In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads.
Valve absolutely did not have to change their screws, and its probably actually against their best interests. While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers, Valve goes out of their way to update their screws to make them easier to install/remove by changing to torx screws and added metal threads in the backplate. Those who know anything about mechanical engineering know this is not an insignificant amount of effort they put into it.
This is a small change that makes a huge impact, and speaks volumes about the ethos of the company. It says:
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We want to make our devices last longer, and be easier to repair.
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If you want to buy the cheaper tier and save yourself a few bucks by installing whatever SSD you want, go right ahead.
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We trust you to make decisions for yourself.
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Most importantly, we respect you, the consumer, and want you to fully own and control the devices we sell.
Valve is by no means perfect, and there’s plenty more they could be doing, but they’ve earned my respect and my patronage and I won’t buy games from anywhere else. I will buy whatever future products they sell, even if I don’t think I’ll use them regularly.
When Gaben dies there will be fucking riots.
I really hope he’s cultivating at least one successor within the company to carry on his vision.
Valve is possibly the closest thing to a non-evil company in the world today.
This is why Gabe is my billionaire of choice in the forthcoming billionaire mercenary wars.
And you wanna know why? :)
divulgâche
It’s because they’re not public. So investors can’t ruin everything like they always do.
More specifically “private equity” investors who are gradually looting the US economy.
Yeh, you say that. But you know they finished Half Life 4 about 2 years ago and are holding it back on purpose
Mostly because they have to wait for Half-Life 3 in order not to confuse the customers.
That’s been in the warehouse for 10 years.
While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers
You bastard, take that upvote.
I read the title with that connotation. Was actually looking forward to hearing a valid complaint of the steam deck but Surprise!
Yeah what Valve is doing is great. Hopefully they will become more mainstream in the future and become more known with the super casual crowd. Nintendo definitely needs more proper competition in the handheld market.
Also FYI it’s Phillips with double L, Philips with one L is the Dutch electronics company.
I actually thought they invented those screws, thus linking them to their company. Glad to be enlightened
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I can’t imagine what gives you that idea about the Steam Deck. I’ve had mine for a year and it’s a great little device.
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Lol whoops, did not see the OP next to your name. My bad.
I mean… Phillips heads are hood for what they’re actually designed for, which is, uh, to strip really easily so they don’t get over-tightened. Which is irrelevant if your manufacturing is precise enough.
Screw head not device.
I think they meant Philips and Phillips
Norelco ain’t bad tho
If they do become more mainstream, there is more opportunities for enshitification.
Nah not as long as they don’t go public and Gaben runs the company
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically…however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
Any opinions on Samsung or Google?
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Just in case you were wondering, Motorola is still trash. I bought the G5 and I absolutely hate it.
Yeah I haven’t even made an account on Epic to get free games from there. Valve almost single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform and I’m grateful for that (I know wine has existed far longer than proton, but the difference before and after proton is day and night).
Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.
SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.
I wonder if the decision has anything to do with selling refurbished units. It’s a good change, glad to see this!
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
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Torx screws and threaded inserts is not really that much effort engineering side.
It has more significant impact on the cost. Millions of torx screws and threaded inserts cost more than self tapping Phillips into plastic.
It’s almost like Valve doesn’t absolutely hate their customers.
Strange how a company with infinite money just produces stuff they like huh?
Every company should try that.
Look at the shit Apple produces and understand it is not only a function of money.
Steam is an infinite money generator, yes, but any publicly owned company would have fucked it up for short term profits. Valve absolutely has its problems, but its focus on the long term and respecting its customers means it can make infinite money and do stuff like this.
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans’ greed may be limitless.
I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren’t public and not beholden to shareholders.
This is the correct answer.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
That’s interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don’t want to stray outside the community.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
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Gabe himself is worth over 4 billion.
Okay, I may have misplaced few zeros here ant there, my apologies.
Always be on guard and claim no allegiance to any huge company.
Also, Valve have been pretty consumer friendly for 20 years.
I fear when lord gaben dies volvo will go public and enshittification will begin
Fortunately Gaben has only a minor interest in Volvo 😉.
But actually his son is involved in the games industry, and there’s plenty of other like-minded people at Valve. Hopefully the (far) future of Valve is as bright as its present.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It’s what I think it’s happening with netflix & others. It doesn’t matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don’t want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don’t care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don’t know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends?
You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).
It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
Just greed… mostly. A lot of people want to “get rich quick”, and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed… but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can “buy low, sell high”, you may still want to do it regardless.
You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).
need to make more next quarter
That’s mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they’ll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.
Sometimes it’s done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it’s easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things “like they’ve always been done”.
The fact that you said Volvo on accident brings me back to the old ThioJoe troll days
Turns out i’m gonna buy a steamdeck with them using linux and thinking of things like this.
I just need to wait a bit as the most expensive season is around the corner, i’m just glad our Dutch black friday doesn’t outdo any regular discount making it a near necessity to wait for black friday.
Made by hardware hackers for hardware hackers.
I just don’t use my impact drill on them and I’ve never had an issue.
The fact that it’s usually fine is probably why they didn’t feel like they had to do this to start.
The failure rate probably isn’t that high, but it’s extra wear over time that can be prevented.
You’re clearly doing it wrong then. You need to torque those screws more than you do your lugnuts
I just sonic welded my steam deck, with extra rivets through the screen and fan to be sure.
Are people continually opening their steam decks? I am confused at the opportunity to have stripped screws and dethreaded holes.
You just need to open it once to strip a screw
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I can understand wanting mods, but at the same time, it’s not like you can open your iPhone without damaging it in the process. I guess I want to say that I can get why people would want to add stuff to their thing, but I don’t see why someone would expect Valve to have accounted for that.
You’re missing the point of this post… They specifically made a change to make it easier to open and put back together without damage, which is not the norm in most related industries these days. That’s a good thing that we have been conditioned not to expect because of companies like Apple that fully do not want you to open your device ever for any reason.
Your comment sounds like “well you can’t open an iPhone without damaging it, why should you be able to open a steam deck without damaging it”… Very much corporate overlord shill vibes.
“Corporate shrill”. Why was it necessary to make it personal?
My point is that you can’t expect companies to do good things. Valve seems to be an exception.
Also you have to admit that the title frames it like a complaint. Top post points this out
Thats OP’s point? Valve has gone above and beyond what’d be reasonable to expect?
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