This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.

It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.

When your competition is EA... it's not hard.

Does it really matter if they take these consumer friendly actions because they know it will get them good press and dedicated consumers? The end result is the same.

Like you touched on, for whatever reason, most large enough companies haven't seemed to figure out this obvious truth. I tend to believe it's because it's harder than it looks, once a company reaches a certain size. Now sure, they are by no means perfect, but I'd like to at least give them credit for being far better than any of the competition, no matter the rational behind it.

You can install your own store or games on the devices if you want to without Steam. You could also take their work and build a custom distro or even a device without any trace of Steam whatsover.

They did the thing. Let’s judge their actions (which they have plenty of good and bad)

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.

They're stuck in the building model of making semi-custom SoCs for enormous corporations and releasing/developing drivers for them in extreme NDA environments.

It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.

Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.

I don't know, Turnip's a cute name and I wouldn't think twice before buying a product which is branded that way (as long as the actual product is cool of course!).

Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly.

Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak throughput for workloads designed for Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

I agree they won’t do a Steam Deck 2 that’s ARM. Maybe in the future?

BUT, what about a “Steam Deck Mini”? Something at/above the current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?

Yeah you’re not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny’s Rent Is Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your big desktop if you have one.

I’m not saying they will, but I could see it as a possibility.

Apple not sharing their chips extends to Apple keeping their grip on the higher density nodes.

I wonder if it's still the case, but for a while Apple was buying the totality of TSMC's capacity for 3nm nodes, leaving the rest of the world with only 4nm+ chips to grab.

Do you mean there's no ARM chips that they can buy? Surely the ARM chips in Apple's devices are powerful enough aren't they?

Yeah, there's a real gap in the market for a relatively compact handheld which can play low-spec PC games. The AMD-based handheld PCs available today are all pretty chunky.

Just my thinking, they'll release a "Steam Deck Mini" that's more in line with other current ARM based gaming handhelds like the Ayn Odin.

If they did an AMD CPU using the same TSMC node that Apple uses for Arm CPUs it wouldn't be that much less power efficient and have much great compatibility.

They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead

An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special and just a combo of GPU and CPU

Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.

And in fact, are able to play Windows games already with Winlator or GameHub. Performance is getting impressive as well, with newer chips like the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU solution since then.

I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).

Yes! The Deck is the closest I've gotten to getting into gaming. I especially loved the "press the power button and your game is immediately right there" aspect of it.

I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.

It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact that it's properly an open platform is amazing.

This is my experience. I played some Xbox here and there and every once in a while fell down the Factorio hole but I wasn’t gaming a ton. I got the steam deck somewhat cause it was cool, and somewhat as retail therapy but now I play it almost every night. I love playing smaller indie games on it, it’s a great device. Compare that to my Switch 2 and I’ve played it about 1/100th of the time I’ve played on the Deck. The Switch 2 is nice and all, just the Deck is way more flexible.

Replaying my favorite GBA/DS/etc games again on the Deck was so much fun. Huge screen for my (older) eyes, ability to speed up/rewind/save slots, and other tweaks if I wanted were all a blast. I played back through some of my favorites as a kid and enjoyment and nostalgia were both off the charts.

I just wish my hands wouldn't cramp on hand-held devices. I've never been able to use handhelds for longer than thirty minutes.

Goes for console controllers too.

> They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear.

I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.

It's a somewhat justified fear - the box screams 'home server' to me. Then again a Mac Mini is just $600

> Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)

They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.

I do buy quite a few games, which usually end up unplayed. A few times I do binge one, so it's generally worth it for me. I'd like the Steam Machine for playing games in my living room with friends etc, even though it might end up unused, but the OSS support really swings the scale towards "take my money".

But maybe I'll use them!

Steam gift cards

I game exclusively on my Linux desktop (for the few games I play). Everything works flawlessly with Proton.

Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said it.

If you think publicly-held companies are bad, wait until you see what private equity gets up to.

For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.

It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.

Steam Deck is not free software, is it?

The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)

[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS

What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.

You can ship DRM-free games on it just fine. It's up to the dev/publisher.

Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through Steam - you can add and launch third party executables through the Steam client.

Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather light curation of their own store.

Steam DRM is entirely optional. Blame the publishers for DRM.