Feels like they should have gone cheap. Undercut the switch and be the cheapest way to play games on your TV. We're pretty far past performance equalling more entertainment. A 150-200 box to play indie side scrollers is a niche that exists.
But even docked, it's a winner for her and all her friends. She's converting more parents over via her friends. The well off ones are just buying from Valve like me. The less so, are using whatever PC is around to mixed results. I'll see how it goes as the kids get older, but I think there's a bigger case than you think and I think it's mostly years long PC gamers who want a more communal experience be it with partners, kids, or friends.
Even buying an old tiny micro PC that's 10th gen Intel would've been a cheaper buy.
I've absolutely loved being able to check a store listing page and immediately know if a game will run well on the Steam Deck. Having the same program for a higher end target would be really nice for me.
Also, getting the CEC right is really valuable for me. If I'm building a computer there's no chance I am going to be able to get it to play nice with the TV using just the controller.
There's also potential for community fixes for older games with issues. And easier troubleshooting cause you can just look up "fix for X game Steam Machine", or "does X game work on Steam Machine"
There are advantages to this over something generic, or building your own machine.
lmao bring up the wife factor, please.
We are devs here. We can have and build gaming PCs I hope?
Yes I will gatekeep.
Yes it is the best as I can get and play anything I want.
Well, you're not doing a good job of it! I'm going to buy one and use it to play games and have a good time.
They will buy a PS5, Switch or Xbox.
If you know PC gaming you will just get a gaming desktop. With newer hardware.
They will buy a PS5, Switch or Xbox.
If you know PC gaming you will just get a gaming desktop. With newer hardware.
"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame"
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
FWIW, the easiest way to dispel the fallacies pumped out by these individuals is to ask how much time they've sunk into a reasonably contemporary competitive online game. I almost never meet people who have these delusions about anticheat being ineffective that also has actually invested significant (>500) hours into the games that they're appropriate for.
(people who work with spam and fraud/abuse prevention also usually don't have these delusions, because the underlying economics are similar. turns out that actually having experience with a thing is enough to disillusion most people of stupid ideas about that thing, who know?)
All of us refuse kernel level anti cheat.
Dota overwatch is the best we have available for anti cheat. It's better than kernel level anti cheat
If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today
Ring 0 anticheat is a mitigation, and just one step down the road of enforcing fairness. The goal of erasing cheaters quickly becomes a Procrustian bed that alienates fair players and funds cheat developers, there's nothing that gamedevs can do client-side to solve this problem without redefining how PC gaming works. Out of all the games I've put 500+hrs into, votekick is the only working anticheat that I've encountered.
Competitive games will likely add AI-based flagging into the mix, but it still doesn’t make sense to make cheating as trivial as adding a few uprobes/kprobes on a Linux box.
I would, admittedly, be interested in an anticheat that reboots the machine for deck into a secure mode.
The GPU is on par with the 3060 12GB and RX 7000 series GPUs which are older.
The PS5 is six years old! This is a brand new machine!
The Steam Survey is a better indicator of what you should target vs. something like the Steam Machine or Deck IMO.
I can get something like 80% of the graphics with 20% of the GPU because the places where games are really pushing graphics out now are really resource intensive. Ray tracing is amazing but we got REALLY REALLY good at making games look good without it too.
Wait, really? I looked at the specs and saw like 2/3 the CUs of a PS5.
During covid, instead of getting second budget gaming PC, I setup janky multi-seat program (Aster), to split single windows machine where I could play locally and someone else could play on steamlink. There's so many games out there that you can run multiple instances simultaneously. Or simply stream desktops to media room paired with a good remote.
It was very janky, setup, streaming DRM (or not). But justifies world of spending on one highend system than multiple mid / tier. The Aster program was designed for low income nations where you split a single workstation into like 8+ substations (i.e. education). TBH if Valve sold a 2-3k steammachine super host that can stream multiple games to different thin client, and value proposition is this is the only entertainment unit for your entire house, I think it would pique interests. Maybe tile different streams into one client for splitscreen playing. Sell those controllers.
I really don't see the vision Valve is looking for here.
Well if you scroll down the page, it's presented as a selling point of the machine
You can barely code in such an environment to a satisfactory degree. You want to stream 4k games with low latency?
I'm someone who has built dozens of gaming PCs, and wired my house. I also have zero interest in doing the above... if I have to pay few hundred extra to get a Steam machine hooked up to a TV without all that hassle... I'll do that.
It's not the absolute best value for gaming. It's not horrible in current market conditions but it's also not targeting "best value for gaming" anywhere in the marketing materials. It's hardware that can play your Steam library on your TV. There are harder, less expensive ways to do that, as there have been for ages.
If you're a console gamer, there are less expensive, just as easy options to play console games, so it's definitely not suited for that market.
It's really only catering to people with disposable income that want a cute way to hook up a Steam-capable machine to a TV. It's not a huge market, nor is it a non-existent market.
It was probably a bigger market at $750 than $1050, but we can't have nice things.
Valve has a long-term policy of being utter trash at game security.
> I know that's not popular. But they are the only ones with the install base AND ability to pull it off in a such a fashion that wouldn't be so god-awful.
Epic Games does fine (though they did it by purchasing an anticheat startup).
EDIT: Oh, you're talking about making an anti-cheat focused Linux kernel build? Meh, still would not trust Valve on that front given their long-standing policy of not giving a shit.
Some people say this same thing about the Nintendo Switch and its successor, but here we are, with the former closing in on highest selling console of all time, and the latter tracking above that.
There isn’t teal system seller at the moment
Look at the PS2. Incredible games on bespoke custom harware.
We didnt know how good we had it.
This is just a x86 PC.