Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!
It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.
It feels like just yesterday that VR was the big hype tech.
VR is so fucking cool tho
To be 100% honest, I like Bitcoin and LLMs too. Could use some pigouvian taxes though.
BTC is neat and I do have some, but I didn’t get into LLMs, no use case for me at this point. But I think VR is in a completely different bucket. VR was so fucking awesome for my partner and myself to chill out in with our friends in 2020 when we couldn’t go out and see peeps. It’s also easily the best most fun form of exercise.
I’m sure you and your partner can think of a more fun form of exercise. 😉
That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.
Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.
don’t forget google. that applies to all paid apps, in app purchases and donations on the play store, not only for games. google also forbids you from showing any other donation option on your website if you link to it from your app.
Can confirm; my app was removed from the Play Store due to a donation link to my PayPal. Absolutely insane.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.
Fwiw, GOG has no DRM for their titles (its own niche space, not competition). Not sure if they charge 30% too, but even in such case they’re giving you more because of the lack of DRM.
Steam is quite virtuous, they gave us Proton. But is far from being based.
GoG also sold the modern hitman games which have DRM.
There are also many games on Steam that are DRM free, you may need to use the Steam Client to download them (but possibly also Steam CMD) but then you can copy the files off as a backup and run them without Steam
GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.
Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.
“Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn’t make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve’s store, research estimates”
It’s fucking wild. Like, I love Steam, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit just suck less (edit: than other stores do) and charge less (edit: of devs) and you could gobble up a lot of that market share. But none of them do.
Notably Epic charges less than 30% (something like 12% IIRC) to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.
Because Epic doesn’t care about end users and won’t add necessary end user features like reviews.
It’s cool that Epic wants to pay developers more, but the way they disregard the consumer makes the platform non-viable
company: “I want what steam is making and more” shareholders: “brilliant”
“I want what steam is making but I’m not willing to improve service OR charge less!”
Most other competitors charge less than steam, but steam has a clause which prevents devs from putting their games cheaper elsewhere. This is the real big shitty move made by valve, otherwise they do mostly everything right. I hope someone challenges this clause in a court of law someday, it looks very monopolistic to me
Except that is a thing only for selling steam keys outside steam. There are no price parity clauses.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Also here is a gamedev saying that they’ll sell their game for a cheaper price on EGS: https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/
If what you saying was actually the case I am 120% sure Tim Sweeney would be all over it lol.
Lastly, there was ALREADY a case like that (Valve vs. Wolfire). The courts couldn’t find anything regarding Wolfire’s claims and then dismissed the case.
Ho ok, my bad, I completely misunderstood the issue then. It seems reasonable to impose a price equivalence on steam key
No worries! And indeed!
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Word that stands out is comparable. Which provides a lot of flexibility on discounts outside the steam store. And isthereanydeals data that tracks all the prices over the years shows steam keys going on sale for cheaper than the steam store. Steam also takes 0% of Steam keys.
Recent example is ARC Raiders. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
Current best price is 15% off for $34.16 versus $39.99 on Steam. And all time low was $31.92.
I do wonder how many people assume Steam store price is the best price, and end up paying more than they’d have to if they checked isthereanydeals. Since I’ve come across some comments that believed Steam did not allow cheaper prices as though it were fact despite reality not being the case.
Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
that’s a bullshit metric only useful to incite hatred. why the fuck do you want to say that valve is “this many times worse than facebook!”? it is obviously false.
only thing this proves is that they have relatively few employees. which also probably means that most of them do real work instead of being overloaded with managers
The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.
I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.
Their efficiency is largely due to their flat organizing structure. They have no real hierarchy to speak of.
Which is also one of the reasons so few new things get done, and why they (until now) haven’t been able to count to 3.
To get anything done you either have to be able to do it entirely by yourself which is unlikely, or get enough others organized and on board to make it happen.
What? Valve released CS2 like last year? They do stuff all the time. They have like three games they’re actively maintaining while making HL3 and three new pieces of tech? This is a wild, unfounded take and feels ideologically bound.
That was 2023, and one of very few things made not to specifically promote their hardware or as a cheap spinoff of existing IP. And define “actively maintaining”, because general bug fixes for decade old multi-player games and managing item marketplaces doesn’t require much manpower.
Going further back there’s Aperture Desk Job which was a tech demo for the Steam Deck in 2022. Then an extended cut version of Artifact originally meant as a sequel in 2021, which is a Dota 2 card game, but still remains unfinished, so effectively abandoned. Then Half Life: Alyx in 2020 which 90% of gamers can’t play because it’s VR only, and clearly made to further promote their VR hardware. Dota Warlords in 2020 which was originally a community game mode. The original Artifact in 2018, which had abandoned iOS and Android ports. The Lab in 2016 which was made to promote the launch of the HTC Vive. A zombie CS spinoff in 2014, Dota 2 in 2013, CS:Go in 2012, Portal 2 in 2011, and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009.
If you remove the spinoff and niche stuff from the list you get game releases in 2023, 2020 (arguable since it’s VR only and thus inherently niche), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009.
That’s a pretty big gap of not much for the last decade game-wise. Its been previously documented and published that Valve has issues getting games developed because of the flat organization structure. Articles like this.
You‘re getting downvotes for no reason. Also anyone who ever had to contact Steam support felt how criminally understaffed they are so it makes sense they make tons of money per employee I guess.
As if normal for companies to say you know what we are getting enough profits lets not monetize things even more.
They need their products to be as clean as possible to hook people into microtransactions and their proprietary platform. Valve is a for profit company and the ceo owns a fleet of mega yachts
The VR headset is going to be standalone??
That’s pretty nuts right?
even more nuts is that it will support pc games via FEX, an emulation layer that runs x86 windows games on ARM in Linux
In addition to streaming from your battlestation
Any ideas on Linux support?
They talked about streaming VR games from the SteamOS based steam machine to it.
So with that I’d assume we’re finally getting some much needed progress to SteamVR on linux.
The headset itself is running linux and it is meant to be used with the steam machine, which also runs on linux.
pretty sure it’s SteamOS, an Arch Linux derivative, on a fairly popular Snapdragon platform. probably not too difficult to hack on it.
It says that it can run Windows applications so it might be the first VR headset that you can actually develop a game on.
My understanding from the video is that the headset will run SteamOS itself.
Its a standalone headset that runs steamos.
Fuck you Microsoft!
Less concurrent is never a good thing. Steam already got too much power. https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-steam-monopoly-real-gamers-chose/
Luckily unlike monopolies in other sectors, Steam doesn’t involve itself in evil oractices that more or less stops others from competing.
Someone just needs to make a better store, but they can’t because no company big enough to compete is willing to be as user friendly.
Epic, probably the second biggest store people thing about, can’t even make a good platform. They try underhanded practices like bribing developers and customers… maybe they should make their store work properly first.
I’m rabidly pro-consumer about most things but I struggle with how we define a market when we talk about steam. In order for steam to be a monopoly you have to drill down through super categories of software sales and then video game sales, to the platform level.
If you look at all digital delivery video game sales they still don’t have a monopoly. You don’t have to deal with steam to play a video game. It’s only PC video game sales where they are close to a controlling market share.
But Steam has far less power over PC gaming than Apple, Sony, or Nintendo do over their respective platforms. Gamers and Devs basically HAVE to deal with those companies to have access to their markets.
And even then, most games are available on multiple platforms, for similar prices. So you can get the same game from Steam, GOG, or EGS in many cases, plus all of the stores that sell Steam keys (and Steam probably doesn’t get a cut of those sales).
Yeah, and if Microsoft suddenly decides they want to shut Steam out then there’s not much Steam can do other than take them to court. And even if Steam exited Windows there’s still lot of popular publishers putting out Windows only games like Valorant, Battlefield 6, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and popular software like Adobe that would lead to losing a significant chunk of the userbase that would not move to Linux due to games and software they use not being on Windows.
Another launcher whether it is Microsoft or Epic or whatever would just fill the void for third party titles and probably be glad that the main competition is banished.
So this market share situation is not quite like Sony, Nintendo, iOS, or Google who not only run a locked down OS but also are the monopoly and sometimes only storefront.
Google recently shifted to wanting to gatekeep what can be installed and wanting verification from even devs that don’t want to release on the play store, which threatens viability of alternative app repositories like F-droid. Which is what could happen to Steam if Windows suddenly decided to change their minds about how open they’ve been in allowing program installations.
So Steam situation despite their popularity is still reliant on Microsoft not turning into a bad actor. They are more Netflix. The go to choice in their segment, but can be replaced.
Also, public companies can’t make good products because they don’t have long term vision. They don’t have long term vision because they need to have good short term profits and profit margins. Look at Xbox eating itself just because they need to have a 30% profit margin right now!
Yet
Yet, unlike other sectors yet.
High chances that this changes. Monopolies are built friendly and get enshitificated later, one baby step at a time.
Market will get harder and harder to join as studios optimise their processes for releases on steam and users get even more trained Games -> Steam.
Especially when Steam manages to kill PS and Xbox, where I see big potential that this happens.
That’s always a possibility, but if it was going to happen, it would have already by now.
It’s very obvious to me that Valves leadership cares about the end goal of making gaming accessible and as easy as possible for everyone.
If they ever become evil, I feel it’s guaranteed to be because of leadership change to someone who is secretly corrupt, we just have to hope the reigns are handed down to someone good.
And if they do become evil and their product suffert as a result, they are going to create an opening for the others to fill.
The market gets harder to join as Steam makes their platform better and better. This is very very good compared to other companies that get to the top and then add physical and legal barries to others to stop them becoming competition.
Xbox has killed itself and I can’t see Playstation going anywhere anytime soon. Steam machines could take some tiny % of Playstation users, but if they do, the users stolen might have been people who wanted to swap to PC anyway. + you can access other stores on a steam machine
But it is exactly the same as with monarchies:
There are some good ones, until there is one evil, and then you can’t do really something against it except whining.
Allowing monopolies is like allowing a dictator to rule in my eyes.
The difference is that a monarchy usually rules over everything and has the last say.
Steam is a monopoly only because every competitor has tried but failed to make a new compelling service.
Steam does have the last say within their platform (usually it’s the correct say), but they don’t disallow competition by lobbying or with other anti-competitive practices.
Some company just has to make a better service.
It’s not impossible, just no one wants to do it because they can’t make bajillions like they usually do in their other sectors where they can freely abuse the customer because there isn’t someone like Steam looking out for them.
So I agree with you, but someone must make a better service before the pc gaming marketplace marketshare can be more evenly distributed, but no one will or has. But keep in mind that Steam isn’t doing anything illegal and by no means should they forcefully be separated or anything by the government (they are not an illegal monopoly like google for example, they are simply a monopoly because they make the best service and no one is competing).
Monarchy only works because every competitor who tries to change something has failed.
Monarchies would as well not have been established, if they where not making better services than competitors, and when they reached power the got out of control.
Same will happen to steam, it is just how things are, it is just a matter of time, until centralised power gets abused.
Our legal framework does not protect us from this, most monopolies are not illegal in current law.
The current state of capitalism is that companies try to get good brand recognition to get support and establish their monopol position, ant then, the enshitification starts slowly.
Back to the monarchy similarity: Most monarchs had great support at the beginning or even for generations until that power gets abused.
If we have no tools against an entity that can abuse power, we have to establish those tools while we don’t need them, or it gets very hard to do something against it when it happens.
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That’s good because it is.
I used to work with a guy who worked at Valve prototyping stuff like the steam controller. He was a boomer so he complained about how people were always playing games in the break room and what not. Said he hated that job, his reasons might as well have been a wishlist for my future career. If he wasn’t so damn helpful I would probably hate him to this day.
As a Mac user with an Xbox, this thing looks like a breath of fresh air! My Xbox (Series X) is still running well, so I continue to use it, but I kinda want this Steam cube thing, if the price is right. I don’t want to buy any more products from Microsoft, and while I tolerate Xbox, I do not like Windows. (I tolerate it at work because I have to, but I’d prefer not to have to mess with it.) I could hang with Linux if I wanted to go down that road, but it looks like this will be a suitable alternative for gaming… if the price is right.
Steve from Gamers Nexus has a solid video where he met with people about Valve and goes into a lot of details on the announced hardware. He reported that they told him that the Steam Machine is not aiming for a console price. This made sense to him as he pointed out it’s basically an ITX computer and you can do computer things with it. Anyway I don’t know what it will cost but I’m guessing north of $500 easily.
I’m in a similar boat. I have both PS5 and series X. Consoles are getting enshittified at an increasing pace. I welcome valve improving Linux compatibility as they invest more in their devices. I don’t think I’ll be getting Sony or Microsoft’s next consoles.
Same. I have a PS5 and a switch, both that I hardly use now.
I’ve been an Xbox user for the longest time and have been dreading them losing the latest console war. I’ve never been a huge Nintendo fan, and fuck Sony. This sounds like it’ll be my next big gaming platform.
There isn’t really any point in comparing this to a games console. There would be no real point valve developing a console because pretty much all of the games on their platform expect to run on a PC so they’d end up having to emulate keyboard inputs as a lot of their library won’t really work with a controller in any logical sense, so they might as well just make a PC.
Have you, uh, seen steam input and the new controller with the touch pads? It sounds like you haven’t…
Hopefully the Frames can compete with the Meta Quest in both price/performance. It will be good to have relatively affordable VR headset not made by Facebook.
Considering that Quest is sold at a loss and tries to make money forcing you to buy games, I don’t think it’s likely
Wish I didnt have to wear glasses, otherwise I’d use my Index alot more.
Inserts?
It will be priced as it isnt locking you into a ecosystem like meta, so it will be of course a bit more pricey. ( rumors say roughly 1200$ )
They missed the chance to call the machine the Steam Engine
I thought the GabeCube was even better.
Aaaaalmost shot coffee out my nose. Almost.
But they did name it after a daft punk song
Huh, neat. Til.
banger
That would be impossible to search online
Fuck, they did! 😫
Not gonna lie the controller looks ass but maybe it feels fantastic so I‘ll wait with my final judgement. I‘m interested to see how they will try to push VR since most users are still incredibly uninterested in it.
I’ve wanted to get into VR for the longest time but they all seemed like extremely walled gardens. This sounds awesome to me.
For most of my life VR has been, ‘VR is a great way to experience shitty games and you just have to pay a grand or more for this interactive tummy ache, and your unit may not be supported next year! Buy!’
I’m going to hold out until I can pick up one of these at the pawn shop for a bill.
I got an Index for cheap last year and was very excited to play a number of my favorite games with optional VR mode. Turns out:
-
the Index ecosystem is more accessible than expected.
-
the games I was looking forward to all played like ass and made VR seem like a stupid gimmick.
-
In a desperate move that felt like sunk cost fallacy, I tried several VR-only games, and got TOTALLY hooked on modded Beatsaber. This itself made the buy-in worth it.
VR-only games
For the most part VR “ports” of traditional games are not worth buying. The developers usually put 0 effort into them. There are exceptions like sim racing titles, but for the most part games developed specifically for VR will be way better designed
-
‘VR is a great way to experience shitty games
Have you tried Half-life: Alyx?
I recommend you give that, or something equivalent, a go without even buying any hardware. Either ask a friend or go to an arcade. You don’t need to shell out a grand to try.
If you hate it, move on.
Edit! I’m a 90s kid, and I’m really disappointed that VR hasn’t taken off the way scifi suggested it would. Back then, being absorbed in pure information sounded awesome, but now it is just going the way of 24/7 misinformation advertisements and micro transactions.
I’ll hold off on VR until there is a decent open source unit that isnt $800.
I remember trying the first VR headset game 1990 that ran on a Commodore Amiga in like 7 fps and was terrible in every way.
Yegods. My first foray into VR was at a high end arcade at North Pier in Chicago. I think the game was Dactyl. The headset was super heavy and none of the goals of the game were explained to me. I basically wandered around for five minutes, shooting green polygons in the sky, then time was up.
Dad was pissed that he’d blown $20 on it.
Edit: For historical reference, in the mid 90s $5 could keep your kids occupied at a regular arcade for a couple hours. $20 could have gotten us a couple of movie tickets and some Twizzlers.
I’d of been angry too.
I think that’s the same game I queued up for like 90 mins at a computer fair to have a few minutes of very confused playtime and that was it.
I remember seeing the Virtuality kits on TV in the 90s.
Clearly absolutely unplayable nonsense, and yet I still wanted to play on one.
It took so long for hardware to catch up.
The problem is to really make an informed decision you have to try it first-hand. The sensory experience unlike any other device, so descriptions aren’t super helpful, video doesn’t convey what it’s actually like, so you really have to experience it to understand it.
Also given how common it seems to be anecdotally to get sick from it, no one wants to jump in just to have to jump back out.
And unless you know someone that already jumped in and can try theirs, a lot of people like me just don’t want to commit sight unseen. (I mean I’m also broke, but this would be true anyway)
I don’t have a way to try it out, so until I do it’s not on my radar to care. I’m very curious about it. Even if I don’t like it I do really want to see what it’s like at least once. But I’m not gonna pay for that chance. It’s gotta impress me without effort on my part (more than driving to it anyway).
I’ve got a Meta Quest 2 as a hand-me-down and yes, it’s extremely locked down. It’s possible to use a third-party app store, but to make it work you have to get a developer account with Meta and enable wireless debugging.
I also recieved a quest 2 recently, any good guides on getting it set up with third party apps that you found?
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I hear the SideQuest app store is the place to go.
I mean, you can certainly pick up a used Quest 2 if you wanted to try it out. There’s a handful of exclusive stuff in the Quest store you’d be able to use, but not much of value. Resident Evil 4 VR is about it for the Q2. I think there was a Batman game for the Q3. You’d have access to anything the Steam Frame has access to if you’re streaming from a PC.
I think the PSVR2 works as well, but it’s wired only.
Half Life Alyx is certainly worth a blast through.
Stories like Ftumch’s reply, and the fact that it’s owned by Meta 🤮 have deterred me from wanting to try that one.
Looks can be deceiving. Coming from someone who uses the steamdeck, that layout looks exactly how I hoped and imagined it would be. The steamdeck is incredibly comfortable to hold and this looks like it would be the same!
It definitely reminds me of that Steam controller someone on Youtube built by sawing a Steamdeck in two and gluing the ends together so to speak. They said it‘s their dream controller so I‘m sure this controller already has some fans. I just can‘t tell by looking at it.
The first controller looked the same, but was very good to use once you got used to it. The build quality, though, was…fucking terrible.
I had to fix my controllers so many times that in the end I was swapping them out almost weekly. Still, felt great in the hand.
I have the first controller, just dug it out the other day because I thought I was going to be able to use it on my new tablet, it still sucks. I never could get used to it, but it’s a far sight better looking then this thing.
It might be you just got unlucky. Mine is still going strong all this years, and I use it often.
It’s basically steam deck minus the screen. If you are used to the steam deck it’ll be fine.
2026 Year of the Linux desktop?
Surely this will bring over a lot of people to Linux
Year of the Linux living room
Valve really listened to Saejima’s advice:
Steam Synapse when?
I feel like if I use this controller those trackpads will go crazy because of my fat hands.
The Steam Deck uses the capacitive thumb stick sensors to completely disable the trackpads as soon as the stick above the respective pad is touched. This works very well, so I think they‘ll implement the same thing here.
That’s so fucking cool
On the opposite of the spectrum, my small hands doesn’t play well with that feature. The capacitive sensors only works if your fingers touch the top of the sticks but I usually move the sticks by pushing on the round edges of it so I still occasionally brush against the touch pads which is annoying.
You should be able to disable them on a game by game basis if needed. Annoying thiugh
That brings up my following question.
If the thumb sticks are capacitive and they wear smooth over time how do you replace them? Are the capacitive sensors under stick caps? Do you just have to replace the rim only?
Does your capacitive phone screen wear smooth over time?
(The point being hopefully they’ll be made of something that doesn’t wear down from human fingies)
The case around it does. That’s what I want to replace.
I’ve not had any wear like that on my deck, but I’m not crazy hard on controllers. At worse the whole stick can be pretty easily replaced. The repairability on Valve hardware gets a high priority.
“The hands you have used to game are too fat. To obtain a special gaming wand, please mash the controller with your palm now”
Steam did an amazing job on the controller management, you can already remap everything. Disabling track pads should be easy
Almost everything. I’ve got this weird issue where my controller gets misrecognised as the wrong type, and there’s simply no way for me to force steam to recategorise it.
I’m just glad they have dual thumbsticks now. I bought their last model on sale but quickly shelved it. Couldn’t get used to the touchpads and didn’t want to spend the next 2 months sucking at every game I played.
You would need REALLY massive hands to touch those when your thumbs are resting on the analog sticks or the face buttons.
Finally, another worthwhile controller with symmetrical sticks. Now to find out how to get my hands on one…
I typically just have one hand on each side
That usb port being off center though…
I did notice that in this picture, but I don’t think it actually is. Pretty sure this is from the “animation” where the puck with the USB cable is put under the controller to charge, and not with the USB cable connected to the controller. From what I see though it should all be centered, even the puck and charging pins, so not sure why they made it off-center here
There’s plenty of videos of it on YouTube and the port is not off centre.
This will invoke someone’s OCD
That controller looks ugly and bulky as fuck.
Well thank God I don’t give a shit how my controller looks as long as it is well designed.
Alphagrip has entered the chat
Actually, not sure how well it works. But it certainly looks very odd
I mean you will care if it doesn’t fit well in your hand and is too bulky. I mean that was the issue with the Xbox controller and still is issue with the Xbox controller for anybody with smaller hands I know the Japanese market had quite a stir regarding that. And this thing looks like it’s twice as thick as the Xbox controller. It reminds me of some of the old third party PC controllers that I used to have back in the 90s and early 2000s. In fact I had one that if you were to round off the top of this thing looked almost exactly like it.
As someone with hands on the larger side, small controllers suck for us too.
The point you should be focused on is having a diversity in controller options, not that any one controller is good/bad.
It is entirely subjective to say the controller is good. Your definition of good won’t be my definition of good. Your taste and opinion is just as valid as mine, and I don’t impose my preferences on you.
I don’t know how big that controller is, since no banana was provided for scale. It could be huge and unwieldy, or it could be very tiny. One size never fits all.
At the end of the day, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it, and/or don’t use it. This is +1 option in the controller space, and that kind of competition is good no matter what opinion you have.
I mean honestly the real thing to worry about here is how long is valve going to actually support this and support their hardware. They’re notorious for releasing things and then forgetting about it within a year or two. I mean they announce the steam 2 controller years and years ago and then decided one day no we’re not going to make it. That disappointed so many people and people still are trying to get to their hands on the first steam controller that is what like 15 years old or something like that at this point.
They still support the original steam controller and the steam link though.
I would argue that, as long as valve gets it out the door, they support it. Index owners are still supported and that’s from a headset released in 2019. The oculus rift CV1 released in 2016 and it was killed around 2020 when oculus was purchased by Meta. Four years, and the headset is basically a paperweight for anyone who still owns one. A $600 USD paperweight.
Considering that the connection cable was the first thing to die and in 2020 meta stopped selling those cables, anyone I know who had one, including myself, either stopped using it, or was forced to stop when their cable inevitably broke.
There’s a dozen examples. The og steam controller, the steam link, and more recently the steam deck, which is still going strong.
Yes, they have issues getting ideas out the door, but when they get out the door, they’re supported for a good long while.
These don’t look like “we have an idea to build a thing” that will never make it to market… This looks like “we finally got a delivery date for these finished units and we’re excited about it”
I’m looking forward to it, no matter what. Valve has time and time again proven itself to be more consumer focused than other tech companies. More from them is good IMO.
That is the complete opposite of what they are. They are notorious for supporting all the hardware they have released indefinitely. They still keep releasing updates for the steam link and steam controller to this day and both of those have long been out of sale.
I mean officially the steam controller updates were discontinued in 2023 for the internal configurator and everything like that any current updates or anything like that is either the third party or being hacked together by people using it.
It looks ass on this picture. However, it kinda looks like a steamdeck without a screen which is no surprise. And I quite like the steamdeck controls…
Yup, I love my Steam Deck and usually prefer asymmetric joysticks, so as long as it feels like the SD, it’ll be fine.
I mean, sure it looks a bit odd, but if you remove the trackpads and reshape the controller based on not having those then it’s a pretty standard controller, no? It’s not like the added part for the trackpads does anything to change how you would hold the controller or anything, so I doubt it’d make much of a difference in use even if you never use the trackpads.
Yup, looks just like a DualSense controller from the PS5 without the trackpads.
Do you remember the old Xbox controllers that had the attachable keyboard? It’s essentially just that kind of shape. So you would use the controller and kind of ignore the touchpads on the bottom unless you actually need them, then you just move your hand down and use the touchpads for something like mouse control. I doubt the intention is for you to use all of the inputs at once like you would an Xbox or PlayStation controller.
Since the Steam Machine is more like an entry PC and not a console (and will be priced as that), does that mean that SteamOS for desktop will be officially supported?
In their announcement video, they specifically called out that you can install whatever software you want and showed somebody working on CAD. So, yeah, definitely.
I think they mean SteamOS on other hardware, like a custom built PC.
I mean the recovery images for the deck have been available and I’m pretty sure you can just install that on any x86 system.
I forgot where but some time in the last 3 hours I read that the goal for steamOS is to be supported on all PCs, though it’s an ongoing effort.
That’s a big challenge, but a worthwhile one. The reason that Microsoft exploded in the DOS era was because it ran on everything that was “IBM compatible” aka x86. Meanwhile Apple was over there with a competitive product, but you could only run the software on their OS that ran in their hardware. People were able to get cheap third party x86 compatible computers and run MS-DOS (and later Windows), and they were not locked into a specific vendor doing top to bottom hardware/software support.
If they do this right, they’ll be the go to option for a lot of people who generally use their PC primarily for gaming.
Not to mention that Steam does have competition as an app store, stuff like GOG. I mean, it’s a little bit obnoxious to use both at once, but really not that much of a hassle.
You’d have to assume so!
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Yeah, it’s not released or supported outside of the Steam Deck or handheld partners. So you’re probably not going to get Nvidia drivers or anything else that’s not built in to the kernel.
You don’t need it though, you can just run Steam in big picture mode on whatever distro you want.
No, it’s supported on two specific pieces of custom hardware, the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. They’ll get there with general support, but SteamOS isn’t there yet.
Well, there’s official support for some third party handhelds if I remember correctly? Asus and the like? And they just announced that the steam frame (vr headset) will also run steamos, and that’s on a snapdragon ARM SoC. Pretty exciting stuff ahead
I guess this would be the appropiate post to ask under, isnt the steam frame using a last gen flagship arm soc and running linux a huge thing? That seems like its pretty close to us being abke to run linux on a newer phone. Tho at the same time i know phones are unhinged so thats why im asking, whether this is actually a big thing.
Gabephone in 2027? /s
That seems like its pretty close to us being abke to run linux on a newer phone
You can run Linux on current gen flagship arm SoCs. The framebuffer, gpu and cpu stuff mostly just works (with some support from hardware vendors). It’s the rest of the device that’s the problem: the phone part, the camera, sound, power management, etc.
I’d consider it a significant advancement. Phones have much tighter regulations than many consumer devices and this may not necessarily align with Valve’s long-term business objectives, however, so I have some skepticism but would be pleasantly surprised if they pursued such an endeavor.
I’d say a lot of the backend stuff has the stars aligning now for such potential. Front end user experience is increasingly the sore spot now.
Doubtful, phone vendors already had access to binary blobs to run Linux (Android) on them.
It’s no surprise Valve who is buying those SOCs is also provided with them.
I’d jump on a steam deck with updated hardware, too bad it looks like it will be staying the same
Edit:
Yeeaaaahhhh it’s going to be a while, they want a great performance jump without sacrificing battery life
Big same. I can only assume one is in the works and likely the most anticipated piece of steam hardware. If we’re lucky they’ll be saving the news for the near future after these products gets their hype cycle. Marketers love to tease ya.
I think they’ve been waiting for what I’ve been predicting for a while. They’re going to make the next steam deck ARM based so they can make it potentially smaller or at least better battery life. Since the new frame is ARM, I think it’s everything but confirmed now. Since they said they want the new steam deck to be a significant step up they’re probably now waiting for certain components to go down in price so it can be more powerful than the OG but not be too expensive.
With a strong internet connection and more capable desktop device, you can already stream for hours with high fidelity graphics, 60+ FPS, and no fan noise.
With that in mind, buying a new Steam Deck is probably going to be multiple generations off for me.
I’ve given that a shot and just can’t stand the input lag I get, even on LAN, unfortunately, I’m glad it works for others though.
And I don’t like to use hotel or other public WiFi when I travel, I’d rather just have the device in hand
That’s surprising to hear, for me the latency is not noticeable even over WAN. We’ve had VR capable streaming for years now, and area where latency issues cause physical sickness.
You might have a network level issue. Gigabit ethernet to the host, WiFi 5 or better for the client, QoS configured to prioritize both devices in the router settings?
I think a wired connection is the key, one of my house projects this winter is running Ethernet through the attic finally
Having both on a different connection is essential!
If you have a spare router, you could connect it via ethernet to the host and then connect your client to that WiFi.
Host would then be able to maintain its internet connection over WiFi and there would be a separate dedicated LAN just for the stream.
Literally I just want a steamdeck with thunderbolt 5 so I can plug it into an egpu. That is my dream; a handheld gamestation that plays locally, which I can beef up when I want to.
