- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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I’m honestly surprised Valve hasn’t made an open source de-Valved SteamOS similar to what Google does with Chromium for these other devices. Valve likely isn’t making much from hardware sales alone, with most of the value for them coming from the Steam store being a mobile gaming storefront as well as moving users away from Windows where Microsoft is looking to compete with them. Getting competitors to run Linux distros with a user interface designed for mobile consoles would boost the amount of Linux gamers which would make Valve less dependent on their competitor Microsoft, make developers more keen to support Linux, and spurn further development for Linux gaming tools. These other manufacturers will without a doubt support Steam as a storefront since Steam is such a dominant force in the PC gaming market so users of these other devices would still be in Valve’s ecosystem
Isn’t that just… Arch
They did do this with the first version of SteamOS they made when they where trying to get non portable game consoles off the ground.
I’ve heard that this is what is causing SteamOS 3.5 to take so long.
That’s a good plan, it worked for Android
Yeah, reminds me of the original Gameboy. Weak hardware, terrible screen, great battery life, awesome first-party support, stupidly robust. Sold a hundred million or so. Up against the Game Gear and Atari Lynx, which although basically miniature consoles, had an unquenchable hunger for batteries and crap games. Complete turkeys. All of Nintendo’s other, very successful, handhelds continue the same idea; yes, a Switch is really underpowered compared to the newest Playstation, but that’s not it’s niche.
Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?
You could have had a miniaturised nuclear reactor and I still don’t think it would have kept up with the game gears appetite 😁 great little device but missed the mark on intended use.
Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?
This is one area where the Steam Deck may have got it wrong. The Switch has games made specifically for its hardware, so to a certain extent, the specs don’t matter. The Steam Deck though has already been reported to struggle with some games, even with the lowered resolution.
For a console that’s only about 18 months old, that’s a bit disappointing. I obviously wouldn’t expect it to be able to play new AAA games forever, but I would have thought that it would have taken a bit longer before it started to struggle.
There are games that aren’t appropriate for the hardware, 18 months old or not.
Some people struggle to grasp that.
That’s my point. This is a quote from the Steam Deck website:
We partnered with AMD to create Steam Deck’s custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming. It is a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 powerhouse, delivering more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.
If I read that and bought a Steam Deck, then found out that it can’t run a new release smoothly, I wouldn’t be very happy.
It’s all well and good having a compatibility list for released games, but their marketing makes it sound like it can play anything.
A fair point.
Not moving the goalposts but steam offers the playability index. So to know “which” AAA games at “what” performance is really varied.
I think it is a bunch of media speak that they wrote there and is a poor representation of what the hardware can honestly do.
As always, it pays to research purchases thoroughly.
I have both the Deck and the ROG Ally. The Deck feels like a complete product and is great to use. The Ally is impressive when pushing over 100fps on relatively demanding games, but the overall user experience is garbage. Windows is a terrible platform for a handheld. I dual boot it with Arch now and can run gamescope session for the Deck experience, but I just recently figured out how to use ryzenadj for TDP control so I could see anything near full performance. The buttons don’t work for navigating the Steam UI when in game. Audio requires a UEFI override. It’s still a better experience than Windows but nothing compared to the “it just works” console style Deck experience. The Deck hardware is more ergonomic and has better designed controls too. Trackpads are incredibly overlooked.
It’s rather interesting to me how nobody puts any value on the Deck trackpads in comparisons like these, and yet they are basically essential if you want the device to be able to play anything but console-optimized games / games that are built for gamepads first.
Playing something like Skyrim on one of the alternative portables can certainly be done, but being able to comfortably play games like Against the Storm, Anno, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Homeworld, Northgard, OpenTTD, Stellaris, etc is where the Deck really shines and where all the “alternatives” fall completely flat.
Edit: Not to mention that trying to run Windows without any kind of direct mouse input is really painful, and all the “alternatives” keep doing exactly that.
I don’t care that much gameplay wise. I don’t play much without a controller.
Windows even with the trackpad is brutal, though. Without? Oof.
It’s baffling especially because all of the other handhelds ship with a desktop operating system by default.
Yeah, it’s weird they all ship with windows instead of SteamOS. It’s not like Valve would’ve said no to anyone trying to use it, they’ve been trying to find partners for ages.
Yeah but they’re already spending so much on hardware just to edge the Deck on performance alone. They’re ignoring all the other stuff that makes the Deck great which is decent performance but fantastic flexibility.
Honestly no idea why Valve isn’t partnering with these companies or why these companies (presumably) aren’t reaching out to Valve.
They work together. Asus and Lenovo sell hardware. Steam maintains software and sells games. Consumers get a sick handheld. Everyone wins.
Maybe Valve just wants to have a limited hardware target for game devs.
Something similar occurred with the Steam Controller, which I loved. I’d show it to people, and they’d be like “OnLy OnE aNaLoG sTiCk, WhAt ThE hEcK?” and completely miss the point of the trackpads.
I can play strategy games with a freaking controller from the couch. That was always the appeal. You aren’t gonna be able to do that with a DualSense.
Also, the virtual trackball haptic on the Deck was developed for the Steam Controller. It’s surprisingly intuitive feeling.
I’ve got a Steam Controller as well, was absolutely amazing sitting and playing Civ in my couch when I got it.
I’m hoping that Valve will release an updated version at some point, because there’s still not a single competing product available.
I’ve literally never used the trackpads outside the desktop interface.
I know there are cool custom ways to implement but I’m not a software developer.
So, modest but capable hardware, and accessible pricing, enabled by scale and software sales. The modern handheld market might have had its roots in the revival of pocket PCs, but it’s by far at its strongest when it’s most console-like.
This is “the point” from the article, which is that we expect a portable handheld to provide an experience like a console portable handheld would, rather than a PC in a small form factor. My two cents is that I’ve found the Steam Deck’s “sleep” function to be very much like a console’s, and it’s not something that Windows does very well.
Yup. It works well enough if you know your gonna jump right back in, but god forbid you wait a couple hours it’ll be dead. I’ve just started to turn the whole thing off every time now. I wish there was a hibernation option.
You may want to look into that… mine sleeps for a day or two at least typically.
They already took so much care to handle the suspend feature (they even support save syncing mid-game!). Solving the point you mentioned is the one thing that, in my view, would make it perfect.
The thing is that it’s technically possible to handle this use case… they could have programmed it so it goes into hibernation after X hours of being asleep (which could have been done by setting a wake up timer before the sleep state, the Linux kernel already allows it).
I wish some of the unofficial extensions implemented something like this, but I bet it’s not so simple to hook into the pre-sleeping / post-sleeping codepath without messing up too much with the system… plus the risk of potentially causing the device to enter some inescapable loop.
I mean yeah, they just jumped in with random devices, tried slapping more powerful hardware in and windows. They want that quick buck off the back of the Steam Deck success.
For some people yeah. I just want a portable Windows PC that I can game with so something like the Ally is perfect for me. I also play a lot of games on Game Pass.
