment mentioned. I appreciate the need for anti-cheat software, but surely the number of people who will not only cheat, but also do that kind of modification is vanishingly small?
Apparently its cheaper than cost of infrastructure that would allow properly implementing server side checks, like validating if the player supplied entity data is within possible parameter limits aka why the fuck is this dude flying all over the map and server letting him do that?!?!?!
They've already pretty much gotten all that low hanging fruit.
Modern cheats essentially can give a player inhuman reflexes. "See, aim, shoot" all mechanized, or even "see, dodge, aim, shoot". Some of them even use sound to locate other players, so it's "hear, dodge, turn, see, aim, shoot".
The cost of of infrastructure to reliably detect that on the server across thousands of players is a lot more than running some cheap process on the user's machine to look for other strange things going on (why does the user have two mice and only uses one to shoot?).
No, you seem to not understand. Modern games dont do the _most basic_ validation on player submitted input - you can use cheats to fly in Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG, Fall Guys. None of those games check something as basic as feasibility of submitted player position/physics. Hell, even something as basic as Among Us doesnt run any server side checks and rudimentary cheats let you see everything, move thru walls, or even impersonate other players.
Valve is already using machine learning to analyze player mouse movements across all games to look for "inhuman" patterns and send those directly to the community-staffed manual review process called overwatch.
Cheaters in online games can ruin the game, and drive the playerbase away. It's a really big issue, and ultimately impacts the game developer's ability to continually sell the game to new players.
Specfiically, at about 7:50 into this, he talks about the propensity of encountering cheaters in CS:GO. The tl;dr is that in a 5v5 multiplayer game the percentage of cheaters required to ruin 9 other players' games at once is not high. It only takes 7% of people to cheater to encounter 1 every 2nd game, and a 2% cheating rate gets you a 20% cheater-encounter rate.
I'd also touch on the point that cheating ruins an online-only game. Like, it is the #1 way a game falls apart.
Take a look at a game like Escape from Tarkov, where a cheater will ruin a good block of time for a lot of people just by existing in one game. It's especially bad in that game because the distinction between 'being caught by someone in a position you didn't check' and 'being killed by a cheater' is so unclear, and the consequences of losing are so high (and thus losing to a cheater is so much worse). It creates an environment where the players have to be absolutely 100% confident cheating doesn't exist, or it will very quickly sour people to the game.
Ok but then you cannot log into an online gamr using Windows without having an anticheat installed saying that your machine is good to go? Is it something like this?
It would be impossible to catch all cheaters just from server side. Game clients for example need to have the location of other players but as the gamer it would be cheating to know this information. Moreover you can have assist clients installed which can do something as simple as image processing on what’s on screen and highlight the visible enemies - this would also be considered as a cheat for which you don’t even need to change the game client code
You absolutely could design a multiplayer game such that the client only has access to what the player should be able to see. Whether such a game would actually be performant is obviously a different question, but as Internet bandwidth continues to improve on average I wouldn't be surprised if the server ends up becoming much more involved - both for anticheat reasons and to reduce the client-side workload.
It's not a problem of bandwidth, it's a problem of latency. What a client sees at any point in time is actually a client-side prediction.
If this wasn't the case, and the server wouldn't send player positions until they were actually visible, players would pop out of thin air when turning corners or crossing doorways.
This leads to a different kind of disadvantage called "peeker's advantage", where the peeking player shows up later at the peeked player's screen... but this is generally accepted as a tradeoff. Players like their object persistence apparently :)
Latency isn't getting any better soon, and there will always be an impassable limit on link latency due to distance.
Good points. I'd also add that the server would need to send enemy positions (albeit not with the same precision) for the audio system to play sounds (gunfire/walking/etc) even when player models are not visible.
An excellent article, cheers! For those scrolling through, the article is written by a developer of Valorant, a recently-released FPS. He talks about his efforts to implement a system to prevent wallhacks and the challenges he encountered while doing so.
>Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.
>At the beginning of development, when we were talking about security goals for the project, the two things that came up over and over again were wallhacks and aimbots.
>League’s Fog of War system works because the game server withholds information about the positions of enemies until a client needs to display it. I knew if I could implement something like this for VALORANT we could solve the problem of wallhacks because there would be nothing for the wallhack to see. If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle. If we could pull it off, this seemed like the ideal solution - but we had no idea whether this would be feasible in Unreal Engine.
You _must_ have server-side anticheat if you have any at all because client side can (eventually) be bypassed - however client side anticheat is better at catching subtle but low effort/obvious cheats.
Also some types of cheats such as wall hacks can only be detected client side.
I really hope this happens for all current anti-cheat software. With Windows 11 coming, I was looking into the state of gaming on Linux and anti-cheat seems to be one of the main blockers right now.
It's really discouraging honestly. Wine/Proton finally gets to the point that nearly everything works and now all of the anticheat systems move to injecting kernel mode drivers.
do you think anti-cheating is ultimately solvable? it seems likely to me that eventually bots just take in a video stream, running on an otherwise separate device. what happens to gaming then?
They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.
It'd be great if clients could be completely untrusted, but the reality is that it's impractical--if not impossible--to have the server dictate what's visible. Games rely on client-side rendering to determine if you can see something. In milliseconds-matter FPS games, there's no way that the server can calculate whether you can see someone poke their head around the corner or whether you're using wall hack to see them in advance. Human reaction time is way too fast, and even great networking is too slow for that to be effective, even if there were enough computing power server-side to run all the numbers. I can't even think of a way that things like aimbots could be prevented server-side; it's hard enough just to detect them.
> but the reality is that it's impractical--if not impossible--to have the server dictate what's visible.
Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible. It might not be feasible due to players on bad connections and hardware cost (in fact, the reason that games do so few checks serverside is hardware cost), but it's not something impossible anymore.
> I can't even think of a way that things like aimbots could be prevented server-side; it's hard enough just to detect them.
Pattern detection can, things like following enemy movements through walls or extreme precision. I agree that it's easier to check for running software on the client, but this is error prone as well and can also be defeated by a sophisticated enough hacker.
> Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible. It might not be feasible due to players on bad connections and hardware cost (in fact, the reason that games do so few checks serverside is hardware cost), but it's not something impossible anymore.
That's a fair point, and maybe we're closer than I think, but I don't think that fully-streamed games demonstrate that we're there yet. At the risk of sounding too elitist, those games aren't "hardcore". The things that streamed game players expect and will put up with are a far cry from the things that hardcore gamers expect.
A serious Counter-Strike player wants things to operate as close to the limits of human reaction time as possible. People can typically react (as in press a button) in response to visual stimuli in something like 150ms, and to audio stimuli in something like 50ms (I don't have good links for these, so don't hold me to the numbers; there are studies out there).
While this may seem like it's slow enough that processing and network delays don't matter too much, when you add those in, you're well into the territory of perceptable delays. Advanced/pro gamers (especially younger ones) are even faster. I don't know that it's possible for fully server-side systems to compensate for this. Anecdotally, I can't tell the difference between 20ms and 70ms latency while gaming (at least not now that I'm old), but I can tell the difference between 20ms and 120ms. If everything had to happen server side, I think it'd be noticeable.
Well, to be fair, simply throwing Stadia at you was a bit of a strawman without further explanation.
I fully agree with you that game streaming platforms, as of now, are not usable for pro FPS players (or any players where tens of ms of latency are important). You're not elitist, that is the truth of it :-) But, if a developer would really want to, there would be options:
1. You could go for datacenters in all major cities. With this, you could probably get <10ms roundtrips for a lot of people. It would still be bad compared to local, but if you control the stack, you could easily get those ms back on other fronts. Bad keyboards and mice, for example, might add a lot of latency. Same for USB hubs and non-gaming monitors. If you supply your own optimized hardware you can easily save quite a few ms compared to a "normal" setup to counter out the network latency.
2. Stadia is the concept driven to its maximum - the client is just a video player, everything is done server-side. For cheat safety, this is actually not necessary - by just sending render instructions (i.e. which object is where), you can let the client do the actual rendering, with only culling being done server side. This would not only reduce the server hardware requirements, but also drastically reduce the required bandwidth (especially at 4K) and latency (since you can skip video en-/decoding and a bit of compression). If cheat safety is the only goal (instead of not requiring hardware, which game streaming optimizes for) this would probably be a superior solution.
Stadia (and NVidia Now and the other ones) prove that the technology is close enough that this would be doable, even though they themself optimize towards other things. However, the reality of it is that this would cost an insane amount of money and still not catch everyone [0]. Cheaters do cost games something, but as long as there are reasonably few (and they're kept out of tournaments), it's fine with developers. This is far cheaper to do with client side anti-cheat right now. So you are probably even right with the prediction that we won't see this for a long time - it's just not for a technological reason.
[0] You could do [Game Console of Choice] -> HDCP Stripper -> Cheat-PC w/ HDMI capture card -> Faked gaming mouse/keyboard via USB host -> [Game Console]. This setup works with everything available on the market right now and is virtually undetectable on the client and the server, at least without analyzing user behavior.
> Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible
Aimhacking is still fully possible on Stadia. You have the problem here of even if the client only has visibility into what they strictly should, machine reaction time & precision is vastly superior to humans. So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
That's why I specifically quoted the part about the server being able to specify what is rendered client-side - this part is possible via game streaming.
> So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
Fully agreed. In the end, the platform can only do pattern detection, but this is really, really hard to do. LAN tournaments where the hardware is fully controlled is really the only option where one can be reasonably sure that no cheating is going on, but it has happened even in these circumstances.
An "assistant" that generates input to move your player in a sports game, or aims for you in a shooter, is absolutely cheating.
You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world.
Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends.
There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago.
This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.
> There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago.
True, but I guess it's worth mentioning that OW is the primary method of cheater controls nowadays. In-game report button, VAC, VACNet, Prime MM, Trust Factor, etc... are the other systems they use, but replacing the community with algorithms didn't really happen.
This system is not good either, according to that model, highly skilled players would have no choice but to end up relegated to communities where cheaters run free.
There is a legit phenomenon in chess of "assistants" that are literally just Stockfish telling you which moves to play. People still want to play chess against untrusted opponents. Real-life chess tournaments generally make people surrender their electronics at the door for this very reason.
Fortunately, most cheaters don't know how or are not trying that hard to hide, and are identified by pattern recognition. It's not that big a problem in practice. It's still universally considered cheating.
How would you apply those rules to say, chess? Games should be computers against computers or they are badly designed? That's quite a lot the biggest games of all time that you consider badly designed.
I’m super excited to see that they’ve chosen Arch as a base for SteamOS. I understand fully why they originally chose Ubuntu, but I feel like Arch actually hits a lot of sweet spots for consumer use cases and could be adapted for such use quite effectively. (To be fair, I feel similarly about Gentoo, which was similarly adapted for ChromeOS quite successfully.)
I love a good distro story but it doesn’t seem very relevant here.
A Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Arch or Gentoo provides a platform for users to configure their system. The distro is a toolkit for finishing up a generic OS into the specific workstation needed by the user to do their work.
Steam Deck on the other hand has one job to do: launch /opt/steam and run things linked against libsteam. The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.
Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting. What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
>The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.
What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.
>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.
Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.
>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)
Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.
>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.
Game developers end up using the distro tooling when they port the game to SteamOS. One of the tensions with Ubuntu was that developers felt familiar with it (good) but the system libraries lagged what was needed by new games (bad) so developers would need to run their game in a SteamOS Ubuntu-esque chroot instead of their Ubuntu host system despite them being very similar. Arch does provide the promise of easier native porting because testing the game during active development (on an Arch host system) will be closer to the SteamOS Arch-esque system. It's small but meaningful for those who try to support SteamOS to the maximum extent, which is important when you're trying to seed a new ecosystem.
Using Arch probably allows for faster updates, since Steam won't have to wait for ages to use some of the newest Linux kernels.
Same goes for other supporting software.
Ubuntu is good as a stable platform, but it's probably too slow moving.
But why would you want the latest upgrade rather then a stable platform to build a console?
If you upgrade often and you break stuff people will scream at you, so you need extensive testing of 3rd party games before you release an update of your os, which will naturally limit you anyway.
I’ve been using Arch as my only OS on desktops and laptops for years now. Maybe I’m just lucky but in my experience it’s been incredibly stable. I’ve only run into one issue with updating packages using pacman and it was a Postgres + PostGIS conflict caused by my own configuration mistakes (easily fixed). I imagine most updates for the Steam Deck will either be from the core repositories or through Steam itself though, so the same issues you might run into when installing bleeding edge packages from the AUR shouldn’t apply.
As far as why Arch, I think it’s a great “build your Linux OS” distribution that gives you a solid foundation to expand into the bespoke system of your dreams. On my desktop, I have a personalized computing experience using Wayland + Sway, PipeWire and only the software I use. That same DIY principle makes Arch a compelling option for anyone looking to build their own distro; Manjaro is one such example and it’s the distro I used before making the full dive into Arch.
For “build your Linux OS” distribution, Gentoo looks like more suitable since it's more customizable (e.g. many USE flags, still provides OpenRC instead of systemd). Just curious the reason why Arch over Gentoo. I suspect that because Arch is more acceptable for normal Linux Desktop user.
Gentoo wants to compile from source, because of the USE flags. Thats hard on battery life, and maxes out CPUs creating thermal issues, both of which are notorious issues on mobile.
You should be able to accomplish the same thing by using your own pacman repos with compiled binaries that have the right USE flags. They all have the same hardware after all.
Anyway, from my own experience, the video decoding performance of gentoo-on-rpi-64bit was somehow nowhere close to LibreELEC, on the same hardware. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there...
With PC games, at least in my humble experience, you pretty much always need the latest drivers to run things well (especially so on Linux). With AAA games you will likely need to download several different driver updates within the first month to make it play reasonably well.
My understanding of Arch, is that it's more focused on providing systems which are more up-to-date/current than strictly "stable." [1] This is a pretty big advantage for Valve/Steam/Gamers since its less likely they'll be stuck having to back-port a sea of changes to a dying, but stable, LTS version. Instead they'll be on a platform with a community that prioritizes it. In all honesty, it'll probably make for a more reliable/stable gaming experience since patches will be easier/quicker to ship.
[1] Just to note, I'm not saying Arch is unstable in case someone reads it as that. I honestly was thinking of giving it a go this weekend (currently on a Debian based system), and this is probably the kick I needed to do it.
Historically, this is AWFUL for gaming on Linux, since NVidia is a terrible company which takes forever to get their drivers working on/with new features (Wayland, kernel modesetting, new kernel versions at all for a long time). You seem to be taking a lot of assumptions about what gamers want/need on Windows and cross-applying it.
Steam (via Proton, mostly) already does a lot of development work, and it doesn't care which distro it's on. "Oh no, I updated my kernel and now my graphics drivers don't load at all!" is incredibly common, even with DKMS. Sometimes (mostly) bugs get fixed in Mesa or whatever. Often, new subtle bugs are introduced when a new Wayland/Pipewire/whatever feature goes GA. Having as few moving pieces as possible (by using an LTS distro, or at least something which isn't rolling with upstream and has a modicum of QA) lets you optimize the pieces you need to without worrying that this or that API is going to change underneath you.
Intel and AMD drivers do not have this issue, and Valve was smart enough to not go with NVIDIA, but "I want to be up to date" is a terrible experience.
Additionally, it generally makes for a much less reliable/stable experience (gaming or otherwise) because `pacman -Syu` may at any point break something because you didn't read the release notes, or "mostly" stable features were committed upstream then released so the userbase can put them through their paces and report bugs the developers didn't encounter.
Users of Arch/Fedora Rawhide/whatever accept this, but someone who buys an OEM gaming machine does not need or want this.
Just to note, I AM saying that Arch is unstable. I've been using Linux for 20 years, and I've had my time with Gentoo and Arch. 99% of the tinkering users do is reproducing the work of professional developers at distro vendors who spend a lot of time and effort making sure you never encounter the problems Arch users revel in fixing at all. Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
> Historically, this is AWFUL for gaming on Linux, since NVidia is a terrible company which takes forever to get their drivers working on/with new features
Historically, sure, but with the leaps and bounds Intel and AMD graphics drivers have made (in no small part thanks to Valve!), we can leave Nvidia in the dust. With said FOSS drivers, "I want to be up to date" is a perfectly reasonable desire and does indeed get the best results as far as gaming goes.
That said, I agree that Arch wouldn't be my first choice for something I'd expect non-technical users to maintain. If Valve really wants a rolling release and close-to-cutting-edge kernel/driver versions, distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed could readily do that (with, at worst, an extra repo for bleeding-edge kernels, though I've yet to find that necessary on my openSUSE-running gaming laptop) without anything even vaguely resembling Arch's maintainability nightmare.
> Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
You can start a sysadmin career with that kind of experience.
I very recently (last week) applied some of the "how do I unbreak my system" lessons I learned from back when I was a teenager messing around with AMD's old proprietary fglrx drivers (and screwing things up on my personal machine) to "how do I get back into my work Linux machine after the Active Directory sync got hosed and my login credentials failed?"
Not necessarily on Arch specifically, mind you, but a ton of the experience I had that led to me getting my first tech job was breaking stuff and then figuring out how I broke it. It's a great learning experience.
But in this specific case, Valve doesn't need to worry about driver support, since they control the hardware? Unless they mean it to be a general purpose distro that people use on other hardware as well, maybe.
Like the word "free" in free software (freedom vs. free of cost), many folks misunderstand the usage of the word "stable" in regards to computers and technology.
For the uninitiated; In programming, "stable" often refers to the programming interface or features a software developer can count on being available for a particular version of a given piece of code (library, server, etc). To the end user, "stable" often is taken to mean "How often does it crash? Rarely or never? It's stable."
If we are talking about upgrading means a complete reimage, Valve probably doesn't push every minor upgrade, but bundles them together. Like what Manjaroo is doing.
Because the turn-around time from upstream-to-packager is smaller, which in turn helps get problems fixed faster. That in turn means devs have more space to fix issues. It is an effective velocity improvement for them and they think it will work for their targeted market.
First, it's worth keeping in mind that this Steam Deck is for all purposes and intents a fixed-spec system. Valve will control all of the most major components that make various end-user support problems appear (fixed CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard, controllers, storage, etc.)
Now, with that in mind, if you use a system that has a release cadence like Ubuntu, if you want to fix issues, you must report them upstream and backport them into your current system. This is workable, but it is implicitly predicated on the assumption that the backport is the only way to deliver the fix to users in a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise you would have to wait 6 months for Ubuntu to release anything.
If you use a rolling system like Arch that is much closer to the very latest versions, the same process above occurs. But the window for those changes to appear downstream (from reporting the issue to the person receiving the fix) is much smaller. If this window becomes small enough, say "I report an issue and a patch is issued and released in 48 hours", it often means you don't have to backport or maintain the backport for long. If you're maintaining less backports concurrently, or even none at all, that means you have less workload and can focus on diagnosing real issues with up to date code.
Finally, and this is the important part: it doesn't matter for who they want to buy this. I don't think Valve intends this to be seen as a console, but as a portable PC, and I don't think PC gamers who use Steam (and thus are the target market) are unexperienced with the fact games might not work and bugs need to be reported. It's part of PC gaming culture at this point to complain about bugs in PC games. They actually will probably want one anyway because it will make their massive investment in their Steam library all the more available. And if you're some die-hard guy who likes this thing because it's Linux, well, Proton is basically as good as it's ever going to get at this rate, and it's objectively made Linux gaming massively more available, so, you just gotta deal. (Proton's very existence gives developers less of a reason to deal with native Linux ports when they can just target Windows and let the magical translation layer fix it instead. So actually the focus will be going into making Proton better instead to fix these issues, and that is actually probably the best way forward to ensure older games can be available, too.)
There are a thousand confounding variables in this equation and I'm sure you can line up to list them or whatnot. But the important thing here is that in all cases there are social expectations about how the maintainers of each upstream project and distro fix issues, and on what timescale, and how users respond to them. That's why they think this will work.
I dunno about pure Arch, but when I was using Manjaro (an Arch derivative) upgrading often was never a problem for me, as the system stayed ridiculously stable (in a never crashing or breaking on me in any unexpected ways sorta sense), so I imagine as long as Valve makes it a point to test each upgrade they push for any unexpected oddities before they push it to the end-user, there shouldn't be any problems there.
As for the games themselves, Valve's been workin' hard on their Steam Linux Runtime containerized game thingy, and Proton sorta "containerizes" (WINE prefixes) things, so that allows for a reasonably stable environment for any given game which already runs well in those scenarios.
TL;DR: I doubt Valve will have too many problems keepin' this thing fairly stable from an end-user point of view unless you start hackin' around on it changing too much, then it's all on you what happens next. ;)
For an appliance where they control the system, they could just ship a stable Debian/Ubuntu/whatever LTS release with just the kernel replaced. (Hetzner does this, actually; their rescue system is a netbooted Debian system with a bleeding-edge kernel.) The kernel has a stable userspace ABI, so you can generally take the latest release, build with the same config, and drop it in and have it work.
Why do you think the end user won't be doing anything with the underlying OS? It seems to me that the sort of customer that would go for something like this over another console is precisely the sort of customer who would love using the underlying OS and this device as a more general purpose compute device.
Considering this is an ultra portable to play games, I would consider the hardware to be powerful. That appeals to the kind of folks who want such a combination of portability, power running Linux that they can play with (no pun intended).
It sounds like a practical choice. "What's a malleable sort of distro we can start with that will be easy to shape into the OS we need?" Apparently the answer turned out to be Arch.
So yeah, not exactly an exciting story, more like a practical solution.
SteamOS is a public release of our Linux-based operating system. The base system draws from Debian 8, code named Debian Jessie. Our work builds on top of the solid Debian core and optimizes it for a living room experience. Most of all, it is an open Linux platform that leaves you in full control. You can take charge of your system and install new software or content as you want.
SteamOS was indeed based on Debian, and Ubuntu was the officially supported distro of the Steam desktop client, and now the new SteamOS is apparently Arch based. Distro-hoppin' like a Boss! ;)
`Steam Deck is a PC, and players will be able to install whatever they like, including other OSes.`
this is probably this most exciting thing about this release. How many days until this thing is running k3s and/or serving up a prometheus dashboard on the same device that is touch capable?
The only exciting thing is the form factor. Spec wise its an underperforming laptop with integrated graphics delivering below 8 year old GTX 760 level of "performance".
From what I've seen it's 60 fps. Where did you get 30 fps from?
The only place where I've seen 30 fps being mentioned was when they said that you can switch Portal 2 into 30 fps mode to get longer battery life (which is a Portal 2 feature available on PCs from the very beginning).
Yeah I mean it's a PC. Depending on the game it will run at 10fps, 30fps, 60 or 1000fps. No idea why OP would say 30fps specifically. There will be games which run at that, there will be games which runs a lot better.
....yes? It will still run something like CS GO at 500fps+, and I imagine some modern games it won't run smoothly at all. I'm just saying that giving an arbitrary number like "runs games at 30fps" is super unhelpful.
Count the frames on the Control gameplay, the game Valve decided to plaster in every single shot on the website and in the IGN "hands on". Its running at 30fps with drops all the way down to 10.
Its because when it comes to gaming consoles hardware doesn’t matter. Only games do. Nintendo has proven this over and over.
You can add rtx it still won’t sell unless there are some great titles that run like native (usually this means custom ports because ui and other elements in 99% of games are not created with small screens in mind and usually are not usable at all)
If they sell enough of these, some developers will naturally just start adding active support in their games for it, even if only as a switchable feature.
[×] Use settings and textures specially optimized for this device?
The Switch has the SoC of an Android tablet from 2015. That's how Nintendo can sell the switch at 200 bucks.
There's no way for valve to discount the deck, which uses a cutting edge SoC cut from the same cloth as the PS5, at anywhere near that price point.
Flagship hardware has flagship prices. If valve would have built a cheap but underpowered device to reach the price point of the switch nobody would have been interested. Gamers are into the deck because of its cutting edge specs.
Well that's the beauty of the deck. Devs don't need to do shit, as it's basically a gaming PC in your hand that can run the same games you have on your steam library on your gaming rig but on lower graphic fidelity.
You don't need to changes things, but you probably want to. It's a general purpose computer and I could run e.g. StarCraft, but I would get slaughtered with controls like that.
The traditional business view is the casual gamers are growing, and the elite PC gamers are stagnant. Valve is trying to wreck that dichotomy with hardware like this, but I think that goes with making sure there are games that fit the form factor. You can't just sell this to people who rather play on their main gaming rig but are sometimes stuck without this.
Making games for this form factor != a retreat from the principle of general purpose computing.
My bad, I thought the oled model was meant to replace the standard switch. The lite does indeed start at $199.99, but that can’t do docked mode so it’s not really a fair comparison to this steam deck. The base regular switch is $299.99.
Sure but it’s also compatible with any generic usb c hub. I know I already have one that works with my Mac and switch that I’m sure would also work with this. Probably cost me all of $20 on Amazon.
The IGN review says it plays Control at medium settings at 60fps. That's roughly double the performance of a GTX 760 I believe (which is around 30FPS at low settings @ 1080p).
I didnt hear them mention 60 fps, in fact they said they were unable to see fps numbers anywhere during this "hands on". They did say Control "felt playable". This is how you make Control playable on APU https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/control-graphics-perfor... everything on low and you reach 30fps 720p.
Hmm interesting. I suppose I could have read too much into the IGN review saying control played at “smooth frame rates”. I suppose we’ll have to wait for proper benchmarks to know for sure the performance.
I have both Steam on a PC (Windows) and a Nintendo Switch and I mostly use the Switch for gaming for the convenience, although it sucks to see the price difference on so many titles. So, great news!
> although it sucks to see the price difference on so many titles
Thats what I always think when considering a new Switch game as well. They're so incredibly expensive, Breath of the wild is still 50€ although it was released 4 years ago.
Having a handheld device with all my Steam titles playable is huge!
Yeah I can imagine this being super nice to have even just lying around at home to connect to as a remote development environment or better: Plug it into the TV like a switch and have a powerful PC that fits behind the TV. At least for me it's super convenient since I wanted to play old games on emulator anyways (but not on a underspecces raspberry)
Speaking of: I wonder if it'll work with a Switch dock? Probably would require some physical modification of the dock itself, but it'd still be neat if they're interchangeable and I can stick either one into any dock.
I wouldn't bet on the Switch dock working with any non-Switch hardware since Nintendo didn't really care about following USB specification there, but you can easily get a third-party USB-C hub that works with Switch and which should work with Deck too (and also other stuff such as laptops or phones like Librem 5 as well).
N900 is legendary when it comes to utility, It's also when the smartphone manufacturers realized that providing utility doesn't result in profit as compared to black box bricks with just biannual camera upgrades for that selfie.
I'm sure there will be keyboard cases for the steam deck, We still might have to carry round a GSM radio module if we want that LTE/call/SMS.
Look into the PinePhone, it runs Linux and there are several distros. You can open the back of the phone and even swap it out with other backs that add functionality. They're working on a keyboard that looks a lot like the old Psion Series 5 keyboard. It replaces the back of the phone and turns it into a clamshell style device.
At this point, i can't tell if I'm an arch user because of that meme, or if that meme is true because I'm an arch user...either way as an Arch user, I must make you aware of this fact whenever linux operating systems are brought up (I think it's even in the EULA). This has been a PSA.
Gotta admit, I never saw that coming. I thought SteamOS was dead after the failure of Steam Machines and Valve was only continuing with their Linux efforts because it's still a useful hedge against Microsoft locking everyone in the App Store. I totally did not expect them to copy the Switch use-case with it.
I'm anxious to see how this turns out. Valve's history with hardware is not so great, so it could go nowhere like Steam Machines, Steam Link, and the Steam Controller did. On the other hand, it could end up all but killing off PC gaming if it is super successful. If it lands somewhere in the middle it will at least be yet another boon for Linux gaming brought to you by Valve as more developers will port or ensure compatibility with Proton.
I love Valve but it seems like they create these hardware projects to occasionally remind platform owners like microsoft/playstation/nintendo that they can't completely abuse their users and software devs (Win10 store lock-in, etc) and retain all of them. Valve just wants to protect steam and credible hardware platform competition is how they do it. I don't think they have any real plans to produce and support hardware long term.
A reminder that if Microsoft does continue along that path, Valve is happy to come along and gobble up significant portions of their market share. It's a win-win for Valve: either MS keeps their platform out of a walled garden, allowing Steam to continue it's current path, or Valve eats their lunch while making Linux in general a more mainstream option.
> I don't think they have any real plans to produce and support hardware long term.
With Valve's track record, I absolutely believe they have limited plans for production in the long term. But their long-term hardware support is impeccable. I have several discontinued pieces of hardware from Valve (the Steam Link and Steam Controller), both of which are still used and work as well as they day I bought them - better even, thanks to continued software updates.
Seems like the Google Fiber strategy - start deploying key products/services to influence the big players in the market to finally innovate or at least play nice for consumers.
SF is actually getting really fast internet now. All the new developments we looked at had gigabit internet at ~$80/month with multiple competing providers. It's getting to older apartments now as well.
At these speeds, the WiFi adapters are more of a bottleneck than the ISP. I can only get close to full speed on ethernet.
Just in SF, though, right? Immediately south in Daly City the options were either paying through the nose for Comcast's mediocre cable or being stuck with DSL, and that was in 2019.
This is a result of the low density of SV. In my Oakland apartment I have 1Gbs symmetric internet. In fact we have the choice of 3 ISPs offering gigabit internet (only one of them is symmetrical though).
Honest question (I may have misunderstood): Do you mean to imply that those are good prices? For reference, I'm paying about $40 for 1000 mbps (I'm not in the US). Can go to 10gbps for about double that price (IIRC), but I think the bottleneck becomes server bandwidth so it wouldn't speed me up for most services.
$80 USD for 1000mbps in Tennessee, USA. Unfortunately I have the best internet of all my friend groups and will be moving across town to a newer home soon where the best I can get is 50mbps for $50 USD.
It is completely random what internet speeds you can get. The only constant is the monopoly of Comcast & AT&T.
A duopoly can be a distinction without a difference if there's territory-dividing collusion, or even just game-theoretically "optimal" moves by the players towards a sub-optimal state for the customers.
So what use is that 5gbps? Do you run multiple machines? Do you use 10gb NICs? Or is this just simply what your ISP offers? I’m curious what people beyond 1gbps are using their extra speed for.
I'd personally use it for remote backups. I guess this is with Free (illiad). They also offer 10G-EPON (8Gbps) with their "Freebox Delta" router with at least one SFP+ port.
Yes it's real! In rural cities in the USA many people only have 1-2mbps speeds still!
My family in rural areas are waiting and hoping for 5G internet to save them, but I live in a rather hilly region and many are worried their homes won't get good 5G service!
Is that in a metropolitan area? Wow that's worse than what we have Australia, and internationally we are the laughing stock of internet connections! Here, you can get double than 10MB/s even in some remote areas now.
Really curious about DIGI. fed up with Orange and I want to try DIGI, 1gbs down + 2 unlimited data mobile lines for <50 EUR is really good value IMHO.
Is it stable? How fast was the install¿? I've had everything from 48hs with ONO to 2 weeks delay with Orange
Their connection is good.
They lease the last mile to Telefónica (Neba). They exchange traffic in Espanix.
Fun thing is sometimes Google says you're in Romania :-D
20€/month for 150Mbps download, 10Mbps upload in France.
Of course, for that price I have to regularly deal with the shitty service of Numericable (payment service down, money extorsion for which I have to send snail mail to recover... and I still haven't).
Absolutely in most countries you get either a much faster connection for the same price, or a connection of the same speed for less than that. And in this comparison I'm including a few developing countries where I've been recently (SE Asia).
End of the day Valve will never work seriously on hardware at a level will allow them to compete.
Hardware is extremely difficult and extremely expensive.
High effort and almost always low to no reward unless you manage to create a breakout device.
Valve already has the business that most people build the hardware for in the first place. The reason Microsoft makes Xbox is to get a cut of game sales and sell a subscription. Valve already gets a cut of almost all PC sales so really trying to build hardware looks bad on almost every conceivable company chart within Valve.
Yet they keep doing it every 5 years ago due to presumably due to their weird management.
They're not building traditional hardware. This is off the shelf components assembled in a particular manner, most likely by a 3rd party.
IMO, this is a great move. They're building a cheap device that plays AAA games in a cool Switch-like form factor. I think targeting teenagers and young adults.
I think the industry is changing how they do business, a mainstream Linux/AMD device is leading the way.
> They're not building traditional hardware. This is off the shelf components assembled in a particular manner
I can tell you from personal experience this isn't easy at all and is just as difficult as any other hardware project, even if you're not literally building new processors or hardware firmwares it's still a huge mission getting something like that to market let alone making it profitable.
I work on a company that has shipped laptops where we designed all the casing with off the shelf processor/storage/etc, so have worked on what you're describing here.
Laptops are completely commoditized, of course you would struggle with profitability there. For a company the size of Valve, building these devices probably carries very little risk. The biggest risk is the software, which they were going to tackle anyway.
This is way back about a decade ago, when Valve was very Windows-centric and barely even had macOS ports of Steam running. Windows 8 was announced with an entirely new application type, APIs, and distribution model intended to support tablets. Existing applications were shoved in the Desktop penalty box, while new applications had to be fullscreen or side-by-side, like a tablet. Furthermore, Windows on ARM was announced, with the Desktop penalty box further restricted to only Windows apps (though you could jailbreak it). If you wanted your app to work as a tablet app, you had to rewrite it for XAML and distribute it through the Microsoft Store, with similar technical restrictions to that of Apple's.
The very clear message from Microsoft was that the future of Windows was in fullscreen tablet apps and that the desktop - as well as third-party app stores - was going away. Valve would proceed to launch a Linux version of Steam a few months before Windows 8 RTM'd, their own Linux distro a year later, and consolized PC hardware another year after that. Basically, the whole company made a very clear pivot away from game development (which they still haven't fully gone back to) to ensure Steam had a lifeboat if Windows 9 were to drop the Desktop or enforce app lockouts on it.
Of course, what actually happened is that Windows 8 became the laughing stock of the entire PC industry. Microsoft was trying, like, five developer transitions at once and nobody was interested. (Not even Apple can do that, and they actually did try. Ask me about Rhapsody sometime.) So the end result is that app developers never wrote anything to the new native XAML APIs, users just used the Desktop app, and nobody had any interest in Windows on ARM tablets. That's why you don't remember the Windows Store lock-in; in Windows 10, Microsoft got rid of it.
After Apple bought NextStep to serve as the basis of their next gen OS, Rhapsody was a developer preview that was a reskinned NextStep running on Mac Hardware.
Existing Macintosh software could be run under emulation, and the original plan was that everything going forward would need to be rewritten using the NextStep APIs. (All those NS frameworks still used on iPhones and Macs today)
Eventually Apple decided they would have to create an additional set of APIs (Carbon) based on the existing Macintosh APIs that would allow software vendors an easier path forward.
Developers could adopt Carbon with much less effort and eventually transition to the NextStep APIs as part of a future large scale rewrite.
Carbon never transitioned to 64 bit, so those NextStep APIs did eventually become the default for native software.
In very, very short terms, Rhapsody is Apple's Windows 8.
In order to explain why that comparison makes sense at all, I first need to go over some basics.
After shipping the original Macintosh in 1984, Apple's investors got really mad about how the computer wasn't selling, and more or less forced Steve Jobs out of the company. Jobs decided he was going to build another computer company called NeXT, which was going to out-engineer Apple and make the next big thing. It didn't actually work out that way, but conveniently for Steve, Apple had been mismanaged into the ground and drowning in technical debt. So Apple basically bought NeXT because OPENSTEP (previously NeXTSTEP; at this point Steve was trying to turn it into a cross-platform API) was a functional operating system and all of Apple's attempts at System 8 (including asking IBM to finish Copland, which is another boondoggle called Taligent) weren't.
So, right when Apple announced the NeXT buyout, they also announced that the next version of the Macintosh's OS would be built on top of OPENSTEP, with all existing Macintosh software running in a fullscreen "Blue Box" VM. The "Yellow Box" would hold new software written to the OPENSTEP APIs, and these apps were properly memory-protected. (Context: At this point in time all System 7 apps ran in kernel mode with separate segmented heaps. It's exactly as bad as it sounds.) This new OS was code-named "Rhapsody", and it even came in an Intel port that would install and run just fine on most PCs (albeit without the Blue Box).
Apple's plan was basically to continue the NeXT business as-is, with some quick rebrands (including rebranding the Windows NT port of OPENSTEP as "Red Box") and hastily-written compatibility bridges so that Macintosh users wouldn't be completely left out in the cold. Users were anticipating the new OS, but developers were utterly furious that they were being told to basically abandon all of their software and rewrite it to this entirely different and far more complicated API. They called the Blue Box the "penalty box", because they felt punished for staying loyal to the Mac.
I call Rhapsody "Apple's Windows 8" because it basically tried the same thing Windows 8 did a decade later: foisting a technically superior but entirely incompatible API on developers who weren't interested in any of it. Some might disagree because, well... Apple never actually shipped what they announced. A year after assuming control of Apple, Jobs would come up on stage again and announce that Rhapsody was "cancelled". Instead they'd build an entirely new OS called Mac OS X, built exclusively for the Mac, with three new subsystems; "Cocoa" (OPENSTEP APIs), "Classic" (Mac Toolbox APIs), and now "Carbon"; the latter being specifically intended for quickly porting existing Macintosh software to OSX without rewriting your app. This made developers a lot happier and saved the entire transition.
In the meanwhile, because Mac OS 8 was terrible for running servers on, Apple would ship another """unrelated""" OS called "Mac OS X Server", which was literally just the cancelled retail release of Rhapsody with some extra server applications bundled in. It even called itself Rhapsody in uname.
If you're wondering what happened to the Intel version of Rhapsody, well... not counting the two developer releases before Rhapsody's faked death, Apple would maintain Intel ports of everything up until actually announcing a proper developer transition from PowerPC to Intel years later. Just as proof of how much Apple had learned their lesson of how not to handle a developer transition, Carbon would actually get ported to Intel, and there were Intel OSX apps that needed it. It was ultimately removed only in macOS Catalina.
The funny thing is that Carbon was based on the modified Toolbox APIs that were intended for Copland! There used to be a header with a big comment block telling the whole history. AFAIR, they had tried changing the System 7 APIs so they could run on a system with memory protection, then they gave up because Copland had failed (and I think part of it was a mandate to be able to use the System 7 API _without_ changes, which was impossible), then Mac OS X came along and the comment changed to "we're doing this after all, lol".
You don't remember the Windows Store lock-in because there wasn't one. (Except for the arm based Windows RT and even that because of no x86 emulation). It was mostly FUD by companies that already had app stores (EA/Valve) or were preparing one (Epic).
No, it absolutely did exist, but it only applied to the new tablet/store app environment and APIs exclusive to it (such as native/WinRT XAML). Win32 apps weren't locked out from running, but they also couldn't use these new APIs. If you wanted to rewrite your app for the tablet environment (perhaps because Win32 was entirely inadequate for developing apps even back in 2012), then you had to also distribute that app on the store, as AFAIK there was no easy way to sideload AppX packages. In fact, games that were packaged for the store couldn't support things like G-Sync, Vulkan, or overlays because the lockout technology also firewalled off external DLLs.
You might not have noticed this because nobody cared about the store and just used Windows 8 like Windows 7 with some annoying tablet UI duck-taped to it.
The lock-in they were talking about was that of the only way to get software to Windows would be from Store.
On the other hand all the half baked "modern" apis were Sinofskys revenge for not getting the CEO job.
I think it's reasonable to think Valve is more committed with this. Valve now faces more competitors in game distribution than ever and it's a good way to shore up their value proposition in a way that is not easily replicated by its PC-only competitors.
> This flexibility means you can do pretty much anything on the Steam Deck that you can do with a regular PC. Connect a mouse and keyboard? Yep. Alt-Tab out of your games to a browser or video? Sure. Load third-party programs or even other game stores like Origin, uPlay, or Epic Games Store? No problem. You could even wipe Steam OS entirely and install a fresh version of Windows if you want – but the default Steam OS is smooth and efficient at getting you into your games, so I imagine most people won’t want or need to go that far. The point is, you can if you’d like to.
I wonder if pure cloud service like GeForce Now can then be used, to benefit from portable hardware but have semblance of battery life, and avoid a likely jetengine cooling fan spin up...
Apples to oranges. Valve is concerned about hardware lock-in, not software lock-in.
I think users care more about being able to play their games on any hardware platform they own than about which software platform hosts their games. Also, it seems like Steam Deck is just running a customized Linux distro, so it isn't really a lock-in.
If Epic Games or Ubisoft decides to make their game stores work on Linux, I bet they would run on Steam Deck too. If that's the case, then how is it Valve's fault that other vendors/game stores aren't bothering to make their software platforms/games work on Linux? Valve put in the work, and they want to reap the fruits of it, without even trying to lock-in their device from using any other competitors' software (as far as I am aware). Competitors just gotta put in the work to make their platforms work on Linux.
> If Epic Games or Ubisoft decides to make their game stores work on Linux, I bet they would run on Steam Deck too.
They can, because the FAQ says it's just a PC running Arch linux and you can install Windows on it if you want, which means you can do whatever you want. Maybe it can run on the same OS (probably, if it's just Linux, but we'll see how customized it is), or at a minimum you could just install something else.
> And yet it looks like you cannot use the Steam Deck without logging into a Steam account. Looks like we are trading in one lock-in for another.
valve so far has been miles better than any other big DRM platform. i would almost bet valve will let you have root on these and do whatever you want with the hardware without any jailbreaks. It may not be supported, but I really cannot imagine them locking this down. That would be very much unlike valve.
iirc steam machines back in the day did also let you go into a bash shell?
full disclosure: i may contain traces of a valve fanboy.
> The new version of SteamOS is optimized for handheld gaming, and it won't get in your way with other stuff. But if you want to get your hands dirty, head on out to the desktop.
And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM has a Valve engineer it's more accurate to view these devices as PCs with custom controllers, and that you can install your own OS.
I'd like to think they'll at least make it easy to root or otherwise repurpose these because I like them and would likely get one, however, in the software part of the specs they state that they have been in the works with game studios to basically have them implement their anti-cheat systems in their platform so I suspect said studios would be against that.
This is pure speculation on my side and I really hope I'm dead wrong but that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it (also, their own DRM right?).
Edit : the reply bellow seems to prove me wrong =)
Why speculate when you can read directly from the product page yourself?
>You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever.
and
>The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
> You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever.
>i would almost bet valve will let you have root on these and do whatever you want with the hardware without any jailbreaks.
Definitely. I have a Steam Link and you can enable ssh access to the root account by simply plugging in a USB flash drive with a particularly named text file and rebooting.
On the landing page they say "You can connect to peripherals, throw the picture onto a big screen, and do all the other PC things you'd expect."
On the hardware page they show it docked and running a normal desktop interface and say "Use your Deck as a PC. Because it is one" and "You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever."
On the spec page, it says the OS is SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) and Desktop is KDE Plasma.
I guess I'm just not understanding where you'd even get the impression that it would be locked into a Steam account.
Seems like you can access the KDE desktop, so I think using the Steam account isn't mandatory. Not 100% sure though. Previous Steam machines allowed full control, even changing the OS.
The FAQs and such make it clear that it's basically an ordinary PC in a handheld form factor; if you don't want to log into a Steam account, then any ol' Linux distro or even Windows should run on it just fine (though whether the handheld controls play nicely is something I'd be curious about).
You don't need a Steam account if you're not using the default Steam Deck install. Wipe it and install TempleOS.
> Do I need a Steam account to use Steam Deck?
> The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
> The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store.
I imagine that would be because the "default Steam Deck experience" probably defaults to booting into Steam Big Picture mode, just like SteamOS does by default.
They state you can install a different OS. That is just if you want the default system. There was a video playing CK3 that shows KDE running so it's not like you can't install windows or a different distro.
KDE is part of the stock software, apparently. Similar to existing versions of SteamOS in that regard, except with Arch + KDE instead of Debian + GNOME.
The thing about Valve's record with hardware is that the products aren't bad, just extremely niche. If this thing really can play most of most people's Steam games in a Switch-like form factor with a standard gamepad layout, I think it stands to be a hit in a way their past hardware attempts weren't.
It's also an interesting counterpoint to all the streaming services popping up these days. PC game streaming to mobile has major downsides, even more so when you're away from stable and fast internet. Until 5G is everywhere and mobile bandwidth [soft] caps aren't a thing anymore, a mobile device that can play games locally will be a much more attractive option for a lot of people.
I am one of them. I have three in the house, mostly for future parts.
I have been gaming for 35 years, and in the 15 of those where I have played first person shooters, no controller compares. Even when I'm playing other kinds of games, the ability to do everything without having to remove your finger from the pads to hit buttons, the size is perfect, everything is so responsive.
They "feel" cheap, but I don't care. They are gaming nirvana for me.
I am definitely a SC Stan too. I learned how to truly master it playing Hollow Knight funny enough. Have a setup where I literally do not need to use anything but the trackpads and the occasional turning over of the whole controller to invoke the map. Absolutely love it.
Only things I don't like are the bumper buttons and I'd much rather USB C than micro usb.
I wish they would make an SC 2 with fixed bumpers, ditching the thumbsticks for bigger trackpads with more advanced haptics and a doubling of paddle buttons like with this new device.
Maybe by setting the gyroscope to directional pad and lowering the sensitivity? There are a few ways you could do it, those things likely the most customizable controller ever made.
Yup, and the remapping tool is killer and supports absolutely everything and has browsable and sharable configs that work like spotify playlists. They absolutely did their best to make it a hit. The quality of work they put into building the software for my SC is exactly why I'm reserving a Deck today.
Oh right, the controller has a gyro as well - something which for some reason Valve completely failed to advertise. You can use it both to aim and as a kind of spatial D-Pad (among a lot of other options).
But not all games are "PC" games. Plenty of games that are released on PC are best/better played with a conroller and thanks to the PC being a open platform you have many more choices than console. Hell you can use your console's controllers if you like.
Outer Wilds in general is better with KB/M because of mouselook's precision, but getting through Dark Bramble is significantly more difficult because of how thrust works.
Valve has experience already with making m+kb games playable via a trackpad on the Steam Controller, so I'm confident that the trackpads on the Deck will be good enough for a decent chunk of games (though I'm not about to try Dota 2 on the thing).
Not every game will be a perfect fit, certainly, but I've had a great time with my Steam Controller playing things like XCOM, Prey (2017), and Divinity Original Sin. IIRC Civilization 5 was explicitly a part of the advertising for the controller in the first place, as a way to play mouse-heavy games from the couch.
Not sure I agree. I feel like the majority of AAA PC games are designed for console first and work well with gamepads. At least the ones I play. It’s also just more relaxing since you can lean back.
Yeah even some of the biggest PC games out there like GTA just don't feel as good on KB/M as they do on controllers. Like others said, with the dual trackpads built in and the extensive controller configurations offered by steam's controller settings I don't see the controls being much of a problem on the steam deck.
You're in luck, then. The Steam Deck has thumb trackpads for mouse-like aiming. This is their 3rd kick at thumb trackpads (they're on the Steam Controller and the Index Controller) so they're established pretty well at it.
It's not the same as a mouse but it beats the pants off of thumbstick aiming.
The more interesting thing to me would be actual peripheral support. It's apparently a PC that can connect to an external display or mouse and keyboard.
These days I think many or even most PC gamers own a gamepad and choose to use it for certain games, even when they have a mouse and keyboard sitting right in front of them. These also tend to be the same games I'd consider most suitable for playing at reduced resolutions and framerates.
To add a point against comments here talking about some games being playable on controllers: of top 10 in Steam's own stats only Destiny 2 looks like you won't be handicapped by a controller.
Depends on the game. Flight and driving games are vastly better with a gamepad (let alone proper joysticks or steering wheels) than with a keyboard and mouse IMO.
PC games are built with power in mind that Switch does not have. So you couldn't play them. Switch games are not built with m+kb support, so that would be pointless.
I am sorry, but this got stupid very quickly. You are blind either by inability to see or by choice.
> Lots of PC games can be played without K+M, what's your point again?
The comment you were replying to directly answers you question about the point:
> PC games are built with power in mind that Switch does not have
The part of comment about "can be played without K+M" is entirely irrelevant to what I am saying because the preference _for_ K+M is the premise of this whole comment subtree.
I'd argue the Steam controller was kinda bad. But more in concept than execution. The touch pads were just not a good replacement for a thumbstick or a D-pad
But I agree with what you're saying. If this thing is actually good, it could have some real mainstream appeal.
I felt almost the exact opposite, in that I think the concept was great but the execution fell a little bit short, mostly in build quality/button-feel.
The biggest single win for me is replacing the right stick for camera control, as the trackball emulation with haptics on the touchpad is so much faster and more responsive than a traditional thumbstick. There are some games that I'd still prefer the standard twin sticks or dpad (twin-stick shooters maybe, some platformers, or hyper-specific designed games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons), but overall I've much preferred the touchpad over thumbsticks for almost every first- or third-person game I've played.
Yeah the controller was really good in theory and the technology was definitely great but the build quality just felt really off and like you said sometimes you can't beat twin stick/dpad but overall the controller was a great concept and paved the way for the index controllers and now the deck's controllers too.
I felt completely differently, the Steam Controller is my favorite one by far. The touch pads make so much sense for a lot of games, and you still have the analog stick for the rest.
> I'd argue the Steam controller was kinda bad. But more in concept than execution. The touch pads were just not a good replacement for a thumbstick or a D-pad
There are plenty of people with great things to say about it, but they largely seem to be people who wanted to play FPS games without a mouse and keyboard, and were willing to put in some effort to get it configured right. I can imagine it being more successful if it had gotten first-class out-of-the-box support for more games, but it seems like it never reached the level of adoption where that was worth it for developers.
I've never tried it myself, though. If the Steam Deck is a success, maybe we'll see the Steam Controller model finally take off (since the Deck has similar touchpads built in). Or maybe it will be like the Kinect, a pet feature deleted in later hardware revisions.
Touch pads a better than a joystick by far. You don't need to snap back the stick to stop moving. Where ever your thumb stops is where your aim is at. A fast flick of a touch pad can 180 which takes a lot longer on a joystick. Plus gyro support it's almost as good as a mouse.
It was great but not ergonomic. I have the same concern about the steam deck (that and the name that sounds like something from a 1920s bathhouse). I still use the steam link.
It's still one of the best tethered headsets even considering it's 2 years old already. Other ones have disadvantages in many areas (like tracking) still.
I'm waiting for some company to release a decent hybrid standalone + tethered headset (that can compete with Oculus Quest at least on the hardware specs), but most companies are only interested in selling very expensive devices for enterprise
is there any indication of a valve index 2 coming? given that facebook is a no-go for me, that makes the index the most appealing VR option for me. but it would suck to buy soon and have the next iteration come out right after I buy
Having tried both, my preference is definitely for the Index. The controllers alone are a substantial step up, not to mention the graphics, tracking, and pretty much everything else.
The Quest is nice because it's cheaper and self-contained, but that's about all it has going for it.
I don't really see how a cheap, low-end, mobile computer is going to kill off desktop gaming. Why would that happen? People will all of a sudden stop wanting top end equipment and big high-res screens because they can play some Steam Gameboy?
You can plug it into a display, and plug in a mouse + keyboard.
I'd be inclined to buy one of these for gaming and an ultra light laptop for laptop stuff when the time comes, versus getting a gaming laptop or desktop.
That is my question also and presumably the answer is "not very good" but we'll have to wait and see as I can't find any info on this. Surely they'll have to rate the experience on a per-game basis when in 4k docked mode else (a small number of) people won't be happy.
Well I guess I don't necessarily mean professional competitive players, just people who play a versus game and take it seriously. If you could plug it in and get 120FPS, I could see some of these people consider getting one, especially if it overlaps with their interest in non-competitive games.
Did the steam link really go nowhere? I have a physical box, and it works magically well. My understanding is it's still available, just not as a physical box.
Parsec works great for me. Main gaming PC + Parsec macbook client via ethernet.... enables a Switch emulator running in 4K on the living room OLED! Yes please.
Do any major Switch emulators natively support JoyCons the way Dolphin does WiiMotes? (Do JoyCons even use regular ol' Bluetooth the way the WiiMotes do? EDIT: quick Google says yes :) )
Switch emulation is quite good, and gets better by the day.
I have no experience with JoyCons unfortunately. I use an Xbox Elite controller + PS4 controllers. They map extremely well to a Switch Pro controller in Yuzu emulator. Launching Yuzu via Steam via Parsec works surprinsgly well to recognise the controllers, despite the occasional hiccup. Smash Bros and Mario Kart are a blast on the big screen.
I am not a Switch owner - surprisingly, I don't think I've even held one - (I am a pretty big fan of Nintendo consoles) - and I know there is some sort of motion control support in the JoyCons? I wasn't sure the extent to which the motion would be required for game play.
I figure in Smash, Kart, etc; it doesn't matter, but I'm just curious how deeply the motion controls affect the gameplay on average in Switch games. :)
I have one too, I got it on ridiculous clearance when they stopped making them. If they had been successful, why would Valve have needed to liquidate stock?
It currently sits in a box somewhere in my house because I have never had any use for it, which I think is the case for most PC gamers, hence its failure.
The Link hardware just wasn't necessary anymore once the software became good enough to run on any device as an app. I have Stream Link on my TV as an app now.
I tried Steam Link on my Android TV and it ran like hot garbage - I think the main issue I had was bluetooth input lag was very bad. My physical Steam Link still works very well with my bluetooth controller.
Right, my understanding is it's still available but not as a physical hardware box anymore but instead as some kind of software. But it's still there and supported, no?
It's a neat piece of hardware, but I have a hard time believing it will be any more than a fad. Who is this for? Serious PC gamers? Why not just play on the "real" PC they already have, with the super-expensive monitor, graphics card, and input devices they carefully assembled? Casual gamers that don't care so much about those things and want to play meatier games on the go? Why wouldn't they just buy a Switch (which already carries many "PC" games, large and small)?
The Index was genuinely revolutionary, despite also being punishingly expensive. It's hard not to feel a sense of envy on seeing one in action. But this? No one will care in a year (or maybe even six months).
I have a gaming PC and a switch. I buy and play lots of indie games. Each time I have to pick a platform.
Steam: more support, lower price, won't have to buy it again if another "version" of the hardware comes out
Switch: portable, multiple controllers for local multiplayers.
Now I don't have to choose anymore. And I already have a big library of games. I will only need a switch for exclusive games and local multiplayer games.
I have exactly the same use case and everytime I had to choose a platform before buying I was hoping Valve would release a handheld machine, my wish was granted :).
I game casually and did not buy a switch, simply because I do not want to plonk $300 on a single-use device that does a marginal job at gaming (mediocre graphics, expensive games).
Steam Deck is a slightly more expensive gaming device, but it does so much more. Previous attempts at these palm sized gaming PC failed because they were half assed, software and hardware wise. Steam deck isn’t.
I never saw the switch as a device for games in general. It is mostly the vessel for the next iteration of Nintendo-exclusive games. Those games don’t need super fancy hardware because the point of the games isn’t to show you the latest graphics.
The switch isn’t “just a handheld games console like any other.” It is “this thing you must buy to play the latest mario/Zelda/animal crossing game.” Obviously if you aren’t interested in those games there isn’t so much of a point.
The Steam Link continues to be very useful for my girlfriend and I. It’s plug and play and we haven’t had issues with compatibility or controllers like we have trying to set steam up on a Pi 4.
There's a relatively niche segment of the PC gaming population that really wants to push the envelope in graphics. I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s, all sorts of mods, games from random nobodies on the internet, the latest games, and also emulate a wide variety of game systems and computers.
Based on my experience, people wanting to play games which are over 20 years old are much more of a niche crowd than those using beefy GPUs. Obviously, few people have RTX 3080/3090 levels of investment, but based on Steam statistics, mid-tier cards from a few years back like the GTX 1060, RTX 2060/2070, and RX 580 are all near the top of the most recent steam surveys.
Certainly the Steam surverys support the notion that the people who won't shut up about $1,000 graphics cards are very much a minority in PC gaming. They eat up all the oxygen in the room, but they certainly aren't the actual majority of the group.
This is directly from valve. It's probably what Valve looks at when making these decisions. I assume this APU is relatively similar to the 1060 in power? Maybe the 1050. But I haven't seen any benchmarking around the APU.
The APU is certainly not slower than a PS4, it has Zen 2 cores. The GPU might have fewer flops but it has a much newer architecture, so it could easily be faster. Just comparing flops across different architectures isn't an accurate way of determining GPU gaming performance.
Do you expect this 15W APU to be faster than full TDP Desktop AMD Ryzen 5700G? The "Fastest Integrated Graphics Ever" 13 days ago https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-5700g-review? 5700G reaches GTX760 parity in some games like Witcher3, while in others like Overwatch its medium for APU while dedicated gpu runs same framerate at Ultra.
It'll be interesting to see. RDNA2 is definitely a significant upgrade over Vega. Also I would assume most of that desktop TDP goes towards the CPU. The LPDDR5 RAM will also help the GPU in the Steam Deck.
>I think most PC gamers like gaming on their PC because it is a very open platform that allows them to play games they bought the 90s
This is just not true. Most pc gamers are playing free to play competitive multiplayer games. Think league of legends, fortnite, call of duty warzone, and hearthstone. The people playing these games care about framerate for competitive reasons which means they need good gpus.
For me personally, PC gaming is all about being able to play anything from multiplayer FPSs to moddable content to random indie games in my web-browser to emulated games from the early 90s to keyboard-centric roguelikes. Ie, more about having a vast backward-compatible library and the ability to hack on the games for fun than about cutting edge graphics.
There are various game genres (flight sims, real-time strategy, simulation games like Factorio and Kerbal Space Program) that just don't fit the console + controller paradigm. Individually, the niches may be small but together they're not insignificant.
Steam link is not the best example as they’ve made it available on standard hardware like raspberry pi and it’s baked into the OS of many smart TVs now. They just pivoted from selling their own hardware for it. They also continue to update the controller features, including adding in Bluetooth support long after release.
I appreciate what Valve is doing and I will vote with my money. I don't see myself as a "handheld gamer" but I am making a reservation today just to be able to play with that device a bit.
Same, I even made a comment a few weeks ago that SteamOS seemed abandonware w/o any recent updates. Glad to be wrong.
And sure their hardware projects often don't hit mainstream success & stick around for multiple generations, but I still had a Steam Alienware Alpha that was both my daily driver & gaming rig for a few years, and still occasionally use a cheap Steam Link for in-home streaming.
Microsoft seems to think Windows is better for ads than anything else at this point. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, the people running the show have made up their minds and game developers and players need somewhere else to go.
I'm also wondering if they'll open the door to third-party apps on the Steam Deck, which could let you use it for other cloud-based gaming platforms like Stadia.
It's a PC running SteamOS (apparently Arch base with KDE Plasma). You can install anything on there that you can install in Arch, or install Windows or another Linux distro if you want. This is all in the copy:
"You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever."
I'm going to buy this just to support Valve for their continued support in making Linux desktop a viable gaming platform. Their reasons may not be entirely altruistic, but there's no doubt that they had a tremendous impact on the Linux gaming ecosystem.
And it's not just the Linux gamers that are benefiting from their work. They also seem to be doing good work on lower-level parts of the stack (e.g.: graphic drivers, Flatpak, etc) that are improving the Linux desktop in general.
I'm going to use it as a (mobile NUC with screen + battery) and use it for programming etc.. not going to buy it for gaming at all. Having an amd machine with 16Gb ram + nvme storage + linux - perfect setup for day to day coding!
And will buy it as a thank you to Valve for supporting us all these years. I think this will pay off for them in the long run.
The intention is to use it with a usb-c dock, which I already own. Will probably buy the steam dock depending on what it offers and if it overlaps with my needs. Or if it is just plain sexy compared to the boring old usb-c dock then I'd rather buy that. The intention is not to get work done on a 7" screen, but on an external display + keyboard/mouse.
If you’re going to leave it docked, why not use a desktop so you don’t have to worry about deteriorating the battery just leaving it plugged in all the time?
It supports usb type c docks, which my mic, keyboard, mouse already uses to switch between my main rig and a macbook. And I have a bluetooth mouse of that fails.
Obviously not going to try be productive with an onscreen keyboard and 7" screen - will use it with peripherals in those cases.
I code on the train using xvkbd on my pinephone. You get used to it. A good editor like vim helps a lot. You're spending most of the time thinking not typing.
Curious, why the insistence on mechanical for a portal keyboard?
Perhaps I’m atypical, but I type more relaxed, smoothly, and faster on non-mechanical than mechanical.
Point of comparison is 150-175 wpm on laptop keyboards as opposed to 120-145 on mechanical. I’ve owned many mechanical keyboards, including very high end ones, and remain mystified about their aura.
Same. I already have $1,100 saved for a gaming PC, but since that might only buy a GPU right now I’ll just jump into this and hopefully wait out the GPU crunch.
That's not really true because of the advancements in compute technology and energy efficiency since then. It'll definitely use a lot less energy than a GTX 760 at the very least.
For a 7" screen jumping down to 720P is just fine. It's market niche is clearly not to compete with even a GTX 1050, but to be a little less than that to manage most games reasonably well and even newer games with a a minimally playable performance anywhere you go. I'm looking at it as a Nintendo Switch with a massively larger available library that can play most games I already own and don't have to wait & hope for ports when it's already more powerful than a Switch, the most comparable portable device available.
I mean that you can just set the game to be 720p with very little noticeable difference. Also at either 720p or 800p many custom graphics options are just not going to make things look any better/worse on a screen that size & resolution.
And 30FPS is just fine, especially for an ultra portable, and when you can probably get more than that out of it with customized graphics options. When I played Witcher 3 years ago it was actually on a machine that barely kept it going at 30FPS w/ low-medium settings. It was fine. One of the best games I played, and the lack of high quality textures too nothing away from that. Do you think people don't know they're making a quality trade off when they play the Witcher 3 on a Switch? Of course they know! NOW they'll be able to play it on a more powerful device that can serve as a full PC and has access to an enormous library.
You're complaining that this isn't good enough to be a primary gaming PC, and that misses the point: That's not the market target. This is setup to be a secondary device for existing gamers and an entry to PC gaming for others that want a wider selection than on a console or a Switch.
>Same. I already have $1,100 saved for a gaming PC, but since that might only buy a GPU right now I’ll just jump into this and hopefully wait out the GPU crunch.
Ah, yeah. $1100 will still buy you a significantly better gaming rig, and even better if you're willing to assemble it yourself.
I guess if you're holding out though, maybe the Deck will scratch the "buy new gaming shiny object" itch, and play games reasonable well at it's native resolutions, but if you have $1100 and it's not getting you what you want in a gaming rig, the Deck doesn't fill the gap.
Also I'm not confident that GPU cards will became easier and cheaper to find for a while. Someone that is related to the general chip industry told me 1.5 years. Until then constrained supply will probably make demand even more frantic.
Heck, just on cars alone: I just traded in a car for 2x the value it was listed at about 6 months ago. It was 12 years old and I knew I'd need a new car sometime in the next 1-3 years, and a new car today has massively more safety features (I have kids to worry about that for too) so I wasn't going to hold out and hope the used market went even higher.
And if car manufacturers whose electronics don't need the latest fab methods have these bottlenecks, I don't see the high end chip market getting much better, especially with Apple & Samsung eating any capacity TSMC can provide.
Apparently they are working with anti-cheat makers to get those games working on Linux before release? This honestly seems like the best news for Linux gaming... ever.
In this video focused on developers (https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Q_C5KVJbUw at 5:54) they mention they are working with BattlEye and EAC to get it working prior to Steam Deck release.
In my experience EAC was the reason that many games that were otherwise perfectly fine became broken because of anti cheat. This should make a huge difference.
Similar: I have a Hades Canyon GH Nuc because I want a very low profile rig that can run older games on high and new games on low and throw it in a bag w/ power adapter & go. Not only does this accomplish the same thing, it runs Linux and means that if I'm just bringing something along for gaming it's completely self contained.
Sure: The Hades Canyon gets (for my benchmarks) something a little bit under a GTX 1060.
The fact that the Zen 2 is 7nm vs the Canyon's 14nm means the performance/watt will be much better. It also has significantly more RAM, and better quality: LPDDR5 instead of DDR4. This also lowers power requirements while at the same time that it improves performance.
But no, I don't think this will be as powerful as a Hades Canyon. Although it also won't have to push pixels to a 2k display like my Canyon does. It doesn't need to be nearly as powerful to provide a similar experience on a small display. (in terms of smoothness. Also higher quality gfx setting will be wasted on this display size, so there's no point worrying about it not running well on "high" textures when the difference between "medium" won't be noticeable on 720p @ 7")
Oh I agree. I meant moreso that it would be awesome to see a zen4 + rdna3 option one day, if we don’t get zen canceled. If the performance increase from zen 2 to zen 3 could be repeated for zen 4… what a powerful little gamepad that would be!
The joystick layout looks funky to me, but apparently it works?
> However, as soon as I held it myself, the layout felt completely natural: the intuitive hand orientation when you grab the Steam Deck is more straight up and down, like holding the sides of a steering wheel, whereas with a controller your hands are at more of an angle. As a result, it’s easy and natural for your thumbs to reach the Steam Deck’s face buttons, D-pad, and thumbsticks.
And as a Mac user who has to load up Boot Camp to play most of my Steam library, a portable dockable PC is extremely appealing:
> As a result, in desktop mode the Steam Deck honestly just feels like a PC. The OS is Linux-based, but it feels largely familiar to Windows and is capable of running everything I threw at it from either platform. I played a bit of Factorio and Death Stranding with mouse and keyboard on a 32” monitor, and if it weren’t for the Steam Deck sitting docked next to me on the desk I would have forgotten it wasn’t running off a traditional desktop PC.
As a Mac user, I'm very interested as well. I don't play any games nowadays because I cant justify spending all that money for a latest generation PC, let alone the space it takes.
If I can have a dockable PC that can churn decent frame rates, It's just a matter of switching the input on my monitor and switching the bluetooth mouse/keyboard to it. For me, the fact it's portable is just icing on the cake to be honest. I'd buy it even if it didn't have a screen or controls to be honest.
I'm in largely the same boat, but with a Playstation 4 (and no current Playstation 5 plans until Sony releases a version that is both readily available and not ugly).
I have a Steam library full of games bought on sale that my Mac was never quite up to the task of running, and the prospect of having them all on a neat little handheld for less than the cost of a midrange iPad is awfully compelling.
Have you looked into the gaming NUCs? This thing is probably going to be difficult to get, but those things are competent and expandable in the future.
Exactly. But I fear that 1280x800 won’t look great upscaled on my 1440p.
That said for playing 2d or lighter indie games it will probably run fine at native 1440p... assuming with external display that you can use native res.
As a mac user, I bought an used PC (haswell i7) + used gpu (rx580) for about $500 (last year before hw price crunch though), and it plays everything on 1440p.
Unfortunately my experience with Geforce Now was deeply deeply underwhelming when played from a current-gen maxed out Macbook Pro w/ a wired Gigabit connection and 1050Mbps/75Mbps Internet service. It was a horrible lag-fest and felt like the game I was playing was being rendered as a flip-book.
Coming from previously having a top-of-the-line ($6k+) gaming PC a decade ago that still does "okay" on most titles at 1080P to trying to game via GeForce Now from my Macbook was a shockingly bad experience. I'm very interested in the SteamDeck specifically because it allows me to use local hardware to run the game without requiring me to build another $6k+ gaming PC which I might get to use one day a month.
Why not build a Ncase M1 form factor gaming PC (or other mini-itx), download steam on Mac and PC, and use Steam’s local streaming to play on Mac while being powered by the PC?
Alternatively, gaming laptop. I’m missing the use case of the Steam Deck except in the event of a budget crunch, since you can get ultraportable 14” gaming laptops that have good oompf - examples being the Asus G14 and the Razer Blade 14.
Generally speaking, I'd just as soon build my $6k+ gaming desktop. I honestly probably would have already done so if it weren't for such severe parts availability issues and my refusal to give money to scalpers.
It reminds me of the Gamecube controller where the philosophy was to "orbit" the interfaces around your fingers to provide better contextual use. It certainly looks strange, but it probably feels damn comfortable to use.
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?
Almost certainly has to do with cost and PCI-E bandwidth. Mobile chips like this only have so much bandwidth, and USB3 requires more dedicated bandwidth than USB2, not to mention more complicated circuitry that drives up price. And when your expected use case is attaching keyboards and mice, which generally are USB2 only anyways, it reduces the cost and bandwidth needed to support that many ports.
That's exactly what we call a "Mobile" chip in the x86 CPU market.
The mobile phone grade chipsets you are probably thinking is probably called "Embedded" chip in the x86 market. ("Embedded" chips is wider than a mobile phone though)
PCIE lanes are still a function of both the CPU and the motherboard chipset. It's cheaper to build a board with fewer PCIE lanes, and cheaper to have fewer components that need said PCIE lanes.
One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions.
edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra weight to hold in your hands.
The build quality is the main I never considered getting a Switch. I simply hated playing with the joycons, they felt like things you win in puff snack bags.
In what sense are the iPhone and iPad not gaming related? Games are 90% of the App Store’s revenue, every new i-device boasts a more powerful GPU that they advertise on stage with top gaming companies. I agree they’d probably never be so gauche as to launch pure gaming hardware but it’s clearly a core pillar of their business at this point.
Tingly feelings in your body are almost always nerve related. Sounds like its pressure on a specific nerve thats causing this issue for you. Hopefully nothing to be alarmed about but that you are putting a strange pressure on a specific nerve.
I bought a "switch grip" that completely fixes the tingling and cramping for me. I have the "satisfye pro" I think. It's pretty big, but there are smaller ones out there if portability is important to you
Ergonomics for me. The buttons are far too close to the edge for my big hands, and it's so thin and flat I have to grip it more with my outer-most fingers than a random comfortable controller.
Had this issue as well. I now use it as a display only and always play with a controller (tabletop mode). If I can't use a controller, I play slower games (like Civ).
Your problem is probably not the weight of the Switch, but that you're resting the weight of it and your forearms on your ulnar nerve (the "funny bone"). Next time it happens, try lifting your elbows off the couch. You'll be supporting more weight with your muscles, but I bet the tingling would go away pretty quickly.
This is such a short-term knee-jerk reaction. We should be thanking Steam for their wonderful push to get gamers into shape. Toned arms might seem like a bit of a joke but when you consider you get your biggest exercise wins doing literally anything at all this will literally savelives. How can you not be for it? Is it heavy enough is the only question to be asked here. There is nothing valve won't do for us!
I wrote every word of it. Probably it isn't really funny at all, even the greatest comedians have misses and I don't claim to be that. But probably not less funny than your response..? Best!
Yes! Start with low reps and weights and just do it regurarily. There are plenty of sites that show what to do if you want to strengthen certain muscle groups.
I've had success with daily low reps, but some longer intervals may work too. Once they've been primed, muscles grow when you rest, so rest is crucial.
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?
I think it's not a case of "having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 slots", I think it's instead a case of "having precisely two USB-2 slots", no matter how many USB-3 slots there are. The reason for exactly two USB-2 slots is obvious: one of them is for the keyboard, the other one is for the mouse. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse need more than USB-2, so there's no reason to have the more complex USB-3 hardware for these two ports.
Other than those two ports, it makes sense to have the rest of the USB ports be USB 3, which seems to be the case here, even though there's only one (the USB-C port seems to be meant to be always plugged into a charger, so it might also be USB-2 only).
I agree on the reasoning, but at the same time, they might as well have just gone with a single USB-2 port and had people buy a <$10 USB hub off Amazon or something (or offered it as a peripheral for $20). Although, you can buy a few port USB-c hub for almost the same price, and if they just had two USB-c ports it would all work just as well with the addition of a hub (since you only need to add a keyboard and mouse when stationary).
Pedantic comment: it’s not that Debian itself is ancient, it’s that they prioritize stability and thus older packages. Both Arch and Debian get frequent updates in their packages, but Arch prefers cutting edge cool and Debian prefers “don’t break any users existing setups!”
Arch is still a better choice because gaming is generally using cutting edge software.
And yet, Debian based desktop systems are the ones that have always broken after updates for me. It was only when I started using an Arch based system that I was able to go past 6 months without any issues. I’ve been running Manjaro now on three different systems for almost 3 years. No other Linux desktop has ever lasted this long for me and I’m not even a newbie. I’ve been using Linux since Red Hat 4. I’ve actually had less problems with it than I have had with any other desktop of us including Windows and Mac.
If you're combining external packaging and debian packaging, or installing things manually, this is typical. Oftentimes if you're doing those, you'll have broken dependencies because Debian lags behind. I had issues keeping Blender and some other creative software up to date, because of this.
It works great if you mostly stick to official Debian packages through and through.
Or you can put in enough time and effort to actually read error messages and do a little work
If you want iPhone ease Linux use Ubuntu based distros. But traditionally Linux hadn’t been single click easy. Much like smartphones weren’t originally iPhone level easy.
Polite edit: if you’re a Linux noob start with a vm or live disk Ubuntu image and play around. If you like computers and understanding them, you’ll find the lessons you need as you need them by searching the web. Then you’ll install a bunch of distros and understand what I mean.
My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. Maybe Valve thinks it's easier to address the stability problems on an Arch-based distribution rather than deal getting the latest versions of stuff on something Debian-based?
I'm also sure that Valve's system is going to have a smaller set of software than I'd use on an Arch desktop anyway, so there's less surface area for stuff to break.
> My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term.
I have the exact opposite experience, I used to use sid and had to do full-blown reinstall every couple months because e.g. dpkg would break too much and I wouldn't be able to install anything, or once, even boot and ended up migrating to arch despite the warnings - never had to reinstall the distro once since then
I'd been using Debian sid for almost 10 years and now use Arch for more than 5 years. Sid is definitely much more stable, as in "not requiring manual interventions", than Arch is. In fact it was actually a bit "too stable" for my taste because it effectively becomes frozen together with 'testing' right before a new 'stable' gets released.
That said, never had to reinstall either of them. Had my system broken by pacman in ways dpkg would handle much better, but it was fixable anyway.
I've been running a mixed testing/sid install since 2005 and not once did I have to reinstall. Even managed to cross-grade from i386 to amd64 a couple years ago.
Do you remember when that happened? I vaguely remember that I used to experience problems installing packages in Aptitude and it would make me "fix" them without a way forward that I liked, but that was years ago.
eh, I switched to arch around.... 2013/2014 ? after an especially bad crash with sid. Never used aptitude, only apt-get. Since then I'm carrying the same "distro" from computer to computer.
Aptitude is mostly a front-end to apt-get, but if you try to install some impossible combination of packages or get your packages in a weird state, aptitude offers solutions to fix it.
Has there ever been an analysis to see what is most likely to break on a rolling distribution? I have been using Arch for years, and have only had a couple of hardware related issues. If that is typical, rolling distributions may not even be an issue when the vendor has tight control over the product and can isolate hardware related packages in their own repository.
In my own experience, the hardware support that breaks is the GPU. For me, the GPU has broken occasionally (once every couple years) regardless of distribution, unless I'm using an Intel GPU or an older GPU with mainline support.
I'm sure that Valve is going to install a much smaller set of core software than a typical desktop, though.
It seems to me that most people finding Arch unstable find it so because they rampantly abuse the AUR. I'm not implying this is something that you, personally, would do, but it seems to be the case in most "Arch is unstable" scenarios.
I might have one or two packages from AUR, but mostly I don't touch it. I've had a number of discussions in meetups about stability and Arch over the years and have encountered plenty of people who switched from Arch to Debian or Ubuntu because of stability problems with Arch. I have a hard time imagining that it's mostly down to AUR.
Maybe the people using lots of AUR are complaining a lot, and the people who don't just quietly switch distros?
Quite possible. The number of packages in the main arch repos is a lot smaller than the number in Debian/Ubuntu. I would imagine the kind of people you're talking about are leaning on the AUR or packages found by default (and thus more heavily tested) in Debian/Ubuntu.
Not really, it slows only down around the time when Debian wants to make a stable release, i.e., every two years for 2-3 months or so.
Debian is in general really rigorous with ABI/Symbol versioning, dependencies and packaging in general - there are some outliers, but most of the packages in Debian is just high quality work.
On the other side is Arch Linux, where they do not even care about Kernel ABI bumps, which are trivial to detect and track, so if you pull in a kernel update you cannot load any new module, as they just overwrite the modules of the running kernel - I used it, but I find that still lunatic!
Nothing like having some complex workspace setup and then needing to connect to a VPN/WireGuard network but also forgetting to preload that module (I just load all possible relevant on start nowadays), forced a reboot, nothing lost but tedious.
On Debian this and other things where you're in limbo while some library version mismatches, or some AUR package is depending on another one, won't ever happen on Debian. It has its disadvantages, but they certainly dot their i's.
Have you tried openSUSE Tumbleweed? It is a well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), with snapshots on update via btrfs.
With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more.
Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
Yes, actually I ran that for quite a while successfully before I switched to Arch Linux and Debian.
The auto-snapshot feature on updates was really cool, and direct integration then (almost 10 years ago for me) was ahead of most other distros IMO.
I then setup Arch to be more confronted with the things that actually go on under the hood, learned a lot and had generally a good experience with it. A bit later I got a job where Debian plays a key role, that sealed the deal on using Debian and Arch only for me (remembering the usage of two package managers is enough for me ^^).
But I have good memories of openSUSE, and it was the distro that I first used "full time", even introduced me to Linux to some degree (I dabbled a bit around with Ubuntu and Knoppix before).
This. Only rolling releases are fit for end user systems; point release is a server meme.
Not only is having new stuff good from a feature and hardware-support standpoint, but, paradoxically, new software seems to have WAY less bugs than old software. (I assume this is because devs are mainly on the new versions and don't care about old versions that much.) Try using CentOS 7, with ancient, should-be-rock-solid versions of apps. Dolphin crashes every time you load into a large directory. Kate's keybinds are broken. Tmux refuses to support 256 colors. I get none of these issues on Arch or Manjaro.
What does Valve have to backport? Surely games aren’t targeting super new libraries? (I’d expect Valve themselves to be the ones deciding what versions are targeted.)
3d graphics libraries, drivers, input libraries, etc.
It is a nightmare getting the latest versions for those on Debian/Ubuntu.
Valve is pushing Linux gaming forward a lot and recent package versions are required in order to run games well.
Sort of agree. I just purchased a UHS-1 microSD card, UHS-I U3 certified. And the advertisement only claims up to 100 MB/s speed, which is terrible in comparison to the SSDs you mention.
But then, it cost 60€ for 512 GB, and that's way more price effective for most. At least on the Switch, loading times are not that noticeable imo.
Raw speed really isn't a major factor in loading times, faster SSDs have almost no impact, almost all of the advantage is gained from better random read preformance
Looking forward, that may change. The two new consoles have shipped a pipeline that allows the GPU to read directly from storage, and the same pipeline will be shipping to Windows 11. An SD card won't be able to run games that are designed around that quick pipeline, even if they have comparably good random seek times.
Loading times will likely be a lot better on the high storage versions due to NVMe. And PC loading times can be brutal so I think the upgrade will be very noticeable.
In my opinion, unless you only want to play extremely lightweight games (like less than 50 megabytes to load) such as older retro games, the SSD is a requirement.
>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base.
I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.
1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch.
2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly.
3. Arch has a stable base and gets small updates every day. Regular software services tell us this is a better model than infrequent large updates. Things like RHEL are the exception, but take years of QA, and leave you with old drivers in between releases.
> 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch.
Fedora rolls the kernel. I'm on Fedora 33 (a full release behind), and yet I still have kernel 5.12.15, the exact same as Arch currently has. I don't have any custom repos configured.
On rare occasions Fedora even gets new kernels faster than Arch, but usually it's less than a week behind.
>2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly.
Fedora gets constant Mesa updates as well, it's not pinned. Admittedly it's 2 months behind Arch (21.0 vs 21.1)
You can add the 2 kernel packages to the ignored packages list of pacman and update them manually if needed. Pacman will warn you that it ignored a package update including the currently installed and new package version.
You will not get security and bug fixes but that's what's bothering you, I think.
Fedora updates everything that isn't a breaking change in between releases. Stuff like major gnome versions or replacing core components with similar but incompatible components gets held back for a major release.
> 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch.
Wrong. The kernel and mesa stack rolls and is rebased regularly throughout the life of a Fedora release. Fedora is prepping for a rebase to Linux 5.13 for both Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 now: https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel...
Bingo, the kernel updates through the life of the fedora release. Then it stops. The life of a console is 8+ years. This needs to be supported for that long. Valve don't want to do multiple dist-upgrades over that time. They just want roll
From my personal experience not really. I’ve steam running on an about 2yo old (at this point) Gentoo system that’s still working perfectly fine. I really should update it but I don’t do much on that system except play a single game.
I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind.
Mesa and the kernel would be less important, as all the hardware needs to be supported by them on release.
> I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind.
That's not the case w/ the Fedora release cycle. Like I said, it's only slightly behind Arch.
fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it
Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.
dnf is a large and complex tool to manage a format that has miles of backwards compatibility (and, for extra inconsistent fun, random cases of incompatibility, since they forcibly broke spec at some point, without changing the extension of rpm, so while there's the expectation of compatibility, many old packages just won't work at all and you'll have very little clue as to why unless you're familiar with the history of the format), and has a lot more to it than pacman.
I'm not talking about the workflow for an end-user: Valve is definitely not going to force people to run terminal commands to update their systems. While pacman's update workflow is way simpler than dnf's, it's just not relevant here.
I was primarily talking about the complexity of the tool itself, of updates, and also the complexity of packaging. Arch is a packager's distro, and much of the foundation Arch is built on is the Crux-style "as simple as possible" mindset. There's much less that can go wrong when you're doing much less with much smaller tools.
I'm not hating on dnf or rpm, here, for the record. They're fine tools for their use cases.
Regarding that storage thing: in the hardware section, they specified that the storage could be expanded with a microSD [1] card which should already improve storage capacity by a lot if you wish.
So, this is actually something that is in flux right now, and the tech is shifting towards loading from storage directly into memory, like the cartridge days back in the 1990s (Nintendo 64, etc). This is in flux to the point that it's really the new games from the past year or two you'd want to test.
What caused this shift is that the current generation of consoles shipped with SSDs. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both shipped with NVMe storage standard. Games going forward are designed with this baseline in mind.
The reason this affects game technology is because it changes the tradeoffs. You always wanted assets to load quickly, since forever. The amount of time it takes to load an asset has two parts that contribute: I/O time and the CPU time spent decompressing.
In the past, storage was more precious and slow, so your game would load much faster by compressing the data. NVMe users would never see worse loading times than SSD or HD users, so you'd just compress everything, and the NVMe users would see a slight benefit.
Now that NVMe is a reasonable minimum requirement, you can ship a game that uses uncompressed data on disk. People with NVMe see faster load times, and people without them see slower loading times, possibly MUCH slower.
When I say "uncompressed", I just mean "uncompressed, relative to the runtime representation" which may still use compression, like ASTC.
The situation with the Nintendo 64 is remarkably similar to what's going on now... because the Nintendo 64 had such a fast storage system, games could "easily" load assets on the fly. The system had only 4MB of RAM, which seemed like a very severe limitation, but you could make very expansive areas in games by streaming assets from the cartridge while playing. It was fast enough that you could load some assets from the cartridge into RAM, and they would be available to render during the same frame! These are the kind of technological changes that are going to happen inside engines, now that NVMe storage is more common.
I put "easily" in quotes because nothing about Nintendo 64 programming is easy.
No, there is not. Loading times from SATA SSD and NVMe SSD is basically the same. Look for example at https://www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-load... - In all loading time benchmarks there is a huge spike for the HDD, and then a minimal difference of ~1 second or less between the slowest SATA SSD and the the fastest NVMe SSD. Note that this includes PCI-E 4.0 SSDs.
Sure, might change in the future, but no game right now uses the future APIs (direct storage) that might lead to bigger differences. Which is no surprise, as Windows 10 does not support it.
Is SATA fast compared to an SD card these days? Recently, when I've worked with newer SD cards (UHS-I and faster) I've been quite impressed with the speed in practice... and I've been hitting fsync at the end, so it's not just the speed of the cache. It no longer feels like I'm working with removable storage.
UHS-III works with Micro SD cards and it's supposed to give you 624 MB/s. SATA 3.0 is supposed to give 6.0 Gbit/s, or 750 MB/s.
That's only 20% faster. I'm sure the real number is different due to overhead, but how different can it be?
I'm not going to be shocked by low Switch performance, since the Switch is basically an obsolete mid-range phone, in terms of specs.
I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I'm not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it's package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don't know or care thst they're running on Debian or Arch).
I would have thought Fedora Silverblue would be the perfect OS for this kind of thing. The OS is a read only image you mount and to update you simply mount the newer image. Its the same model mobile OSs use and it means update failures are almost non existent.
> Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes?
there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch.
Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there's the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.
Why does valve need to use a "distro" at all? LFS exists and is trivial to throw together a custom install. You can grab whatever glibc or mesa you want. Also building a kernel with improvements for a certain CPU is dead simple out of the box with Linux. Distros make it hard, and Arch makes it "easier".
As for packages, why does SteamOS need packages? They can just make one large update package that includes all library updates for the latest SteamOS version. Or are they expecting users to say "Oh I want to update just this one library"? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to make SteamOS a "stable target" that Linux devs can make games for. But if everyone is like "I want this weird glibc!" then that's impossible.
Valve probably does not want to maintain their own distro. Using Arch as a core with their own packages on top is far easier and ensures you always have the newest core components.
What does it mean to use Arch as a "core"? Can't they just pull a list of packages that Arch uses (or the latest Ubuntu for that matter), and use those in their Linux insall?
Arch is a surprising choice because of their rolling release schedule. How will software updates for Steam Deck work? Will Valve just snapshot Arch at a random time, and then stabilize it?
my guess is pretty much what manjaro does.
i was surprised to see its running kde. i thought they just woulda launched a steam frontend and that's that.
In my experience USB-3 generates interference that messes with wireless gaming device dongles. I use a Logitech wireless headset and gamepad and they work far worse in USB-3 ports.
There are a surprising number of USB devices that don't work right when plugged into USB 3. I figure it's a compatibility-driven move to support random cheap janky controllers/keyboards/mice that customers will inevitably try to use.
In a mobile device, it's not necessarily about the power delivered over the Vbus wire, but about the energy required for the transceiver and serdes logic in the controller. USB 1.0 "low speed" had a clock of 1.5 MHz, and USB 1.1 "full speed" is clocked at 12 MHz. You can communicate at that frequency with a microcontroller on an ancient process node on a coin cell. USB 2.0 "high speed" runs at 480 MHz. Running a processor at that frequency requires significantly more power, but is not too egregious.
USB 3 is clocked at 5 GHz, which requires more power still. Just having a transceiver capable of that frequency enabled will draw a significant load from a battery, regardless of whether you're using the bus for power delivery.
I meant that there’s probably a usb 2 controller with lower power draw reqs compared to a usb 3 controller, but I now see that the ports are on the dock like others said.
Internally, it might be a single USB 3 interface routed to a hub chip that breaks out one USB 3 and dual USB 2, or maybe even three with one of them going to a GPIO controller or some other random peripheral.
There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite / mobile gaming.
Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move.
But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.
I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Frankly, I feel like it’s probably a decent number of people? Enough for this product to do okay, if not change the whole market. But people have been very confidently incorrect about almost every iteration of mobile gaming in the past. I guess we’ll see.
The Shield was Android with GameStream. This will run games directly on x86 Linux which, with all their Proton work, will result in a much bigger game library out of the box. There have been more niche handheld x86 devices, but they were even more money, and different form factors. Steam being as big as it is, I think this has way more potential than anything done before.
You have to consider that PC hardware is currently spiraling out of control in terms of price, and $400 for the specs it has presently is a fairly decent buy even if you don't care about the form factor.
I wonder if they're selling at a loss? Valve can afford it, plus it'd be no different than Sony/Nintendo/etc subsidizing hardware since they make most of their profits from software sales.
Only difference is that, unlike traditional game companies, this Steam Deck thing isn't a walled garden. But of course, Steam has a near monopoly on PC gaming so it's unlikely that'll be a problem for them.
I would bet that they do sell at a loss. There's an interview with Gabe[1] in which he keeps repeating that the price point was painful. He is very vague about it but he also mentions some calculus like "they'd have to sell 8 games to be profitable". So I have no doubt they're doing it like the consoles do it.
If Valve isn't locking the hardware down, but is subsidizing it, then they might run into a situation where cryptominers (or some other group) start buying these things up in bulk, but never playing any games on them.
I could see owning one of these as a non-gaming desktop.
They actually did a pretty smart thing, where you can only order it if you have a steam account that has spent money on steam before this month. I would guess that they also limit the amount of Steam Decks you can order as a single person so it would be some effort to start buying these things up in bulk.
Ethereum, because there are not ASICs for it. See the news about recent crackdowns on mining in China, that's where all the GPUs were at, mining Ethereum.
While this is true they are taking their time. Here is an article from 2017 that suggests they will have finished the transition to proof of stake by 2018:
I'm just making up hypothetical my friend. I can't really predict what these might be useful for as an alternative to gaming, but the world is full of bright people who exploit any opportunity.
Nintendo sells its consoles at a profit. It's why their hardware is always "behind" the other guys who are, as you say, selling you $4 of power for $3 and hoping to make it up over time on ecosystem purchases.
To be honest, I don't think your assumption is that far off. The way that Gabe talks about this device, I feel like the purpose is simply to extend the PC gaming market, which is essential for Steam.
PC hardware prices will affect this as well, since this is based on shortages and high demand... basically these will be almost impossible to get outside of secondary market.
You think Sony Computer Entertainment didn't wait until the supply chain was ready before launching the PS5?
It's not about being ready or not, it's about supply and demand.
An example from Valve themselves from early this year regarding Index, an interview with Gabe:
“We actually have components that are manufactured in Wuhan and when you’re setting up your manufacturing lines it doesn’t occur to you that you’re suddenly going to be dependent on this peculiar transistor that’s sitting on one board that you can’t get,” Newell said.
“Everybody ended up running into the same problem simultaneously — you go from, ‘Oh, we’re in great shape,’ to, ‘What do you mean Apple or Microsoft just bought the next two years’ supply of this just so they could make sure they aren’t going to run out?’ You went from a situation where everything was getting done just in time to people buying up all the available supplies.”
Newell says these constraints are also why the headset still doesn’t ship to some markets like New Zealand or Australia. “The only thing keeping us from shipping in New Zealand at this point is just getting enough of them made — we’re very much manufacturing constrained.”
> I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
At first glance at least, it seems like it may end up being much more than that. I see appeal here for non-gamers as well - or at least, for people who aren't only or even primarily gamers.
It's a very nice cyberdeck for general use, though granted it doesn't have a hardware keyboard. Given the size and form factor any keyboard they'd tried to graft on the thing would be basically unusable anyhow so I'm glad they didn't try.
I can totally see myself picking one of these up and throwing it in my bag alongside a small Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. For working in coffee shops in a terminal it'd be just fine. Connect it up to a TV via Chromecast or something and you've got a damned nice setup for less than a grand.
The extra keyboard is going to add a bunch of weight, probably more weight in total than something like the x1 carbon with a bigger screen and battery that weighs 1.13kg.
I call it the ipad effect, where an ipad + keyboard of the same size ends up being heavier than a laptop of the same size.
Convertibles also tend to have a touch screen and pen support too.
I find the 7" form factor only good for personal usage, if you want to play a multiplayer game on it, it's too tiny usually.
The mere fact that NVIDIA Shield Portable didn't take off doesn't tell us much. It had poor design sensibility (i.e. it looked like ass, like some kind of portable Xbox designed in the early 2000s), and it ran Android, which lacks a compelling games library.
Steam Deck at least stands a chance, although I'm worried about the weight and the battery life.
If it can do low-resource gaming for 8 hours, its not lie. And honestly, thats not something too far-fetch.
The only one lying here is you, since its not even released yet for you to test the claim. Not to mention how you conveniently left out "2-" from the battery life range
What? Did you expect to run Cyberpunk 2027 for 8 hours on single charge this machine?
I intend to buy and use it as a mobile workstation for programming, since it has a x86 chip, 16Gb Ram, Linux-compatible gfx chip, decent amount of storage. Basically this will fill the void left by the Nokia N900 for a lot of us. It being able to run steam/games is secondary for me.
Or, if AMD would please get on with it and release a small form factor like the Intel Nuc, that would be great. But this device does have a screen attached to it and a battery, so it would work fine as a nuc for me.
One major difference (besides the form-factor obviously) is that the Deck doesn't require WiFi + desktop to play your PC games. I'd also argue that the trackpads will be a major difference. The Steam Controller's trackpad wasn't perfect, but it made possible to sanely play a ton of designed-for-mouse games
The Nvidia Shield ran Android. So either bad Android games locally, os streaming. The Shield might do better today as a client just for Stadia, Xcloud or PS Now.
However, this is far better. Not only are the specs very impressive for the size/power, but it runs an OS that can plan anything (with Proton). It's like mixing the switch with a ps4. Imagine playing the Witcher 3, or Doom Eternal on this compared to the 480p blurry Switch version. I hope this does well.
> I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Does it even matter? For consumers, they get what they paid for even if Valve shows zero commitment as long as Steam does not actively shut them out. For game companies, support for controller and Linux/Proton is valuable with or without Steam Deck.
And for Valve itself, all the software investment is a long term hedge against the existential threat of Windows failing them, this is just an opportunistic bonus use. The only actual cost is the hardware side of the project. If it tanks in the market they'll simply refrain from doing a v2 and do damage control with long tail sales of v1. While taking comfort in knowing that the Deck hardware will at least have lured a few game companies into the arms of Proton, strengthening their Windows hedge.
It's interesting timing because the Switch Oled edition was just announced with no bump in power. So if you want a capable handheld with access too all the indies which will play games much better than your switch... here you go.
And you can still keep your switch for nintendo exclusives because they've just made it clear that they're not upgrading the switch in a worthwhile way for at least a year.
I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.
> I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.
PC gamers and steam gamers are often very different markets. Nintendo, for decades now, was about fun, not power. I'm casual gamer, just for fun, and steam deck, while super cool, is certainly not going to replacement my switch.
It will replace my Switch. I mostly play indie games, but the Switch can only play those indie games that get released to the Nintendo store, and then, usually at almost double the price of what you can get them elsewhere. As for experimental games that never even get sold? Not likely to happen on the Switch, there's just not enough incentive to publish.
That's great, but "Nintendo not being about power" doesn't change the fact that many of my 40$+ Switch games barely run on the device and run at such low resolutions that it feel like looking through an oily glass.
Seems like something is very wrong with either Switch hardware performance or Nintendo quality control.
Steam does have one huge thing over Nintendo. The PC platform is so backwards compatible that I can play games from the 80s on a brand new computer today.
Nintendo charges you money for new copies of each game you want to play on their latest hardware. You can't just pull out your old copy of Super Mario Bros and install it on your Switch.
Hell, I've heard that there are Switch games that have been out since the very beginning of the console that are still full price.
Its still painfully low spec even for casual gaming. Sitting for 5 minutes waiting for Animal Crossing or Crash team racing to load is not fun for anyone.
The Switch power bump would've probably only made sense in 4K docked gaming anyways, and people are probably not going to buy one of these for docked gameplay.
The biggest disappointment in the new switch is the lack of native bluetooth audio headphone support and becoming less picky about its hdmi travel adapters and chargers
>I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Yup.
Before clicking the "Reserve" link, I put a personal threshold for this thing at $300. If it was somewhere around that, it'd be an instant purchase for me.
Over $500 for a version with barely acceptable (by 2021 standards) storage? No thank you.
The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device. I can't imagine people not running out of space very, very fast (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs). Still, for $300, it'd be an instant buy for me - just to be able to play in bed.
I really hope enough people buy this thing, because I'd really want it to thrive - and the price to drop :)
> The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device.
I felt that way about the Quest 2, and opted for the maxxed-out version. As it turns out, I use it a few times per week and have ~40GB of storage in use.
I originally used Virtual Desktop to remote in to my desktop, mostly from across the house but also over 5G. Now that Airlink is available in beta I use it exclusively at home, and mostly play "PCVR" titles wirelessly.
The Steam Deck seems to be taking the same approach. I see myself using it to play games from my desktop library while in bed or sitting outside. Few if any games will actually get installed on the device, because I won't want to use the on-board processing and drain my battery anyhow.
I don’t get this, if you’re using it for gaming then storage isn’t a huge deal. Even on a dedicated gaming PC, most people don’t have their entire Steam library installed at once.
Not only is it just too much space, but it’d be wasted since there’s no way you’re going to play all of those games.
The 64gb version of this definitely is too small though. That’s less than the average AAA game. And while there are certainly people out there who don’t play AAA games, I don’t think the average Joe will do the math ahead of time when buying one of these, and will be very disappointed/angry when they find they can’t play the game they want (without using external storage/a dock).
But, if this thing does have an SD card slot (idk, I haven’t checked), it should solve the problem. SD cards aren’t super fast, but the Nintendo switch is proof that they’re at least good enough for gaming.
However, when the hypothetical average Joe you propose picks up a cheap 256 GB SD card off of Amazon and it takes five minutes every time they reload from a checkpoint in Control, I think they will be at least as frustrated as when they ran out of space on the internal SSD.
I have a single game that clocks in at 374gb. (Ark + DLC and 50gb of mods.) And I don't want to be limited to a single game. I am really hoping the 64gb can have an nvme drive added.
My guess is that to get the entry level price as low as possible, the BOM is cut to the bare minimum. That would probably imply that they preclude including the NVMe header - but who knows?
Most blockbuster games are over 64gb on their own these days. You couldn't install just one of: GTA5, Red Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Forza Motorsport/Horizon, Fallout 4, the list goes on.
At least Todd Howard can't sell Skyrim yet another time, it's already in my steam library.
Yeah 3D models and all their LODs, textures with all their layers, (one surface could have half a dozen layers used to render it), the myriad audio and music files. Games can be really humungous orchestrations these days.
> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.
Anyway, you can more or less do that today already with external disks, etc. You can certainly connect a USB3 SSD. I wonder if the nvme drive is user-replaceable? I guess not?
Though given the open nature of the device, expect mods sooner rather than later. Replacing a chip and telling Linux to override its size (or mod the bios/dtb) should be a breeze.
Since it runs Linux I don’t see any reason you couldn’t put your entire library on an NFS server in the other room. If I get one I’ll certainly be doing that
Sure, if you have one. I don't (I play games in bootcamp on an old MacBook Pro) but this perfectly fits my needs. I don't have anywhere to put a gaming PC in my apartment and have been considering getting a switch, but this is basically my dream machine.
I honestly can't believe the 64GB one isn't 128GB instead. I looked through my steam library and I have a lot of smaller games that would fit just fine on that.. but 1 AAA title would completely fill it. Plus, you don't get that whole 64GB, the OS has to take some of it. After the formatting and OS I'd be surprised if there was more than 50-55GB free space.
>But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.
People forget that these devices without marketing and consistency they won't go far.
Nintendo, Sony, even MS that came later to the party have hundreds (if not thousands) of millions poured to build their brands, over decades... Sega knew how to play this game and still didn't manage to hang on...
They are already taking the crops of nostalgia, that's for how long they have been around. Leveraging these devices base on hardware it's nothing in the great scheme of things.
It’s more less the same price as Nintendo switch and the switch is limited to expensive Nintendo games. Now if you are a fan of Nintendo games, great! But if you are a of gamer then this steam deck sound like a better idea!
This is my feeling. Money is no problem for me, but I'm not immune to purchasing stuff I don't end up using. So I'm cautious about that and I'm sitting here wondering about the value. Say, the $650 model.
On one hand it would be nice to have my Steam games on a portable without having to double-purchase(a problem ATM with Switch, on top of the higher typical costs of those games on eShop).
But I have the Switch and Switch Lite already which plays Nintendo exclusives. Honestly it's nice to get a break and dip into a catalogue that's not on my PC when I'm on the go. And I'm 100% not going to take two portables with me anywhere.
Then there is the cost. $650 for me would be better spent toward a PS5 if I could get my hands on one. I like the Sony exclusives(GoW, Last of Us, etc) and would really like to play Returnal.. Though it will probably go cross-platform before I ever see a PS5 with my own eyes.
The more I think about it's price point and value to me the more I get the Shield vibes, and the more impressive it is how well Nintendo knows their customers and rides a very fine line with their product placement.
Edit: As an added thought; I like to experience certain games, shows, and movies in a very controlled environment. I won't play/watch them on-the-go.
I view this as more of a tinker device. They’ve stated you can install anything on it. I just know I haven’t regretting buying the steam link or controller, so I may give this a go.
This is different than the NVidia Shield handheld in that hardware has come a loooong way since 2013 and it’s actually possible to run modern AAA games at 1200x800 using what is effectively a mobile chipset. No streaming from a PC required.
If I played more games I would absolutely buy one of these. I already own the NVidia Shield that plugs into your TV because it’s a great streaming box even if you ignore the gaming aspect.
This has so much more potential because its a desktop OS. You could e.g. play WoW using this. Not to mention the huge selection from emulators. I've tried gaming with Android before and the game selection is awful. Realistically, the only good gaming options are from e.g. snes emulators. On top of that, most phone GPU drivers are horrendously broken when doing advanced 3d stuff so even if a good game was released for android, you wouldn't be able to play it on 80% of phones.
Personally I find a lot of these devices backwards minded. I'd much rather just shell out for a service like Stadia (if the catalogue was larger) and turn my actual mobile device into something capable of playing pc titles. Especially if the implementation is platform agnostic like Stadia. Gaming devices of all stripes have become expensive enough that I'm more than happy to see cloud gaming takeover and leave hardware for the activists and bitcoin miners.
Your phone lacks the controller interfaces these devices have though. I guess it depends on if you can hook up a controller to your phone, or if you're able to play the games you like without to much fuss on your phone screen.
Matter of taste. A pc gamer will hate a mobile control scheme but I can play Cyberpunk fine on my S10 with the touch controller and if it had even the level of customization that CoD Mobile or Pubg Mobile offer the player I'd go so far as to say I could be happily comfortable. Imo, people underestimate both how poor the quality offerings are on mobile and how far ui control design has come (in the few top tier offerings that exist). Cloud gaming kills two birds with one stone in that it suddenly adds a plethora of games to mobile that are good in the real way while simultaneously mitigating the mounting costs of being a pc gamer (maybe consoles too but I can't speak to them) by letting me run high-end games on average hardware so long as I have a good internet connection.
I tried pubg mobile and a few other mobile FPS games. There's one major flaw with using a touchscreen for those kinds of games, you need to be able to aim, move and shoot at the same time. In my experience, touchscreens only allow you to do two of those things at the same time.
Apple had a solution to this problem years ago but made the very very very stupid decision of removing 3D Touch from recent iPhone models.
On phones with the feature, you can use your left thumb to walk, right thumb to aim, and 3D touch (press down hard on the screen to shoot). I know at least call of duty mobile supports it, and when I tried it out it felt revolutionary.
But rather than add new input methods, they’re removing them at the same time they’re trying to push harder into mobile gaming (with Apple Arcade).
It’s baffling as an outsider to see such obviously bad/stupid decisions like that from such a massive company.
I don't game on mobile, but wouldn't back-side tap be the obvious solution? I've never tried but I'd expect the accelerometer to be able to detect something like a middle finger tapping on the back of the phone with sufficient precision and latency (just the binary event, not the location)
I do remember a game that did something like that many years ago (posted on reddit I think?). It was an endless runner type game with a fox character IIRC, and you had to alternate taps on the back of the device to get it to move. I do remember that I couldn't get it to work reliably though.
Tapping the back of my phone now, I can see it maybe working for some types of games/shooters where you don't have to hold down the fire button, if implemented well (which probably isn't easy to do for all hardware). The tactile feedback of smacking the phone could help provide a good experience if paired with appropriate audio/visuals.
This isn't quite the same thing, but the Playstation Vita has a rear touchpad, and not a ton of games managed to use it well, even with the much higher precision (Tearaway[1] is the only good one I can remember).
Rear touchpad means you can't put it in a protective case. Unless you can figure out a way to make one that protects it from most of the kinds of drops a phone would take in normal daily use and still exposes the rear pad.
3D Touch was the stupidest idea apple had in the last decade and I don’t say this lightly given there’s also the Touch Bar, the trash can Mac Pro and canceling of the apple display.
It's not perfect but this, speaking as a casual observer, is something I think will improve with time. It took far too long to move away from fixed d-pads and now more games are experimenting with on-screen zones you tap to fire. There's still a lot of unwieldyness exactly as you noted but I think this is a surmountable challenge.
I'm not sure how this could really be surmountable. With a controller you have access to at least 6 simultaneous inputs, more if you do some finger claw tricks or have back buttons or something. A keyboard and mouse gives you around the same or more simultaneous inputs. On a touchscreen you can make 2 simultaneous inputs.
Most action games require at least 3 simultaneous inputs to be played effectively.
There's definitely workarounds like the ones you mention, but unless a game is actually made for touchscreen controls, as in optimized for no more than 2 simultaneous inputs, it's not going to be as playable on a touchscreen as it would be with anything else.
Unfortunately, some genres of game just aren't as suited to only 2 simultaneous inputs.
There's lots of fun touchscreen based games, but they're always better with game mechanics specifically suited to touchscreens.
Playing PC games on a cell phone is painful. You can't even see half the game because your thumbs always obscure the screen to operate the touch controls.
It's not that I couldn't it's that I wouldn't want to with an agnostic service like Stadia. That's money I could put towards a nicer smartphone or into nicer non-internal pc components like the monitor instead. But I also say this as someone who doesn't mind touch controls when they're done well so having physical things to press isn't as big a draw for me as I imagine it is to their target audience.
I think a better question is will games traditionally built for PC's hold up on a mobile device?
Mostly I'm thinking about controller vs keyboard+mouse. Typically you have more controls available on PC and when I play the same game on PC I am complete garbage at it because I'm used to controller, maybe I'm too old though.
The videos on the site show people playing Doom Eternal (FPS), Crusader Kings III (4x strategy game), Balder's Gate (top down RPG), and Disco Elysium (point-and-click adventure game). It looks playable to me.
Plus it natively supports "mouse" controls via a few input methods: thumb touch screens and tilt-o-whorl. And if neither of those work, you can use a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
Valve has been pushing their Steam Controller for quite some time now, it sits squarely in the no man's land between clear success and total failure. The core audience of this new product will know quite well what to expect.
I for one own a switch and has been waiting for a better quality product, I've also been looking to get a desktop gaming PC but the price + the space it takes has been putting me off for a long time. So this steam deck is an insta buy for me.
I'm absolutely in the market for this. I'm fixing to move six time zones from my friends, who all play. Instead of buying a gaming laptop to take with me I'd just buy this if it's let me play with the easily.
I for one love my Shield and would upgrade / buy again - real-time upscaling/upmixing makes YouTube into a competitive "channel" I regularly watch on my 4K TV.
The shield runs all the major streaming networks and there's now Airplay apps that run in the background, closing that gap.
As with all chrome-based devices, the Google voice assistant blows away AppleTV and Roku.
I wonder how really portable this thing is; it has PC hardware, a screen and a small factor in which to stick batteries: how long will the battery last?
> The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
I like their middle finger against other console and smartphone manufacturers.
Many people I know have bought more games on Steam than they could ever play (a behaviour encouraged by seasonal Steam sales). This strikes me as a great chance for people to discover and play titles that have sat in their collections for years.
Guilty. For various reasons, I just don't find gaming on my laptop or media computer an enjoyable experience. Too much dealing with thermals, audio/controller issues, random driver crashes and updates (thanks AMD), etc etc.
I know I can get it to work, but when I'm at the point in the day where I just want to play a game for an hour before bed, the PS4 can have me into it in 10 seconds or less with a very low likelihood of drama.
Anyway, I know this isn't universal, but it's enough of a thing for me that I've even re-bought Humble Bundle games on PSN just so I can enjoy playing them that way.
Maybe Steam Deck would be polished enough to change my mind?
I ditched my PC for a PS4 a few years back, and the quality of life improvement was tremendous. No more endlessly updating... everything, down to the MOUSE DRIVERS. Just hit the button, and pick up where you left off.
I used to worry about the thermal cycle of playing Civ 5 on my MBP, but it's a 2019, and I WANT it to wear out early -- if such a thing is possibly -- to justify upgrading to an M-based, TouchBar-less version sooner.
It's definitely a cost premium buying the console versions of indie titles, and it's not usable for strategy games or twitch shooters where you have to have a mouse. And obviously no mods or free multiplayer.
But if those things aren't a consideration and/or your main jam is single player action adventure, going console is a no-brainer.
Halfway down the page on https://www.steamdeck.com/en/ they have a graphic of a user logging in with the username 'gordon' and an obscured password, which conveniently has the same number of letters as halflife3, haha.
Highly unlikely. Because the Steam Deck is not a mobile gaming device in the classical sense. And they definitely want to make HL3 accessible to regular PCs as well.
I think "mobile" and "handheld" are pretty distinct categories at this point. Switch games a pretty qualitatively different than most of the junk in the android app store.
I have always said that they are sitting on HL3 until they release a proper console they felt they could throw their weight behind. The Steam Box sure wasn't. This could indeed be it...
Im not sure how apples to oranges it is, but a GTX 980 (Released in 2014) has 5 TFlops. Genuinely curious how powerful this might be for GPU intensive games. (Call of Duty, Rust, etc..)
Maybe this is equivalent to something like a MX-150 or GTX1050?
Should be totally fine for Valves games though (CSGO, TF2, Etc..)
Having a screen resolution of only 1280x800 helps a lot. Steam Deck specs say up to 1.6 TFlops from the GPU.
That's half as many pixels as the 1080p screens that people in 2014 were playing on. Keeping "rendering quality" fixed, pixels and flops aren't necessarily linearly correlated, but half the pixels does mean approximately half the flops to hit the same quality targets, ignoring the new upscaling tech that will almost certainly be used to close the gap. So 1.6 TFlops today vs. approximately 2.5-equivalent 2014 TFlops is probably not that dramatic of a gap.
And running on a battery. That's actually really damn impressive.
Missing detail information to properly estimate it. But for now, as a lower bound I would look at the 3200G. That one had 8 CUs @ 1,25 GHz, but with Vega architecture, so two architecture steps behind. In my meta benchmark that put the 3200G igpu behind the GeForce GT 1030 [0], but with certainly playable FPS on many games, especially on 720p.
With the new architecture the APU in this machine should be faster (despite the low TDP?), and isn't it combined with really fast ram? If it beats the GTX 750 Ti then that makes a lot of games available on the target resolution, and maybe that's too low a target and your GTX 1050 comparison is apt. The 128MB cache integrated with RDNA 2 could have the effect it had on the Intel Iris Pro 6200 and give a big performance boost in some scenarios, that graphics hardware was awfully strong for an old igpu. Something like that on newer hardware could be really nice and make this a lot stronger than one would expect at first.
Its a 15W APU, ~5300G at 1/4 the power. Full TDP Desktop AMD Ryzen 5700G, The "Fastest Integrated Graphics Ever" 13 days ago https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-5700g-review , reaches GTX760 parity in some games like Witcher3, while in others like Overwatch its medium for APU while dedicated gpu runs same framerate at Ultra. So forget 1050, its more like 750TI.
The igpu of the 5700G is not based on the RDNA 2 architecture, it is based on the older Vega architecture. It's no step up (in that compartment) than the very first Ryzen APUs, the 2200G. The 5000G series was a big disappointment in my eyes because of that.
But you are right in saying that a 15W APU can't be expected to be very fast.
We have vastly different definitions of what "impressive" means - TW3 was already two years old in 2017 ; the screenshot of the games you linked looks barely like a good PC indie with a metric ton of post-processing FX to hide the textures' low resolution
This is a racing game, screenshots are the wrong medium. Watch the trailer, or look at it in motion on the real console. Also, the screenshots really do suck.
> with a metric ton of post-processing FX to hide the textures' low resolution
That doesn't matter at all to me if the result looks good. Of course it cheats. Many switch games (mostly?) don't even use anti-aliasing. And here is a fast racing game, 1080p@60, with a bunch of effects that manages to look good. The "ton of post-processing FX" is not free. It was important to show what the switch could do on launch, even before developers learn how to optimize for the console.
> That doesn't matter at all to me if the result looks good.
well, lucky you, to me they stick out like a sore thumb ; likewise with the weird lightning on the plants around the tracks.
Likewise when looking at this video https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1418 I can't help but have my eyes linger on the super static blue / orange exhaust at the back of the vehicle, be angered at the very cheap splish splash here: https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1445 or the smoke sprites suddenly disappearing here https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1495 ; it'd definitely break my immersion while playing and make it an unenjoyable experience. And don't get me started on the aliasing...
It also allows developers to target and optimize performance for this specific device (or family of devices). Won't be surprised to see games having a Steam Deck "mode" in the future.
I might be the target audience for this. I have a steam account for years but I barely touch it. I don't feel like building a PC, and games for MacOS were limited last time I checked. I've been happy playing my Switch and PS4.
My first thought when I saw this was that it better be able to connect to an external screen, and it does! An added bonus would be if I could hook up external controllers to it as well.
I've heard of Valve's Proton[1] but not sure how stable it is and if it can support any Windows game on their platform. If so, then that would be pretty amazing to have access to some Windows-only games without building a PC.
I'm definitely interested but I'm in no rush. I'd rather upgrade to a PS5 first but I'm gonna keep my eye on this. If the reviews in the long term are good maybe I'll get the 2nd generation of it.
Wonder if they'll release a Oculus-Quest-like all-in-one VR system next.
Proton is absolutely incredible. It doesn't support all games, but what it does support work fantastically well. It's a great 80/20 solution for your games library.
You still need to have Windows for a couple bleeding edge must play AAA games and a few slackers that haven't been ported over, but there's a wealth of wonderful games that run great on Linux now. More than enough to last a lifetime.
Proton is the reason I might say goodbye to windows for good after the Windows 11 mandatory account announcement. It's only going to get better too. It's seriously one of the biggest deals for making the Linux desktop more viable for most people.
I'm not here to dish out undue praise, but Proton really is incredible. Unless a game has intrusive anti-cheat or DRM, you can expect most Windows titles to "just work" these on Linux these days. Valve has put a tremendous amount of work into this project, it's almost hard to describe.
It’s really long-term planning. Valve gets shut for not following through on game projects these days, but building Proton and preparing Linux for gaming will yield 10x to 1000x the returns on making a game…
Let’s not forget they were the single most important player in the whole VR Revolution. Oculus took the huge improvements that were made inside valve in VR and took the team to FB. But pretty much all the major breakthroughs were done at Valve, not oculus.
And they switched from Debian to Arch. Can't say I don't understand them, but I would have thought there would have been better bases than a rolling distribution (Gentoo, NixOS, Fedora).
Gentoo, like Debian, has always been a good distribution for derivatives. It is quite flexible and you can definitely distribute binaries in the case of a commercial derivative. Gentoo has also been used more widely in the embedded world (because it has the ability to lower its footprint). Known derivatives include Chromium OS and CoreOS/Flatcar Linux. Both of them do not use the source model.
Fedora is also very friendly with derivatives and features the ability to upgrade painlessly through atomic upgrades/rollbacks, thanks to rpm-ostree. Something that is shared with Nix. RedHat is mostly a sponsor and Fedora is community-maintained. Unlike CentOS, RedHat didn't get any bad press on how it tries to influence Fedora. Fedora is pretty consistent and quite polished on the desktop side. You also get a distribution who has access to the most influential upstream distributors (including for the graphical stack for example).
Debian/Arch do not offer such things. Arch does not even offer a stable base to start from. Taking a random snapshot of a rolling distribution needs a lot of work. Ubuntu does that with Debian. All Arch derivatives are desktop distributions. It would be interesting to know why Steam did not continue with Debian. Is it bad experience on the previous SteamOS or inability for Debian to move forward?
I think you're overestimating how much Valve wanted to customize this. I'm pretty sure that a large part of the appeal here is that it's "just regular ol' Linux".
They'll surely host their own repository rather than use Arch's directly. There's no reason to question stability when they're in control of both ends, and Arch is light with excellent tooling.
I find that odd too, but in my recent experience, Manjaro has been the best Linux experience I've had since Ubuntu 14.04. Just install and everything works. Although Gnome was a bit of a hassle, xfce and Cinnamon run beautifully.
This is a pretty amazing. Given the ports on the back, will this support the Valve Index? I love my index, but having to boot up a PC and keep myself tethered to the desktop is a bit of an effort that I'd love to skip.
EDIT: Found a half-answer to this: "Pierre-Loup Griffais: I mean, it has all the connectivity. You would need [a lot] to do that, but that's not really what we're optimizing the performance for." [1]
I have a lot of doubt about it supporting the Valve Index. Mainly because it's a 15W CPU. Sure, you can optimize for it, but VR is extremely performance heavy as far as I can understand.
It depends, running less than 90 fps is borderline and anything under 60 is a vomit comet. Most people have some issues with motion sickness at first but after a few days your brain adapts to it (so called “VR legs”). I regularly play games with lots of fast locomotion for 4+ hours at a time and have no nausea at all. Subnautica with an xbox controller in particular would send most people to the toilet after 60 seconds, which is a shame because it’s the most profound VR experience I’ve had.
Depends. I get horrible carsickness just riding a bus or a plane, so I get some motion sickness in VR no matter how high of FPS it is, no matter how low the latency. I sometimes get motion sickness playing games on my monitor too though, so I'm definitely in the most susceptible category for this stuff.
Like other said though, the worst of it goes away after using it a few times. I noticed though that if you're really susceptible to motion sickness, you basically need to adjust to every type of locomotion or movement individually -- and any vehicles or cockpits are still totally unviable for me still, from No Mans Sky to American Truck Simulator.
Though it's not just one kind of locomotion either -- I adjusted to head-position-relative smooth locomotion with a joystick on a flat surface at a walking pace, but what about downhill at a running pace, on horseback? Then I have to spend another week getting used to THAT. Or what about smooth locomotion circle strafing in a dungeon around a bunch of skeletons? Another week. And I still can't handle any camera rotation at all.
Not really. Keep in mind that getting the headset out in your room is very different to getting a whirlwind tour in a shop. You can just sit down and gasp at the sensation of seeing the trigger move in sync with IRL
Like others have said, it really depends on the game for me. I have the Oculus Quest 2 and some games (Beat Saber, Half Life: Alyx) are fine, but some like Star Wars Squadrons make me really nauseous.
Depends on person, the game mechanics and the hardware. Oculus Quest 2 is very nice HW for its price. Shame you are locked in with a mandatory FB account.
It's entirely down to whether the experience retains 1 to 1 movement between your head and the camera in the game or whether joystick movement or in-game animation yanks control of the positioning of your head/camera and moves it somewhere your real/physical head is not.
Typo in the title. It’s “Steam Deck”, not “Steam Desk”.
Interesting that Valve is diving deeper into hardware. Remember when they still made video games? Remember when there was still a hope they would some day release Half-Life 3?
I wonder about the privacy issues here to be honest. The "FAQ" linked to by the site says "we can go to ign.com on it" but what happens if we do? Does Steam see that we went there? Do they log that? If we log into our bank accounts on the device does Steam see that too? What telemetry are they collecting? Does changing the OS prevent all of it? Will there be ads?
It's cool tech, but I have to ask how will it be used against me? Will it only be pushing me to spend more of my money on Steam games or is there something more?
I can confirm this. The index is a marvelous piece of tech in so many ways. It's a premium bit of kit (with the associated premium price) and I have zero complaints about it.
Yes. It’s a PC running Linux and can do anything a regular PC can. It’s probably a little lacking performance wise for VR though. It’s optimised for the native 1280x800 resolution.
I doubt it's the future. There's a mini documentary called "Half-Life Alyx: Final Hours" and the majority of the developers at Valve said they don't want the next game they work on to be VR.
You can project VR content on to a flat screen. You don't want to look at it that way, but you can do it. The part that makes it 3D is entirely down to the lenses and optics used. The display inside is just like any other.
That’s an extremely pedantic interpretation of the word video. The game isn’t designed to be playable on a screen with regular control input. It’s a video game the same way a full flight simulator is. Technically true, but it requires specialised and expensive hardware to “play”.
Hardly specialized and expensive, it works fine with a $300 headset aimed largely at serving as Facebook's next social platform hooked up to your PC. It's like saying a Wii game isn't a video game, or that games you can't play without stereo headphones aren't video games.
I hope so too, and I think this time Valve has a much higher chance of success. When they launched the Steam machines it was almost guaranteed to fail. The Linux ecosystem wasn't there yet and the prices weren't competitive.
But now with Proton most problems I have are caused by hardware/driver incompatibilities. Which is exactly what Valve can get rid of by launching their own hardware which is actually built and tested primarily for Proton. That's why I'm really hoping this takes off. I'd honestly have preferred a stationary device, but now that the Switch is the only serious portable console they might be able to build a market there. Especially as people can just keep using their Steam library.
> When they launched the Steam machines it was almost guaranteed to fail.
Too true. Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (existential fear of a Windows store built into Windows), but didn't really solve any problem for the bulk of their customers (existing windows users).
Exactly! Only one hardware configuration makes it easy to program for and test. This will be way more successful than the confusing array of Steam Machines.
Yeah this makes all the investment in Proton make a ton more sense. I've been really enjoying the side effect of pretty much any game I try running on my Linux desktop with little to no extra effort as well.
For me personally, I value the openness and out-of-the-box hackability of this device very much and it will likely be the first handheld gaming device I'll buy since the Nintendo DS. I'm interested to see if that sentiment is shared more widely as well.
Protondb isn't completely reliable, it's all based on user generated reports of how well a game works. I've had games that were rated gold and platinum on ProtonDB fail to launch on my PC. Then you have people reporting that a game works great, but they say that they had to compile a custom version of Proton, not just use what's included with Steam.
Honestly, it has never been easier to get a version of proton that makes gaming on linux seamless. Of course, I understand "run these terminal commands" is the usual defensive linux nerd^H^H^H^H coward's reaction, but installing Steam and this package from flatpak and then going from there is a _vast_ improvement from yester-years. I've been fairly happy with it, and I didn't have to do any actual compiling / building!
It runs many more games than the Nintendo switch right from the start, with many people being able to play games on the go without buying them again.
It's not perfect, but it sounds like a much better deal than the Steam Machines which didn't really offer any additional value to anyone and were much more limited.
I really hope that this market picks up steam (heh) and we get to see even more bigger names coming up with devices. The Aya Neo [1], OneXPlayer [2], and GPD Win3 [3] have all come out relatively close to each other with different ideas of what people want in a handheld gaming PC.
Valve seems to want to get in on a price that is more competitive with the Nintendo Switch, so its hardware specs are a bit worse it seems than the others in the market. The plus side to this is that the base model comes in at just $399, though that is with eMMC storage, while the next bump up uses NVME. The other specs seem to be identical across the 3 SKUs, though.
The trackpads a la the steam controller seem appropriate for the types of games that require a mouse on PC, which is unique in this product market. Gyroscopes are also built in, which I'd presume would work similar to the Wii U and Nintendo Switch for aiming. I don't think it'll be as good as a mouse, but I've found that aiming with gyroscope on the Wii U was much easier than using just the analog stick, so hopefully it makes FPS games with a controller more pleasant for me.
I also think it's interesting that it is using SteamOS, which had been kind of abandoned by Valve for quite some time. This also means that it is depending on Proton for game compatibility, which in itself is a huge statement on their confidence in the maturity of it. Without it, this would be a complete failure like "Steam Machines" were. If it works out well, maybe we'll finally see a real product instead of a tech demo from Dell and other PC manufacturers. Exciting.
I'm surprised they went with a custom AMD part. Seems expensive for what is likely to be a low volume product. Why not just do a laptop in a handheld form factor.
I don't think you come at the Nintendo Switch expecting low volume. Whether another company can be successful at it is a good question, but if you build expecting low volume, that's what you're going to get.
Nintendo has some rabid fans as well as selling mostly exclusives. Valve's market mostly already own gaming PC's and won't buy a handheld. It's just too expensive for the few time's you want to play games and aren't at home. For most people.
Most online gaming is currently borked on Linux because the anticheat software doesn't work. Does this get around that somehow? Will I be able to use the same method on my Linux machine?
EDIT: Otherwise 'runs the latest AAA games - and runs them really well' seems like oversell.
EDIT2: From their 'software' page: 'For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.' Yes!
Everyone is talking about gaming, but do you guys think this could be a laptop replacement? I've been intrigued by docking tablets for years now, but haven't found one I like yet (that can run linux well, so no Surface). I like the tablet form factor for web browsing and watching videos, but nearly all the tablets are too phone-like to get real work done.
I don't actually play games much anymore, but do people actually want a portable gaming device in addition to their phone? They always felt like gimmicks to me.
Honestly full linux desktop in a handheld form factor is pretty attractive.
One of the biggest pain points of linux laptops is getting the drivers right.
That being said The screen is quite small if you are dealing with text & while you can do some typing with the steam controller you won't want to do too much.
If your general set up is doing a tiny bit of work while away from a dock (with mouse + keyboard + monitor) and you dock it most of the time I think this could be a really nice package.
I'm thinking this looks fantastic. I can dock it at home and in the office, its powerful enough to do a lot of dev work locally, and I can just VNC to my home/office server when I need more beef like I do with my laptop. So - first pass, the same as a laptop.
Second pass, anti-glare ok-nits screen means I can use it outside. Format means I can use it on the fortnightly train. Whilst I don't want to code with it without being docked I can review, plan, read, have meetings, and make minor edits + run tests while sitting in the garden.
Having meetings outside will probably be the best use of time and justify the spend.
You can probably do it, it's just that the screen is probably too small to get any real major work done, but some quick VSCode editing should be no problem at all. You can also connect usb or bluetooth peripherals as much as you want.
Indeed, in portable mode it'll be hell to type. But for some server maintenance (ssh, service start / stop, read log) and database / app designing it won't be much of a problem.
I must say for programming or office related workstation, a non-joystick version will be better. But if we want a lite programming pc that's able to be docked that can also act as multimedia and gaming, it's suitable.
Well if the controller can be detached (maybe nintento patented them?) like switch it'll be awesome.
Apple's "retina displays" aren't mapped to any specific PPI number. It depends on typical viewing distance for the device it's on (e.g. an iPhone would need a higher PPI to be "retina" than an iMac which would sit further from your face)
So for a device like this you'd probably compare it to an iPad. The latest one is 264 according to a quick Google search.
That's not to say this thing's display is bad by any means, but it's worth noting.
Valve's new Steam Deck 7" @ 215ppi has essentially the same pixels per inch as the new Nintendo Switch OLED 7" @ 221ppi, so from a gaming perspective their target aligns with their direct competitor's hardware. You're right that an iPad has a higher PPI, but Apple typically runs a lot higher on PPI compared on all platforms (handheld and otherwise), and in this case, now that I've run all the numbers, I think the Switch would have been a better first point of comparison for a successful gaming deck handheld than the iPad. (I just happen to know Apple's macOS retina PPI by heart, is all!)
I do recommend measuring the distance from your eyes to a gaming handheld that you're playing while it rests in your lap, and then measure the distance from your eyes to your work monitor; for me, these are only a couple inches different, so it makes sense to me that Nintendo is willing to let the PPI drop down to Apple macOS Retina levels with this year's OLED update, since they have some PPI room to work with.
Detailed breakdown for the curious:
Apple's macOS retina displays are all 220ppi +/- an insignificant amount:
MacBook M1 Air 13": 227ppi
MacBook Pro 13": 227ppi
MacBook Pro 15": 220ppi
MacBook Pro 16": 226ppi
iMac 4K Retina 21.5": 219ppi
iMac M1 24": 218ppi
iMac 5K Retina 27": 217ppi
Apple's iPadOS retina displays are all 264ppi, except the 8" Mini which is halfway to an iPhone (probably to maintain fidelity at the much lower screen size?):
iPad 7.9" Mini: 326ppi
iPad 10.2" Retina: 264ppi
iPad Pro 11": 264ppi
iPad Pro 12.9": 264ppi
Apple's iOS retina displays are all 460ppi, with negligible variation, with the Mini offering more support for the "maintain fidelity at small sizes" thought above:
iPhone 12 Mini 5.4": 476ppi
iPhone 12 6.1": 460ppi
iPhone 12 Pro 6.1": 460ppi
iPhone 12 Pro Max 6.7": 458ppi
However, the nearest competitor to this Steam device is actually the Switch, so let's look at that. These numbers might be off by a few points, but essentially Nintendo seems to maintain the exact same resolution and just sizes the pixels based on that:
Nintendo Wii U 6.2": 158ppi
Nintendo Switch 5.5" (Lite): 267ppi
Nintendo Switch 6.2": 237ppi
Nintendo Switch 7" (OLED): 221ppi
And finally, Valve's entry here is nearly an exact match for the 2021 OLED Switch:
All previous CEO refuse to lower their margin. Not just console but also for iPhone. Which leads to Intel losing everything except their highest margin Server and PC market.
What makes you say that? That is quite beefy machine, very capable of running most modern games on reasonable settings (the resolution is a lot smaller than what people are used to which means lot fewer pixels to push). The only concern I would have is thermals and cooling but I'm sure they have it figured out.
“Installing Linux is hard” is about to flip on its head as people find themselves with Linux installed by default and instead having to figure out how to install Windows (and pay for it explicitly).
Having the battery as low as 2hrs is brutal. I know the early Switch consoles weren't much better running AAA titles like BoTW but they've revised the chipset a few times since, and newer models floor at ~4.5hrs (3hrs for the lite).
I'm all for more competition, but I'm not clear on who the intended audience is for this device.
If the Steam Deck is successful I imagine that will give less demanding titles that will be much closer to 8 hours battery lifetime a nice boost.
I'm suspect games like Among Us, Mindustry, Poly Bridge or Human Resource Machine or Life is Strange will boast a good battery runtime (just scrolling through my steam library).
USB-C charging also opens the door to some quite large battery packs (Dells sells a 65Wh power bank)
It's not great, but I'd wager it's enough for a two-way train ride for most people, and almost certainly enough to commute in, charge at work, and commute home.
A popular portable platform to target provides an incentive for PC game developers to improve their power efficiency. I wouldn't be surprised if PC games mostly didn't even measure power consumption.
Storage seems like it'll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it's got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like Doom Eternal won't fit on the base model, and the next step up with more sufficient storage is more expensive than the next gen consoles.
All the next gen consoles have SSDs though, so games are going to be designed around that. Current AAA games might be playable on a microSD, but I doubt any of the AAA games currently in development will.
We still have yet to see if that will actually become a standard going forward. Sure there's probably gonna be some fancy games without loading screens doing crazy content-streaming tricks to show of the new console hardware, but in the long-term, studios may decide it's not worth the time and effort compared to just having a loading screen that loads the whole level in a big chunk.
Plus you're gonna be targeting a much wider userbase for the time being by not targeting SSDs.
I think there's the argument that most studios will do whatever's easiest. Only a few will really try to be fancy and use the new hardware to the utmost, right?
So then yeah, sticking with a load screen _might_ be easiest. But if the tooling supports it, it might be even easier to just not worry about loading and having to make a loading screen, and let the engine handle that stuff for you. UE5 at least seems to be going in that direction.
A lot of AAA games are built for PC and consoles, that's why you don't normally see much progress in graphics until a new console generation comes out. Current AAA games are also already recommending SSDs, so if people think they're going to have a good experience playing AAA games on an SD card, they're going to be dissapointed.
Yeah - I imagine that the games are designed thinking most players probably have an SSD or - at worst - an HDD. An SD Card - especially a not-good one - can be 100x+ slower than an HDD for small reads. Any games that depend on this would effectively not be playable.
As I was saying, bad SD cards can be REALLY bad. The difference can be over 1000x. Anything that depends on being able to read ANY small piece of information regularly in a reasonable amount of time from disk would simply not be playable.
Well for heavy gaming I doubt you'll be able to put any more power in such a small package.
I don't think the target audience is heavy gamers, but mid-tier games.
The way that Gabe talks about the console is really interesting. From what I understand, the purpose of this device is simply to ensure that gamers continue to buy games on PC (i.e. from Steam), even as desktop PC gaming becomes less and less relevant in the wake of an increasingly mobile landscape.
In many ways this is clearly their second-take on Steam Machines. They learned the first time around that licensing the name to third party hardware vendors didn't work (a lesson they could have learned from the 3DO), and that people didn't really like streaming games from PC to TV.
To me this seems like a decent combination of all of their past hardware experiments. It’s a steam machine, but in a portable form factor. It has the streaming capabilities of the link, and the touch controls of the steam controller. If this takes off, I’d expect to see them continue to release accessories and iterations of it. Maybe we’ll eventually new steam controllers for use in the docked mode.
Steam Link and Steam Controller were dropped because they weren't selling very well, but the steam link application continues to be updated, and the Steam Controller continued to get firmware updates until 2018.
If this Steam Deck thing sells well, they'll probably make another one. If it sells poorly they'll probably keep the software updated and use put discounts on it to clear out stock.
It was pretty clear why they dropped them, which is most people hated it (while a few very much loved them). I loved my Steam Controller but right now I'm using mostly my Xbox controller for PC.
The Wii U was a failure, but I feel (and I guess the sales can confirm that) that Nintendo learned from their mistakes.
I dual boot windows and linux, but have not booted into windows in years. I can play many games on linux now, but having a completely separate system means I can keep games and work separate. The dock also means it can be used as a real gaming computer. I also refuse to play mobile games, but might make an exception for the ability to play full pc games on the go. Normally I would never consider such a device, but the price point, size, and the dock makes it almost a no-brainer.
I bought a gaming PC years ago, and I hate booting it up to play my Steam library, because of the constant, unending updates.
Didn't turn on your PC for a week? Enjoy a 45-minute wait while Steam downloads and installs yet another giant update, preventing you from playing anything until it's done.
If this is going to be like that, I'm out. Even though a device like this is what I've been looking for.
That is configurable, from within Steam. You can install updates on demand if you'd like to only update prior to playing. If you're not wanting updates at all, just keep it in offline mode until you need to go back. It's even adjustable per-game: you can keep your THICC titles to update on demand and the lightweights to keep updating as needed.
> "Steam Deck starts shipping December 2021 to the United States, Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. More regions coming in 2022—stay tuned for more info."
Does anyone know why hardware product launches tend to be region-constrained initially? Is is for shipping/logistics reasons, or legal/tax/etc stuff?
Software/SaaS launches never have these constraints, so I figure it must be shipping related, but that would amaze me. Is there still no company that makes international shipping painless/simple? What would be the difficult part for Value here?
Shipping (distribution from local warehouses to avoid unnecessary customs surprises), taxes, certifications, (and I know it's not the case here but for some HW projects) regional electrical differences (50/60hz, 120/240v), and of course supply-- there's a number of differences that could lead to a hardware project restricting the initial launch.
At a cursory glance this thing seems to be well-equipped to handle emulation. There are a lot of (sometimes sketchy) portable emulation devices on the market but most are pretty underpowered. This seems significantly more powerful (at a higher price point of course).
I'm curious if more folks interested in portable emulation will go for this or wait for an FPGA-based Analogue Pocket.
Honestly, I'd prefer the Steam Deck over my phone, simply because it's a dedicated gaming device with integrated controls. I'm always forgetting my gamepad and I hate fiddling with putting the phone in the holder. It's just so awkward. A gaming device in the form of a tablet like the Switch is so much more convenient.
That's what I'm wondering here. If it's just a normal m.2 slot then you're way better off price-wise getting the entry level unit and upgrading later on.
You probably can. Everything seems standard hw and they are touting the ability to add anything to it and even replace the OS. It won't be locked down like Apple's hw.
This is neat, but I really would like to see Valve putting a tiny fraction of what must be a monstrous private cash pile into some new content that can run on these devices (and my old-school desktop).
I feel like I am in the middle of a desert of gaming content right now... I can see the mirage of BF2042 and AOE4 on the horizon, but who knows how that is going to play out once we get there.
Maybe Netflix (with the recent EA exec acquihire) can pick up some of the AAA gaming slack with their even more gigantic pool of cash and inclination to greenlight and fund everything that even remotely sounds interesting.
I'm totally cool with a role reversal if Valve execs feel the need to master all manner of hardware. Someone else will eventually fill that software role.
>>"I feel like I am in the middle of a desert of gaming content right now..."
Sorry, just to check... Are you saying you are genuinely bored and have nothing to play right now?
I am envious beyond belief.... I feel there are literally hundreds of high quality brilliant games out there in a real and virtual backlog I'd love to play, but time is limited and I'll realistically never get to them :-/
I'd imagine that Valve is counting on others to fill that software void, as they frequently have in the past. Frankly? I can't blame them. Proton has gotten to the point where most Windows games "just work" on Linux the same day they release for PC. Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield 5 all ran on Linux within a week of their release, and I'd imagine that compatibility will only get better as time goes on.
As someone who has a stReam deck[1] sitting on their desk this is a very confusing name. Before I realized this new product was steam not stream I was trying to find if valve bought elgato or something.
I always felt their controller was a bit of a weird product. Turns out they were just dipping their toes in the water. I wonder if they are going to produce this fully in house like the controller.
Valve wanted to compete with consoles. Consoles go in the living room and are played with a controller. Your home's PC is not in the living room, so how does Valve fix that? The Steam Link. Okay, but PC games are frequently designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard. There's lots of stuff to click on. So how do you play that from the couch without some elaborate lap pad with a mouse and keyboard on it? The Valve Controller. I see how it could very well have worked. Consoles are expensive, and if you already have a PC, it's an awfully cheap way to play games with better graphics for less money.
It really is a great controller. The omission of the d-pad was a mistake, but the real reason it failed was because people already had a preference for the X-Box controller. Most games worked with the X-Box controller with no extra configuration.
This is why I think the Deck has done it right: include all the standard buttons plus the extra stuff.
>So how do you play that from the couch without some elaborate lap pad with a mouse and keyboard on it? The Valve Controller. I see how it could very well have worked.
I guess maybe in a world where every console controller isn't compatible with most PC games, cheaper than the valve controller and more ergonomically designed than the valve controller...maybe if Logitech, 8bitdo, Razer etc. didn't exist and didn't produce cheaper or better controllers it could have worked....
Most first person shooter PC games, sure, but there are thousands of PC games that assume you have a mouse and a keyboard. Point and click adventures, that sort of thing.
Yeah i know. Playing an RTS or a Moba game or something with a controller would be a nightmare. Most 4x games like Civilization would suck a lot. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm or pretty much any non mobile roguelike would be unfeasible to play with a controller.
Even some games you'd think should work well with a controller don't really. Unepic's a 2d side scrolling action-adventure game, you'd think it'd be controller friendly, and there are console ports of it, but the PC version uses 10 hotkeys for various spells and abilities. I managed to map i think 4 or 5 of them to controller buttons, but it meant more going through the game menu and reassigning spells than it would have using a keyboard.
I know from first-hand experience as a dad of a gamer that AAA PC games aren't optimized for space in any way and 64GB of storage is nowhere near enough. I know they are trying to hit a price point, but for all practical purposes, this thing starts at $529 (where you get what I'd consider the minimum of 256GB).
I thought the same at first, but then again, a lot of people play indie games first and foremost which tend to be smaller, and it also has the sd card slot
Only thing this and Steam OS is missing is native support for software like Easy Anti-Cheat. Because EAC explicitly refuses to work on wine (proton), it's impossible to run a huge number of AAA multiplayer games. I know Value probably cannot do much on it's own here though.
I'd be a little skeptical of that. Valve's commitment here is to "providing SteamOS as a platform", not "building a really appealing handheld". It seems counterintuitive, but I'd imagine Valve is lobbying for the entire Linux platform right now: especially after you hear the rhetoric on their dev page for the Deck.
Windows doesn't have it so they don't cut off most of the playerbase. Linux + online gaming on the other hand is basically nonexistant right now so they don't have to deal with legacy hardware.
Just in case anyone is Ctrl-F-ing this for NVMe M.2 M2 SSD upgrade slot support for the 64GB eMMC version, apparently, the base model does indeed have the NVMe SSD slot like the higher versions according to this:
AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
and 5 screenshots with Control by Remedy, game that runs at ~10fps on PS4. PS4 has faster GPU than listed here ...
BTW Somehow Sony didnt delist Control from PS store despite performance problems, their official reason for delisting Cyberpunk :)
Edit: IGN "hands on, but not really hands on" https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-hands-on-impressions... Once again Control by Remedy in EVERY fricking shot of the screen. Even the shot where Valve employee is "casually" sitting with the Deck on his lap, the screen is facing the camera and you can see Control right there :D And the mystery is solved, Control is playable in mid to low settings at 800p with Ray Tracing turned off, something you cant do on PS4.
The screen is 720p, not 1080p which is probably what the PS4 was rendering. Also worth noting the GPU architecture is newer, so a straight clockspeed or Flops comparison might not tell the whole story.
Well I guess their time developing the Steam controller isn't all for naught. Looks similar in concept, except with dual joysticks and thumbpads (instead of just 1 each) and extreme deemphasis the traditional X/Y/A/B buttons, and 4 (instead of 2) back paddle triggers. Which is great, I loved the paddles on my Steam controller.
I wonder what this will mean for Linux support on the Steam store in general? Since this is SteamOS[0], then manufacturers will have to support Linux / Proton in order to have their games on this machine.
I noticed one of the screen shots was using KDE on the connection to another screen. Honestly that got me to realize it's another PC and made me consider getting one. Worst case scenario, I just have another PC that's marginally better than those small box office PCs.
Edit: I read further, it is a fully fledged PC. You can install or do whatever you want to it.
It is! A new version, in fact. It includes Proton.
(I'm not sure if SteamOS v2 and below were already Arch-based, but it's interesting to know that v3 is, given that the Steam Linux Runtime is mostly Ubuntu-tested)
If I were them, I would launch a 2nd version of the dock around Dec-2022 that has an integrated GPU. Use a GPU than can push 2k content and call it the Steam Dock 2K. 4K version in 2023.
The one issue with this is going to be the storage space. 512GB isn't really enough for multiple AAA games. It will also be interesting to see what the battery life is going to be on this thing, and how well they've tuned the controller hardware.
It could either be an amazing upgrade for mobile gaming or incredibly janky.
I know giving predictions against Nintendo is always a bit of a gamble due to their strong 1st party IPs, but with the announcement of the Switch OLED (and with that basically killing the hope for a Switch Pro), they might have seriously bungled it.
At least for me, I know when my Switch finally kicks the bucket (and maybe even before then) I'll seriously consider a Steam Deck instead. I've been using my Switch almost exclusively for indie games, and even though there is quite the selection of them for the Switch I could have played basically all of the indie games earlier (and then some) if would have had access to my Steam catalog. So unless you really want Nintendo's 1st party (expensive, never-dropping-in-price) games, this really looks to be a no brainer.
I don't see any mention of VR. I wonder if they will support plugging in a Valve Index. Seems like it should be possible through the dock. Oculus headsets wouldn't work though, since they don't support Linux. Unless you can install Windows on this thing somehow...
Edit: Yes you can install Windows: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq This might be a good companion for an Oculus Quest headset. $299 for Quest plus $399 for this and you get access to the Steam library of PC VR games in addition to the Quest library.
This Ryzen is faster than Snapdragon XR2 (855) that's core on Quest2, so there are no reason it can't run VR but is it practical is different story. XR2 is excellent for integrated device, but if it shouldn't integrated, gaming desktop is better rather that this portable machine.
Pierre-Loup Griffais: I mean, it has all the connectivity. You would need [a lot] to do that, but that's not really what we're optimizing the performance for.
IGN: So you can try it, but your mileage may vary.
I‘m not sure this delivers enough performance for decent PC level VR but you can install Windows, they say you are free to reinstall whatever OS you want.
I'm so excited about this - I've been looking for a cheap device that won't take up much space and allow me to play AAA PC games despite having a Macbook as a primary machine. Can't wait to get my hands on this.
Steam input. If a game supports steam input, the developers can create a mapping for controllers that is automatically loaded for users using a controller. You're also free to modify these layouts in the comprehensive steam input UI provided. People can also share their mappings for a specific game which anyone can select in the community section for that game's steam input menu. Often times community mappings will be better than developer created mappings, and the community mappings have a rating system so you just search by highest rated or most downloads etc. The best part about steam input is that it makes enabling gyro support easy as, so long as the game supports simultaneous mouse and controller input at the same time (which Valve exclaims to developers in the steamworks documentation to make this possible).
This looks great. A Nintendo switch with more than a handful of AAA titles and shovel ware and power. I’ll be buying I think since the Nintendo DS is dead, switch isn’t for me, Sony gave up. This looks like a winner.
Nice hardware specs[1]. It's really delightful to see such relatively powerful hardware in that form factor, because if stuff like this catches on, it will only push the market of those small form factor PCs which make really good home servers. Like the industrial SBCs that can be found on http://linuxgizmos.com/
If I were into gaming, I'd definitely consider getting one of these.
This is great because there is only one platform to program for. The previous Steam Console was a big failure because it had so many different hardware configurations. This could be awesome!!!
This is great! I don't know how much of it is open in the -all specs open- sense, but being able to install usual OSes on it, paired with the really nice price, makes the platform interesting for a lot more uses other than gaming.
In fact, I don't see it as a simple gaming platform but also a portable terminal with lots of buttons.
Hopefully more competition in this field will also help bring down prices of other interesting gear such as the GPD handhelds and mini-PCs, the One Xplayer etc.
Bringing PC gaming to a portable form factor will probably be successful, but I don't game on my phone, so I don't think I'd buy this.
I am in the market for a gaming laptop that can dual boot Linux as my work machine. If they did an Alienware or ROG style build I'd very likely buy that.
Btw if anyone has recommendations for me, I'm looking right now. Looking for a 15-17" heavy ass laptop with minimum 32gb ram, quality 4k or close display, and as much performance as I can find.
* 1.47 pounds is 666g, versus the Switch’s 398g (with Joy-Con attatched). 67% heavier.
* I do like that the two people I can see on the landing page both appear to be female, and not overtly "models" at that. I don’t want to read into whether this implies anything about what the marketing for this system might be — rather, I just like that we’re seeing a further erosion of the video-games-as-boys-club trope.
* The visual appearance of this console is brazenly ugly. It sure feels like they were unwilling to compromise something for the sake of appearance, though I’m not sure what that something is.
* They claim that there’s no performance difference between tiers, but obviously disk speed has an impact on how games perform whenever they need to fetch data. This feels like a bit of skating by on ambiguity rather than being fully forthright about tradeoffs — which only hurts since the price jump from the entry level to the middle tier is so dramatic, and we don’t yet know pricing for the dock.
* Countdown until this thing is EOL? Any bet on what the firesale will look like? No, I’m not assuming it’ll flop necessarily, we just all know Valve’s track record for being fickle about hardware.
* This really goes to show how much prowess Nintendo has at hardware, and how hard mass-market product design is. According to my napkin math, Nintendo and Valve are both in the same ballpark in terms of financial status / resources. Though if the Xbox and Surface has shown us anything, if you keep trying and trying in earnest, you’ll eventually get there.
1.5 pounds is what the 2010 iPad weighed, people managed to use it just fine.
As for visual appeal, who knows? PC gamer aesthetics seem to be oriented around dotting your CPU case with the most gauche RGB lights Amazon dropshippers have to offer. At least this is more toned down than say, a comparable Alienware product.
The weight is pretty excessive for something you hold out in front of your face with two hands. Yes an 11 year old iPad weighs the same, but people tend to rest the edge of the iPad on a lap, chest, table. At least with the Nintendo Switch, I find it uncomfortable to play while resting it against something else. The angle on my wrists ends up being painful after say 20 minutes.
Regarding the weight, it’s a different position when you’re holding it at arms length while playing. You don’t hold your iPad in the air while reading, you put it against your knees or something else!
I would put the Steam device on my knee when seated and playing on a train, possibly on top of a backpack that's also on my knee. I'd have to try it to be sure but I think it will work out fine.
Experience! Every portable gaming PC and piece of Valve hardware have flopped. This is a "We have tons of money and are still committed to hardware" release, not a success story.
This is news to me. What is an example of a portable gaming PC that has flopped? I'm honestly just not aware of any major company trying to make one.
As for Valve hardware, the only clear flop was Steam Machines -- which weren't Valve hardware at all.
I think it's odd to focus purely on the mass market success of Valve's actual hardware (Link, Controller, Index) since these can all be considered experiments by a company that can afford to fail, and since these have all been widely praised as the best-in-category. Clearly they know how to make great hardware; they just haven't done anything mass market yet. Who knows, maybe the disappointment with Nintendo will fuel sales for the Steam Deck.
Nintendo has a major advantage, in that they're not trying to run everything on the Switch. All their first-party titles target low-power hardware, and they make those games smooth and responsive. Valve is trying to give people their entire Steam libraries on a portable device, which is bound to lead to a worse user experience.
If they keep trying, one day the stars are going to align and their hardware dream will hit, but today isn't the day. I give it 18 months to live, no chance at a v2.
I feel this device is too "on the nose" for what PC enthusiasts want. Its a Nomad, not an iPod. Its a Game Gear, not a Gameboy. Enthusiasts will just shrug at its lackluster performance and tiny screen vs just paying a bit more for a gaming laptop or desktop with several times the performance.
I also don't like the idea that if you want to play many popular games, especially those beholden to anti-cheat systems, you have to run Windows and now you have to go through the hassle of buying a Windows license and installing it on this machine. A lot of kids might be disappointed when their parents buy this and they find out they can only play stuff that works on Linux and that stuff may not include the big AAA shooters they want to play (mostly due to anti-cheat being windows only). Worse, Win10 costs $120, which is a pricey upgrade for a device that starts at $399.
I think its often in technology that the customer doesn't know what they actually want. They don't actually know how to ask to be surprised or what that surprise might be, afterall its a surprise! So they just ask for slightly better or tinier versions of the things they already own, which may or may not be the right answer.
Products that actually get successful tend to surprise and break expectations and introduce new concepts. This device just seems like its not doing any of that, but on paper its what PC enthusiasts claim they want, but I'm guessing won't actually buy. I don't know what its EOL will be, but its definitely going to be a super-super niche device, at bit like how Android tablets with things like full size USB slots were seen as potential iPad killers just a few years ago, but failed to get any real marketshare. You can still get an Android tablet, but its just a lackluster device compared to the competition and super-super niche. This device may also have a very long life as potential ammunition against Microsoft trying to seal off Windows from gaming again. It'll always be in production even as a loss because its so politically and economically important to Valve to be able to keep MS from locking them out with the MS store.
the difference between a mid tier nvme drive and a top tier nvme drive isn't that big. 1.5GB/s or 3GB/s (numbers made up, I don't know the actual specs), That's still crazy fast. The impact here would be minimal.
What I was interested to see discussed here which I have not seen is the relative merits of this and other similar products (yes, there are several!).
GPD Win
Aya Neo
Smach-z
The first two have actually shipped units. I own the first gen Win (underpowered, quality issues but an amazing first effort), and am awaiting my Neo.
Neo seems more powerful but bulkier and more expensive. I have great faith in Valve to produce hardware to last. The latest Gen GPD'S are looking great!
Seems great as a niche enthusiast device. Based on my past experience with Steam Link though I'm not sure how well it'll do as a mainstream gaming console.
Too much of Steam's game library just wasn't designed to be used without a keyboard/mouse, and touchpads + mappable controller buttons aren't a great substitute, particularly when the game you're playing still thinks you're using a keyboard.
There's a certain level of polish expected from console gaming. People expect to be able to launch a game and have it just work; they don't want to be futzing with controller mappings and adjusting graphics settings for 15 minutes before they can start playing.
To be clear, I think these are surmountable problems. From what I've read though I'm not sure if Valve has done anything to address them. There's a lot of talk on the website about having access to "your entire Steam library", and a mention of how the touchpad lets you play games designed with a mouse in mind. But again, based on my experience with Steam Link, it's not really that simple.
I game on a Switch a lot and wish the charging port was up top. On the bottom _sounds_ good, but the cable ends up being in the way all the time. Up top really is better.
This seems to integrate tech from Steam Controllers. I.e., dual touchpads on a gamepad style layout. They went through many prototypes [0] attempting to create something as portable as a console controller but as accurate as a mouse. I certainly prefer it to a touchscreen.
This is an interesting product that I am happy will exist, but that I doubt will sell particularly well.
It is a Nintendo Switch for the PC crowd, but that comes with inherent compromises and nothing in the way of exclusive software.
I personally do not think I could justify spending money on this over a new laptop instead, but I hope it is a really great little niche product for some people.
Yeah, it's definitely a strange move, and I think only really exist because Valve is a private company that works on basically whatever the fuck the people there are interested in.
The lowest SKU is probably selling at a loss, and will never really sell units on the scale of xbox/ps5/switch in order to make a profit. This is pretty enthusiast stuff, probably in line with the Index or Steam controller.
To me, someone whose gaming experience rounds down to "never", but who's casually interested in maybe playing some games, this looks very appealing. Switch form-factor but it runs PC games? I don't need to carry around a tower with me and sit in front of a desk and disconnect my peripherals from my other computer? Sounds great!
I'm a little disappointed that Valve is focused on Proton only. This can also play native Linux games. A well written native game should perform better, and, more importantly, get better battery life.
Maybe Valve is going about this the right way. Focus on Proton now, and if it takes off, game devs will make the effort to do a native port.
Proton is the answer to the chicken-and-egg problem of linux gaming. No one will make games for it because no one games on Linux because no one will make games for it. With Proton and this, they’re trying to bootstrap a Linux gaming community. From there, native ports will happen when the community is large enough to be worth optimizing for.
Idk. You still get your game to run on both the Deck and Windows if you write for Windows, whereas it'll only run on the Deck and a few bless Linux installations if you write for Linux. There must be a pretty big performance gap (or some financial incentive) to convince devs to switch, and it almost can't be performance: then Deck will simply not take off.
Sadly, some of the native linux game versions that I've tried were worse(less performant or unstable) than forcing Steam to run the proton version, since they don't get as much dev effort. I'm perfectly ok with this for now, given how well proton already runs. We'd need to find ourselves in a primarily-linux-gaming future first.
I am excited about this because it finally seems like there will be one more worthy competitor in the portable gaming arena. I was getting really tired of Nintendo's majority market share, with no one to compete against them they have been reigning free with their ridiculous "no sale on 4 year old games" policy.
Valve doesn't need money. They make enough profit as it is, purely from digital goods and their revenue cut. So why give up control when you are free to do what ever you want. In the end it is extremely profitable company.
It seems that IPOs are sometimes the only way for investors and founders to cash out, or get a return on their investments, even if the companies themselves are unprofitable or unsustainable.
I don't know about their investors, but I assume they aren't pushing for an IPO because Valve works well and is profitable as it is.
> On Steam Deck, your games run on a different operating system than the one on your desktop PC. It's a new version of SteamOS, built with Steam Deck in mind and optimized for a handheld gaming experience. It comes with Proton, a compatibility layer that makes it possible to run your games without any porting work needed from developers. For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.
Of course, it doesn't magically make every Win 10 game run on Linux without issue. Your favorite games may not even work, but it does make most games playable. More info: https://www.protondb.com/
Valve is like 90s id Software without Carmack. They understand business models. They know that the money is to be made in game engines and game platforms, not games themselves. However, they’ve never had the technical talent and vision to execute on that.
Half-life was supposed to be a demo for GoldSrc. It never took off and I can’t name a single 3rd party GoldSrc game. Likewise, Half-life 2 was supposed to be a demo to sell the Source engine but I’ve yet to see a successful Source title that wasn’t Valve-based.
They tried with the Steam console (the name of which escapes me) and I don’t know anyone who owns one (despite the excellent controller). Now we’re at them trying their hand at a Nintendo Switch competitor. Based on their past failures, I don’t see this being any more of a success.
I think they've done fine with VR hardware, except for that market still being pretty small/niche in general. Oculus probably has a more well known brand, but the Valve VR hardware is - I think - pretty much best in class, and I think anyone would choose Valve over Facebook as a source of VR games. HL Alyx was well-received as well. But VR is still pretty niche.
Steam itself is their biggest success of course, though that is not hardware. I do believe Steam took good perseverance and good execution to achieve the success that it's seen. (Re: perseverance, remember that when Steam first came out, people really hated the idea!)
Anyone else understand why the storage upgrades are described as "Faster" and "Fastest." At least for eMMC to NVMe, I can see how that can be described as "Faster," but how does increasing NVMe capacity get you "Fastest?"
A lot of times larger SSD have a faster throughput. If each flash module can do n mB/sec then 2n is twice as much. Obviously there’s overhead and how much the actual bus can manage, but plenty of 512gb SSDs are ~20% faster than their 256gb brethren.
It's 1280 X 800 on the device, I wonder how it fares playing AAA titles at higher res on a TV or monitor.
Have only given the specs a cursory look so far but seems the GPU is (understandably) significantly less powerful than, say, a laptop GPU from a few years back.
How long until Epic Games sues Valve because they're not a first-class store on Steam Deck?
Companies like Apple, Valve, and Microsoft build out ecosystems and take massive risks doing so, only to have someone who made millions if not billions of dollars off of these systems to come knocking.
Epic made millions if not billions off these platforms. Nintendo is locked to their store. So is Xbox and PS. Not sure why anyone else that designed it that way would be any different. If it's a closed ecosystem, it's just not for you.
If Ram pickup trucks sold door chimes on the dash's touchscreen, Epic Games would be suing for access for their alternative marketplace.
I realize this, that's why I said first class store. It’s all about money, they’d stop fighting for freedom if they weren’t losing a cut. And now with all these lawsuits, no one‘s ever going to take the multi-million dollar investment to build a quality platform ever again. Why would you, when you can just leech direct from everyone else without them even taking a percentage of your sales?
May as well shut it all down. Everyone else gets to completely freeload off of your multi-year, if not multi-decade, multi-million dollar investment.
As a person who is mostly interested in playing a few older PC games out of a sense of nostalgia (such as the definitive editions of Age of Empires / Age of Kings), should I get this and if so, what size?
As one data point, Age of Empires 2 DE takes up 13.7 GB on my desktop, so you'd probably be fine with even the smallest one (though I'm sure it will still fill up quick!)
Form factor is another consideration. You'd probably still want a dock and mouse/keyboard. I'm not sure how well that game would play on a controller.
You may have trouble running some older games if they aren't already on steam. If they are, though, then that seems like a fine use. The 64gb version would probably be more than enough.
I have a Steam Controller. It performed well in several games. However, my experience with it and most games was very bad. Most games did not really support it and community keybinding presets were either non-existent or unplayable. I had to learn how to use a controller as if I did not use any in my life. I had to spend a lot of time to get everything up and running and learn the controls. Most of the time I switched back to wireless keyboard and mouse or xbox controller.
I hope that controls on this device will be decent and the games are playable.
After having to replace a second joystick in six months, I'm just about ready to dump my Switch Lite for something not made out of mud by a company that doesn't really care about hardware.
Could anyone comment on the relative speed of the UHS micros SD cars these support VS. NVMe (I know it's faster) & specifically how the UHS would compare to a traditional HDD (not SSD)?
I think the Switch gets this type of handheld play right by having detachable controllers. I never use my Switch with the controllers attached to the side. Instead I use a separate pro controller when playing handheld mode. Maybe this doesn't matter if you can still use a separate controller.
Beyond that, it's not clear to me what this will support. If I can play Fallout, any of them, I will seriously consider buying this.
The website is pretty clear: this runs SteamOS 3.0, which is Arch Linux with a KDE Plasma desktop. You can run anything you want on it, including switching out the OS if you want, and it uses standard PC peripherals.
In other words: your wireless XBox controller (or whatever) should work fine and you can play Fallout whatever as long as it is supported by Proton or you put Windows on the thing.
Damn, if this was officially available in Japan I'd be so tempted to reserve one right now...
Might still order one to my home in Germany, but probably will wait for further news on proper international availability first.
In any case, I hope this will create a fire under Nintendo's ass to release a proper Switch Pro. They've had the handheld market to themselves for far too long, and the lackluster upgrades are showing it.
The resolution, the weight, the battery life and potentially the cooling are all sub-par. There's also the fact that this can't compete with the Switch due to the simple fact that games are optimized to run at a stable framerate by the developers or subcontracted companies for the Switch, while this will just run games from Steam at a low-res and hope for the best.
Even some first party Nintendo games can't be relied on to run at a stable framerate so I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Link's Awakening has some nasty and inconsistent stutter issues, Breath of the Wild runs better than on the Wii U but it still has its moments.
Then you have games like Hyrule Warriors where it just feels actively bad.
Lots of Switch Games actually run a lot better under even a very mild overclock (Nintendo even officially lets the CPU get OC'd during loading screens for limited periods of time, to great effect).
This is beating the Switch on most aspects outside of first-party Nintendo library.
I think a lot of the performance problems on the switch occur when you set the resolution of the device to anything outside a fixed 720p.
I've definitely had issues with 1st party titles, but after going into the settings and forcing 720p, some did go away. At the end of the day I mostly play my Switch in docked mode with an mClassic, so the forced 720p doesn't typically detract from the experience.
However, many 3rd party titles on the Switch are just actively bad ports. Omensight, for example, which is an otherwise good game has the most atrocious port I've ever seen on a console. I would agree with you that the thread parent is off-the-mark in saying that Valve will do worse here -- PC settings are notoriously better than what you get from traditional consoles since you can actively choose to optimize them to your environment, instead of hoping some developer took the time to even try.
> There's also the fact that this can't compete with the Switch due to the simple fact that games are optimized to run at a stable framerate by the developers or subcontracted companies for the Switch
I have a pretty extensive Switch library and can definitely say that performance of ports is really hit or miss.
This is also missing that PC games are already designed with a broad range of hardware in mind and nearly every game for PC has extensive settings to control graphical quality vs performance.
Sure, maybe a device like this might have performance issues but I don't think the Switch completely trumps this in terms delivering playable experiences.
Switch is infamous for adding lots of input lag to its PC ports (like hollow knight). Not to mention the abysmal online experience. The steam deck looks like it will destroy it for any third party title.
This sounds like a tv issue rather than a switch issue. Monitor != tv. Having played hollow knight on both PC and switch, I can say that I haven't felt any noticeable difference. In general one should expect between 30-100 ms input lag, depending on the tv model. Even with gaming mode enabled, some tv models are simply terrible for gaming.
Playing in handheld mode, there should be no input lag at all.
It's been measured around 7 frames of lag, so 120ms [0]. PC in comparison is around 2-3 frames of input lag. That thread is pretty old though so may be out of date now.
Two gripes: Wifi 6e should be included for a new device that's launching for gaming this holiday.
OFDMA really has the potential to decrease the lag of cloud gaming when playing wirelessly.
2 why would you just let the microsd card dangle in the breeze like that?!? It's a necessity at the storage sizes provided and ruining that slot will make the whole device a big hassle to use.
Valve is the antithesis of Apple. Where Apple says it must be great, even if it can’t do everything, Valve says it must do everything, even if it’s not great.
I see the same things that I didn’t like about the Steam controller here. Cramped layout, tiny buttons, and no clear goal of what it wants to be except “everything”. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
Although this is a pretty niche case - this might be a godsend to those who have too many little indie games piled up in their library and actually want to finish some of those in commute.
The hardware doesn't seem to be apt for the latest AAA games, but that's maybe fine - the majority of Steam games aren't really that taxing in terms of hardware.
I try Proton a few times a year and the experience is almost always disappointing; I'm not even a hardcore gamer, so mostly playing 2-3 year old games which I'd expect good experience with.
However, if they ramp up investment and actually make Proton viable for the majority of titles, this is very bad news for Microsoft / Windows.
While we're reporting our experience, I'll say that my experience with Proton has been highly mixed. By which I mean I have seen several games work pretty much flawlessly, and several that were pretty much totally busted, and many in between. I think there are also quite a lot of games that benefit from customising the Proton setup instead of just using the default configuration (there are often guides online for particular games, advising what version with what tweaks will make things work), but tbh I rarely have the motivation to go down that route. I usually check protondb before buying things.
For what it's worth, I no longer have a Windows install. If a game doesn't have a Linux version and doesn't work on Wine/Proton, I just live without that game.
I will say that I give Valve major kudos for their work on Proton even with its limitations. It's one of the primary reasons that I continue to use Steam and haven't done much with GOG or other sources (despite GOG's admirable stance on DRM)
Since they are targeting a single hardware platform with little difference in configuration, I feel proton will run much more smoothly on the Steam Deck. They will be able to tie the software with the hardware more closely for better compatibility.
IIRC most problems with proton arise due to various hardware issues or incompatibilities.
Yeah this will be an interesting test. They're eliminating all of the variables but one (which game is running). No more "works on my machine" protondb reports! It either works on Steam Deck or it doesn't. Excited to see what they can do with that power.
Did not see that coming! I’ve been saying for a while that the nintendo switch is one of the best idea of the decade and the poor quality leaves a lot of room for competition. My first guess at a successful competitor would have been Apple, who I think has a lot to win in entering the market with a switch-like console.
All models do have a high-speed microSD slot similar to the Switch, so you could offload less intense games there. But yeah, I think most will go for the mid tier model. 64GB is low.
But to each his/her own. For some that may be completely sufficient if they’re not playing AAA games.
I just hit the site on my desktop. Like the steam controller before, it's got a lot of back buttons that you can likely remap (R1 to R4 and L1 to L4). So yes, the front buttons are backups.
Judging by the image in the "Speeds and feeds" section, there are only four shoulder buttons. Also, looking more closely at the placement, it looks like they're putting more emphasis on touchpads over the joysticks, and certainly over the D-pad, much like the Steam Controller.
7", bigger resolution would be useless, and a waste of ressources tbh, it's a portable console, i'd rather have better FPS and better battery life than higher resolution with lower FPS
It does have a bigger resolution when connected to an external display, 800p is only for the internal one. Tech specs say "up to 8K @60Hz or 4K @120Hz" for USB-C display.
Maybe the 800p thing only refers to the console's display, as it's in the "Display" section, and it could output more resolution when plugged to an external display?
If it can't do at least 1080p on a bigger screen, it would be a deal breaker for me, to be honest. I'm considering reserving one but it would see plenty of big screen use.
Looks more like the size of an 11" tablet to me, but with a smaller screen. The physical interface uses most of that real estate - which is good, because otherwise a tablet would be a superior device.
The display specs seem very mediocre:
Resolution: 1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio)
Type: Optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability
Display size: 7" diagonal
Brightness: 400 nits typical
Refresh rate: 60Hz
I feel like they dropped the ball on d
Integrated graphics wont let you go higher with resolution. The big question is if the display supports variable refresh - by guess is not, and This is the big ball drop.
As a long-time user of Big Picture Mode, I am pretty skeptical how happy I would be long term with one of these. When it comes to things like basic controller support or options for unusual resolutions, it's still the wild west in the Steam library.
Agreed, support is very much not standardized across games. If this thing takes off then I'm sure the story will be different in a few years, but the early adopters will surely face some headache in games that aren't "officially supported".
Sure when you're talking about older games. But for newer games I'd say support for XInput is pretty consistent, and resolution support is usually OK too.
There's enough demand for a more powerful handheld gaming device. Nintendo continues to let down their most avid and vocal fanbase by not producing a "Pro" model of the Switch that can run AAA classics. I think this will do really well.
How open is this platform to custom peripherals (wifi/bluetooth) ones? I've always wanted a nice controller for robotics projects with a touchscreen. Right now it seems like most hobby projects use a laptop and ps4/xbox controller.
Just wondering, it notes that the base model has 64GB and it has an SD card slot. 64GB isn't enough space to play most modern AAA games. Do SD card really have the bandwidth to play AAA games or Will the memory be upgradable post purchase?
No, given the design of SteamOS there's nothing stopping you from running linux native games on the device outside of steam or running windows native games on it using the proton bundled with steam.
Probably not. You can load anything through the SD card slot. Just create software and load it through there or the many USB ports it has! They are saying you can even overwrite the OS so they are not restricting you.
Due to Linux being the host (and Proton being heavily used), I wonder what this will mean for Denuvo enabled games. Could it lead to publishers stopping to use it?
I also wonder if this device will lead to more games targeting Linux as a first class platform.
Did anyone find anywhere what the compatibility of all/most games would be with SteamOS? I know Proton has come a long way but doesn't have complete coverage of the Steam library: is SteamOS improving on that?
I wonder if one could run a custom Linux distro on it? It looks like a sweet device, but I'm not enough of a gamer to spend that kind of money on a device I can only play games on.
My first reaction/two cents is that while this seems really cool, PC games are mostly set apart from console games in that they’re often designed with keyboards in mind, as part of the core experience (similar to how motion controls were core to the Wii).
PC games that don’t need a keyboard/aren’t designed with a keyboard as a core input are already available on most consoles (e.g. many Steam games with controller support are already on the Switch).
Not saying this won’t work out — I think it will likely do fine.
But I don’t think this was meant for the more hardcore PC gamer, and a lot of controller-only gamers are likely fine with consoles (and for their portable fix, the Switch). So there’s a pretty niche set of gamers this will attract.
I can't reserve. For whatever reason, Steam won't accept my payment. I switched to Paypal, and now it says I've been trying a lot of purchases, and I need to wait a while. :-(
I either get a message that there was an error initializing or processing the transaction, or I get an error saying that I've been trying too many purchases in the last few hours. I give up. :-(
How is this going to be able to play AAA games? It's going to need to emulate x86, as well as add the WINE layer for compatibility. I can't imagine this being able to keep up.
Valve has spent the past 5 years optimizing Wine (and the technologies behind it, like DXVK) to be perfect. The performance drop is seriously quite negligible in most titles[0], and considering how powerful their GPU is... I have high hopes for this little machine.
And cost five times as much, wouldn't run a customisable OS, hardware couldn't be upgraded, no ports unless you bought a two extra dongles and included a free game from U2.
I hope it has better latency than the Nintendo Switch - if you build your own hardware with display included, why not make it fast!? Why does it need to have a 20+ ms response time!?
Happy to see KDE Plasma is default. I think KDE should be more adopted than now (rather than GNOME). But a bit weird decision since GNOME3 is more touch friendly than KDE Plasma.
Deck vs OLED Switch: 40Whr vs 16Whr (3.7V * 4.310Ah) battery, to give similar 2-8hr vs 4.5-9hr, with 1.6TF vs 1TF GPU, weighing 669g vs 398g. Batteries weigh a lot.
Honest question. Is there a gaming platform where I can play only free games? Or atleast where I don't have to put a credit card number before giving it to my kids?
Maybe a mod can correct the title to "Steam Deck". This post made me think Valve had introduced a second product, Steam Desk, in addition to Steam Deck.
The abbreviation for Canadian Dollar is CAD, not CDN. Sometimes C$ or CA$.
I checked Valve's website for an email address to let them know but it seems they have scrubbed it quite deliberately. This is not a surprise, it's something we see all the time with scale: if a 100 person company can have 100 million customers, they will happily do so and gladly take their money, but never scale up enough people to deal with this extreme staff:customer ratio. Google, FB, etc., we know they all have terrible customer service and that this is the reason. Seems with Valve it's the same.
I want to know if I can stream and play on a TV or external monitor. It will double the value of this device if I can also play on a bigger screen at home.
You're not going to do anything to it. Valve will be the ones monitoring the Arch repos and testing it before releasing it to you. Maybe they want to have the option to have the latest updates, if they deem them stable, rather than having to wait.
The screen's as big as the largest model for Nintendo Switch, I think the hardware is fine. The problem is that most PC games are optimized for higher resolution and screen size (especially the 4x or strategy ones), and unlike Nintendo where there is a standard 5.5" ~ 7" size you have to optimize for, the PC developers don't have any top-down pressure to port their game for smaller screens.
Yea, that's a great base to aim for. Lots of great games will look respectable with those specs. I'd have loved a full 1080p screen, but at least its larger than the Switch's 720p.
You can use Steam Link to stream games from your PC to your phone or tablet.
For decent handheld controls, simply pair a PS4 or PS5 controller (or even an Xbox Series X controller) with your phone/tablet over bluetooth.
All you need now is a phone mount for the controller and you are set. For example, google: "PS5 controller phone mount" for a big selection of options available for sale.
The only downside to this type of gaming is the latency. Some people don't mind the latency from streaming games, but it really bothers me.
Given steam PCs can stream between each other, I suspect this would be able to as well. Otherwise there's the nvidia shield portable, though I haven't tried it.
It will allow for only activating the gyro when the stick is touched, which is a great feature for augmenting aim without having the gyro wobbling the view all over the place all the time when not wanted (like when staking out through a window in an FPS).
A device with half the resolution of your phone, not enough storage for a single AAA game, and a maximum of 2 hours battery life. But it's by valve, so hype, apparently.
I can see these being stacked like bricks to make a house when valve has to stop supporting them because it's too expensive. There's a reason an iphone or switch has a sizeable profit margin - you pay that back in RMA, returns, and general support.
Good luck getting a dev kit. I had a relatively successful game/app on the Wii U, wanted to make a sequel, and have been rejected 3 times without reason.
I don’t know if this has changed but the problem with This is the same as the stream controller. Pc game interfaces aren’t designed for controllers and aren’t intuitive. This can be seen if you just compare Minecraft Xbox vs Java and the lack of some little menu optimization really makes Java a pain to run on controller only.
It doesn't have a keyboard and a comfortably-large-enough screen though. You would be better off using a Chromebook with Crostini for less than that price.
For me, the existence of a usable screen and keyboard is far more important than raw specs. (Maybe it's fine if you're the type of developer who always brings your HHKB and secondary portable monitor with you...)
huh? so a gameboy on steroids? that's what gets hackernews excited? at first i thought, finally a competitor to Oculus quest and what do i behold? a little notebook with domain specific keyboard ... come on, give me a break
I'm pretty sure the demand for a mobile computer like steam deck is way higher than any oculus quest competitor. How many of those exist right now that can play any steam game? Zero!
I wonder if they would touch the Linux kernel a bit to improve things on power management. Vanilla Linux doesn't seem to provide good battery life for portable devices (at least, if we look at laptops.)
Given the time, skill, and inclination to tinker, Arch has very good power management. Also considering that Steam is throwing dedicated dev resources at this and it will end up being a very limited array of hardware to need to support, I would expect improvements here.
The Steam Deck seems like a smaller iPad with physical controls. Game makers need just make their stuff work on iPad and then suddenly millions of people won't have to buy a new "small PC" to enjoy their content.
I suppose you're dumb; not because you're functionally illiterate but because it's clear that a laptop is both handheld and portable as much as Steam Deck.
Form factor is completely irrelevant since Steam Deck is advertised as a computer and not a console. Which is how I would use it; plug it into a monitor and use it as a desktop PC with keyboard and mouse. That's why I asked what does it offer that my laptop already doesn't in the context of playing games. If this is hard for you to comprehend then you shouldn't reply with destructive comments. I found a video on YouTube explaining technical specifications and comparing the CPU and GPU to their desktop equivalents, so my initial question has been answered.
The device has a USB-C port so I think it will probably work. People have been successful connecting up their eGPUs to the GPD Win 3 (which is a similar device)
It's using a custom AMD APU, so I estimate it would be probably a bit weaker than Ryzen 7 5700G's integrated GPU (1.6 TFLOPS advertised vs 2.1 TFLOPs for 5700G).
Though the performance may get a lot worse if you're using it on battery power, or the device gets hot enough to get throttled.
I get more of a Sega Nomad vibe from it -- take the games you can play at home with you on the go, and you can even play them on a big TV (or monitor, in this case) when you travel, but the portable experience will have some notable caveats in terms of ergonomics, heat, weight, and battery life.
I ran Steam on Centos. You had to do some conversion to get the Steam app into an RPM format (or use one of the relases that did it for you). I've messed with it on Centos, Ubuntu, and even played with SteamOS.
Last time I did this with Centos 8 and the AMD proprietary drivers, it looked like this
tar -Jxvf amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956-rhel-8.1.tar.xz
cd amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956-rhel-8.1/
./amdgpu-pro-install -y
(reboot)
Mind you, you don't need the AMD propriety drivers. I'm also still trying to figure out what my long term home will be for my workstation once Centos 8 becomes Centos Streams.... so will be seeing if Rocky or one of the others becomes my long term home.
Nope, you can also install any other linux app / game on it. Or even an entirely different OS. SteamOS is arch based, so you can probably just pacman install whatever you please.
Is it actually a PC? Could I just put windows on it?
Also as per installing any other linux stuff, Can u plug a keyboard into it so u can type in terminal? Otherwise how would u install stuff?
Thanks to Valve and Proton/Wine, my games run great on Linux now, in most cases. So, I can say I'm really satisfied. We're certainly miles ahead of, say, 5 years ago.
Just thought I'd mention, that I have not had great results with this. But presumably it'll be a different story when supporting one known specific hardware shared by many Steam users.
I don't disagree, but I think the $399 version might be their undoing. 64GB is about 1 AAA game, and 0 in some cases. So people are going to get this one for their kids for Christmas, the kids are going to say it's shit, and it's going to get a bad reputation, even if the high end models are good.
Maybe they have solutions lined up for the problems that will come with low/slow storage, but we'll see!
The Switch has had the same problem, which causes me to basically never keep AAA games installed for long, but they are still quite successful.
The Switch also tops out at 64GB with the new OLED model, whereas that's the starting point for the Steam Deck. There is also a history of consoles being offered with a wide variety of different storage sizes (Xbox 360), and I don't remember that causing any serious problems for them (if you ignore the humongous size of the Xbox dashboard at the end of its lifetime, which is an avoidable problem).
One caveat, at least for me, is that Switch games tend to be designed around cartridge limits, and the transfer speed there isn't too much faster than the Switch's UHS-I SD card reader (although I can't find any tests or specifications on the cartridge port). PC games nowadays tend to be designed around either a SATA-III SSD or a PCI-E SSD (over NVMe), which will be much, much faster than a UHS-I port, so PC games over an SD card won't be anywhere near as performant as a Switch game.
It will be easy enough to hack it to add your own storage. Probably just a screwdriver is needed and you insert your own NVME drive. Everything is standard hw.
The Valve Steam Deck is pretty exciting and well timed.
The Nintendo Switch it the largest console market > 50% and mobile is the biggest market in gaming. So going with that model but with gaming selection of Steam is a smart timed move.
The size of gaming markets are mobile first as the biggest, then PC, then console in terms of gamers with revenues about split in thirds equally across mobile, PC and console -- including handheld the biggest part[1]. Mobile has a bit more than the others and when handheld it not included in console then it is the top. Mobile has 2.2 billion gamers, PC has 750 million, console has just a bit less than PC around 700 million [1]. Though each stationary console has had less than the last in total players, most players are still growing on mobile and even PC [1]. There are also more game developer on PC by 2 to 1 over other platforms, mobile second then console. Developing for console is costly and time consuming.
Consoles that go handheld are smart, even better if they are more open and allow game studios of all sizes to launch on it, games will be better at the high end, even if there are more bad games.
Since consoles like Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and Nintendo are so locked down and hard to enter for indies/small/medium players, PC going handheld/mobile is going to be great for indies/small/medium game developers extending the PC player base. Mobile opened up stores for everyone in 2008-2012, Steam opened up 2012+ and game markets should be more open, especially console as you want to sell hardware and the more games the better.
The first iteration of the handheld hardware may or may not hit, even the WiiU failed initially, but the beauty of Steam is there are no games you can or can't play on specific consoles. They don't need launch titles. Steam Deck gen 1, 2, 3 will all have the same games. Steam has a competitive advantage here on selection due to their openness.
Consoles and PCs are stationary and that is why mobile does so well, you can play anywhere. Handheld does well as well because you can take it with you and can game at a desk or on the couch or at work. Game streaming changes this a bit allowing you to game on your devices on the go, but having a beefier device that can play all types of games is surely going to have at least some market. Lots of times I am working on my PC and shutting all down to game seems too tasking but you could play Steam games on the Deck while keeping work open or allow gaming to fit in your day more when you aren't at your PC.
Very, very excited for the larger potential market for PC games on a handheld console! This massively helps indie/small/medium players get more gamers and handheld is a unique new market for PC games.
I don't think it's currently possible for any cloud service to make this obsolete, at least in the ways that I'd want to use a portable gaming device. Which is to say, mostly in transit, which tends to have spotty (at best) internet accessibility. (In the air on an airplane, between stops on the subway, ...)
and? Consider this is HN, which is largely populated by people with the disposable income that this doesn't much matter.
> with the attractiveness and weight of the Sega Nomad
... which competed with the Gameboy
> Complimented by the extensive Linux gaming library.
First, this is much larger than you might expect.
Second, it's only limited _on the device_. I see this being used as a thin client into a desktop gaming PC that you already own, which presumably will be running Windows.
> Reduce your steam tax for the companies that provide a native linux build
The idea that this would move the needle seems like wishcasting. Ten percent less of 0.89% of the Steam hardware survey is a couch-cushions rounding error. Meanwhile, Proton is a really good way to get hold of that rounding error as-is and works with surprisingly few problems across most games I've tried; For the amount of noise that 0.89% of the audience makes, Valve's spent quite a lot of time-and-effort to come up with something that works quite well.
most of the time you have to fiddle with weird settings, portable console appeal more to casual people, majority of them are tech illiterates, if something bug or doesn't work properly and requires tweaks, it'll backfire at both the devs (they bought the game after all), and valve (they bought the console)
if they don't push native builds, it'll flop due to lack of proper NATIVE ecosystem
"daddy, why this game doesn't work, this console sucks"
this only asks for a proper windows based machine, if XBOX releases their XBOX portable, it's game over for valve
> i can't play most AAA titles because of DRMs, yay
That's on the developers and publishers.
> proton is a waste of time
It works well enough for a lot of people.
> most of the time you have to fiddle with weird settings, portable console appeal more to casual people, majority of them are tech illiterates, if something bug or doesn't work properly and requires tweaks, it'll backfire at both the devs (they bought the game after all), and valve (they bought the console)
That sounds like PC gaming in general. If you're talking about Proton messing up, there's lots of warnings that things might not work right.
> if they don't push native builds, it'll flop due to lack of proper NATIVE ecosystem
Why on earth would you think trying to incentivise developers to release native Linux builds would be a more worthwhile investment than simply improving Proton? Linux desktop probably occupies about 2% of the steam market and that's being generous and assuming that their actual steam hardware surveys are underreporting adoption.
Even assuming wild success on this products part, that would only drive that number up a few percent since I don't see production for these running particularly high.
It might make more sense to encourage developers to provide proton support for anti cheat (like what Valve are actually doing leading up to this device's launch) rather than asking AAA developers to invest additional time on support that is arguably a waste of resources and certainly something of low priority.
Aside from that, my own experiences with Proton are far more positive than yours. I've hardly ever had to tweak things for it to work. Occasionally, I need to use an older proton version for a game but that's hardly a chore.
will they hook and reimplement EVERY WINDOWS APIs?, what about Windows 11? what about DX 12 and DX 12.1?
Oh, now imagine that windows 11 now requires X security features that are impossible to emulate with proton, how will that work?
native vs non-native
that's the difference
i'm not against Proton, i think it is a very nice idea to SUPPLEMENT my library
nothing can beat native games, built for the device and its constrains
and and an other WORSE thing
CONTROLLER SUPPORT in steam
valve never encouraged people to support controllers, WORSE, 99% of games expect you to use XBOX controller, as a result XBOX controller are displayed even if you use a DUALSHOCK one
valve could have provided APIs so they can feed games with proper icons etc etc, but nothing
so many wrong things, including the focus on proton as main selling point
that's part of the reason why you'll see majority of people install Windows instead, and "the year of linux on the desktop" will yet again be killed due to poor decisions
i'm kind of tired of trying to provide arguments, i reply to that kind of comment on a daily basis, it's painful to see linux people stuck with their WINE, it's WRONG, it's BAD, it's COUNTER PRODUCTIVE
microsoft helped a lot to drive linux adoption up with their crappy Vista/Win8/10 releases, but yeah, let's focus on emulating a bloated OS instead!
you don't come up with such a device over night, they had years to think about that, they focused on emulation
we will see who was right in the end, i think i am
valve never encouraged people to support controllers, WORSE, 99% of games expect you to use XBOX controller, as a result XBOX controller are displayed even if you use a DUALSHOCK one
valve could have provided APIs so they can feed games with proper icons etc etc, but nothin"
Out of all of your rather dubious points against Valve's plans, this is by far the most absurd. Have you heard of a little thing called Steam Input? Valve in fact have provided an API that does everything you've listed including feeding the "proper icons". It's up to the developers to use it. That would not change even if the game was 100% native because xinput is still the industry standard. Controller support on Steam is second to none.
"you don't come up with such a device over night, they had years to think about that, they focused on emulation
we will see who was right in the end, i think i am"
No, I think it's safe to conclude that you are wrong even from this date. You're asking Valve to compete with a platform that has all the games available. You're also assuming that native is always better than non-native but as I've already seen, a crappy native port is often beaten in both performance and feature set by Proton. Instead of asking developers to gamble away valuable time on the OS of a device that could be a flop, it makes a lot more sense to release the device with the games currently available in the market in mind and then give developers an incentive to add special support for a device that is actually out in the wild in the hands of paying customers.
You also really do not need to implement every Windows API, you only need to translate draw calls to Vulkan and then a small subset of API's that actually relate to games such as sound. Your example doesn't make a lot of sense, the only way a security API would matter for Proton is if the game is from the Windows store but most people do not in fact use the Windows Store even on Windows so games tend to get released on Steam as well - including even many Microsoft titles.
At the end of the day though, Valve's approach has made it so that I already do not miss Windows for gaming even with the current non-ideal situation with anti-cheat. If they adopted your approach, we would have likely had a small increase in the number of native games but most of the industry would have probably ignored such a call. It would also be very unlikely to magically make desktop Linux a real competitor. I think we need to stop chasing that dream because frankly, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The only way you would be able to compete with Windows and Mac is by having a similar marketing and UX budget and by removing or downplaying many of the attributes of desktop Linux that likely drew us towards it in the first place - package management, hyper-extensibility, the terminal, GPL licensing, etc.
I do not think it's worth it frankly. There is nothing wrong with being "niche".
It looks like it is $399 USD, so the price point may mostly be a conversion thing.
Edit: Just looked up the conversion rate, right now 399 USD is 288 GBP? Weird. The mid tier is 529 USD, so something like 382 GBP. Upper tier is 649 USD, or 468 GBP.
$399US is ~338€ though. Even adding in 19% VAT we'd come out at a nice round 400€, so I don't really understand the 419€, which is just a weird number from a marketing perspective as well.
That we're getting overcharged on this side of the Atlantic isn't new though, but happens with basically everything.
With 24-27% VAT in use in some countries it comes to exactly 419€, which might explain the price. As they really don't charge different price per country in Europe.
What os does it run? And the more important follow up: what games can it therefore run?
I _assume_ it's linux, but that must limit the games to protondb and linux compatible games which, speaking from a lot of experience, misses quite a few.
Seriously who what this? For those who can spend fortune for the PC games, they have better options. Those who can't spend that much, Nintendo switch is probably better for the gaming.
Probably someone like me. I have a pretty crappy PC for gaming, but I have 100s of games via Humble Bundle I've bought over the years. I already have and enjoy my Switch, but having another option (plus all the games I have already) would be nice.
I really wonder what the point of this is. Mobile gaming is a meme at this point. It's a thing but phones and tables have it well catered too. We don't need another mobile gaming thing that will surely be in the bargain bin in as couple years.
I would not classify the Switch as portable gaming. It definitely acts more like a console.
Of course this is ultimately a definitional issue, but there is IMHO clearly a difference. I think rather than "mobile" the distinction might be "touchscreen only" gaming; contra some of the wild predictions I recall on HN about a decade ago, "touchscreen only" has failed to displace all other input mechanisms, because it's honestly not all that good. It works, and can be better than nothing, but I think it's hard for touchscreen to ever attain that transparent "flow" state where controls just disappear, and is table stakes for being a 'core gaming' platform.
So, your kids playing a couple of games proves that touchscreen gaming has in fact displaced all conventional controls?
Someone better go tell the rest of the game industry they're really misallocating their resources.
Dunno about Octopath Traveller, but I have no idea why your kids are playing Captain Toad without the controller, unless you just don't trust them with the controller or something. Camera controls are clearly better with the controllers. Deemo or something like that would be a better example, but it's also clearly an exception.
There are numbers from Nintendo on the breakdown between mobile and dock usage, and they indicate a larger percentage of users play undocked vs docked.
I saw the same numbers. They are from 2017 just months after it was released, back before many Nintendo exclusives had been released and even these numbers show 70% of users spend significant amount of time docked.
The switch sells well because its where you have to go to play Nintendo games, but you just go on about sales figures. If it had no exclusives, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
I own a switch. I have never played it in mobile configuration in the years I have owned it, neither do any people that I know that have it, neither do my nieces or nephews. I would trade switch mobile capability for 4k in a second.
The reason why the switch is popular is the same reason why a long line of absolutely craptastic Nintendo hardware is popular: exclusive Nintendo software, which this platform will obviously not have.
I agree but mostly I think it’s because most games need a special GUI to use a controller. I would buy it if playing factorio and rim world felt natural and intuitive on a mobile platform but it’s not.
> You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever.
But you can run emulators on all sorts of things. Hell, I first played through BoTW on a WiiU emulator on my PC. I still ended up buying a Switch and one of the first things I did with it was play BoTW again.
I think they're completely different audiences. Nintendo games aren't, and never were about cutting edge graphics or the latest tripple A games. They were always about family/kids oriented more casual games. Which is not to disparage them in any way. I like playing some nintendo games every now and then.
But my mom bought a Wii back in the days. For herself. My mom doesn't usually play video games. And she is most certainly not at all interested in playing Doom or Hades (just because they're shown prominently on the webpage). But she liked Wii Fit and bought a Wii.
I honstly think the subset of people who would buy a Steam Deck to avoid buying a switch is so small, it would not put a significant dent in nintendo's bottom line.
Agreed that they're different audiences. The deck is for people with existing steam libraries who don't feel like sitting down at a PC to play games.
The switch is for everyone else - way cheaper, unique games you won't find on a PC, etc. Plus, co-op. I recently spent 6+ hours at my friends house playing Super Mario 3D World Deluxe. They got one joycon, I got the other. In my college dorm, we have a switch dock attached to a monitor in the dorm lounge. Split the joycons, and 4 people can play smash or mario kart. I don't see the deck supporting these use cases.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that. The last time I played anything on Nintendo hardware was Mario Kart on a Nintendo64 (which was awesome!), so I missed quite a bit of evolution there.
Valve could try to create games that are more appealing to the typical Nintendo enthusiast, but I suspect the respective cultures are too different.
Nintendo has the best IP as a whole in the industry. Nobody has what they have. They also aren’t going down the crazy AAA shooters who will milk every skin or map pack penny from their users.
I doubt it. Nintendo hasn't dominated in hardware specs for several generations. They survive by primarily being developers of great games that just happen to only be available on their whatever-hardware-we-could-get-for-$250 platform.
IMO Sega’s problem was started by having a confusing lineup of too many products. Then they fumbled the US Saturn launch and faced stiffer competition than before. Then the Dreamcast was a victim of the PS2 _also_ being a DVD player, which made it a much more compelling option in its early days.
In this case, Nintendo has a large and dedicated fanbase, hardware that they (IIRC) sell at a profit, and a truly enormous warchest. They’ll be fine.
No way. Nintendo's success isn't about the hardware specs, and characterizing the Switch as a "portable console" doesn't capture it well. It has first-class support for traditional "couch gaming".
The Steam Deck will be a great complement to traditional PCs for people who are already bought into that ecosystem. For people who aren't, the console offerings from Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft are similarly priced and have obvious advantages.
Switch "AAA" titles on cartridge weigh in about 10-15GB, and a LOT of the indie games(which apparently sell the best on Switch in a lot of cases, TMYK) are far smaller.
The switch internal storage is only moderately faster than loading off of cartridge or micro SD, which are both very close in read speed; ~100MB/s.
Taken holistically the Switch storage limitations mean games on the platform are basically targeting the micro SD specs.
The Steam deck's primary value proposition is playing your existing Steam(PC) library on a handheld. Games on PC have been targeting SSD speeds for a long time now. People will be used to SATA SSD or m.2 NVMe speeds. Customers buying the base model are NOT going to have a great experience with the terrible eMMC storage. Customers trying to run modern games off 120-160MB/s micro SD are NOT going to have a great experience either. Selling a PC gaming machine in 2021 with 2008 storage speeds is a recipe for disappointment.
Source? The console market (~45 billion) is larger than the PC market (~37 billion) [0], but I wouldn’t describe PC as ‘fairly small’. Maybe you have different data though?
The Switch has a hige game library with some interesting exclusive title. This machine only has a subset of compatible PC games, and the subset the make sense to be played on that hardware (I sure won't play Age on that).
Valve has a pretty bad track record with hardware, do they not? I'm not very aware of this industry, but the vague impress I have is that they've tried this a couple of different ways and it hasn't gone well for them. I'm curious why they would make this play again.
I have a Valve Index VR headset. It was clearly the best on the market when I got it last year. The controllers and headset tracking are great and the video quality was a notch above the competition (though recent newer headsets have closed the gap). However it did have some hardware issues such as crackling audio in one of the speakers, so I ended up removing the headset speakers and wearing my own headphones. Anyway, overall I'm satisfied.
They have a great track record with hardware. They have a poor track record of hardware adoption.
I have the Steam Controller: it's fantastic, so versatile, and everything it claimed it would be. I have the Steam Link: works great, brings my desktop to any TV in the house. I haven't used their VR equipment but from those that have, seems like basically the reason get Oculus instead of Valve is because of Oculus exclusives.
I've been dying for this form-factor for years, since long before the Switch came out. Valve has been losing tons of money from me in the form of purchases, because games in their library haven't been in the right form factor, so I've bought them for mobile and for Switch, when really I'd rather have bought them in Steam with a mobile-play option.
I've explored the mobile-phone-with-controllers-streaming-from-a-desktop option, and it's just not what I'm looking for. I've been looking for a feasible option in this space since the Razer Edge came out in 2013, and there just hasn't been a good one...not with phones-with-controllers-attached (have to stream), not with mini-laptops (bad ergonomics and performance), etc. I've looked into a number of homebrew efforts to try and get Steam games onto my Switch (streamed or otherwise) but it's just not worth the commitment of time and effort when I could spend the same $10 for that indie game I want on Switch instead of on Steam.
I reluctantly got a Switch two years ago. I was reluctant because although I've been wanting this form factor for years, I also wanted a device that was compatible with my Steam library. Since buying the Switch, I've only bought Switch games (and not a single Steam game) mostly because being able to play on that form-factor is worth the price-premium to me.
It's Valve's excellent record of delivery on hardware that makes this a pre-order for me. Super excited about this.
Steam link and the controllers were great. Too bad they dropped support for them so quickly. Went looking to replace one that finally broke down and found you couldn't buy them anymore.
The Valve Index is one of, if not the best, VR headsets on the market. Quest 2 is a very close competitor and arguably better when you consider price + wireless ability. But the Index is no slouch.
Happy index/steam controller customer here, had to RMA one of the index controllers for a weird resetting issue but they handled that really well so I feel I’ve got my money’s worth. I may be biased though because valve is actually the company I have been a customer of the longest in my life
Valve's arguably biggest most obvious failure are the Steam Machines [0], but that doesn't feel like a track record failure in the way that, say, a PS Vita was. Weren't Steam Machines basically just branded (and reasonably priced) PCs pre-loaded with SteamOS/Linux? Not even the Steam Controller feels proprietary. I mean, in the sense that I can still use it handily on macOS despite its ending production 2 years ago.
The Steam Link was awesome. Their VR headsets are the industry standard. The controller was niche but I heard good things. Steamboxes weren't really a hit, but I don't consider them a failure either (users still got fully functional gaming rigs).
Whoever named this an idiot, my first thought was reading “Stream Deck” and I thought it was streaming device. Valve makes good hardware but their marketing is terrible leading to abandoned hardware that enthusiasts rave about. The marketing page is white... it is Valve... why is the marketing site white?!?!
I guess that would be a reasonable complaint if it wasn't so that Steam is already Valve's main product, and that this device is intended for playing games from Steam!
This seems more like an opportunistic rant about Valve's marketing than a sincere response to the particular situation. The name makes perfect sense given its a slab that plays steam games and if you'd pay attention to the website beyond the background colour (???), you may notice how it has several pictures, animations and videos illustrating the product in far more detail and clarity than many console launches. It worked for me anyway because I studied the site cover to cover so to speak.
Granted, I agree that Valve did a genuinely poor job with the Steam Controller and Steam machines but in the former case, it was because even Valve themselves didn't quite understand what they had just made and in the latter, things were complicated by having to deal with multiple third parties.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=5
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=6