Imho, the Steam Deck will be the only one with a really long product lifetime. Simply because Valve’s main business is selling games, not consoles. The Deck makes people buy more/different games. Worked on me. I haven’t played much in the last decade because I was too tired to play at my PC after work. Now I can play everywhere. Couch, bed, car, … Basically every other manufacturer makes money exactly once by selling such a console. As soon as their marketing is done with it, they’ll release a new revision and you won’t see a single software update for the old model ever again.
Yup, there are a number of features for Valve to do this right:
supporting linux frees them of the eternal windows shackles that pc-gaming has become, diversifies steam as a multi-platform service (not just pc gaming juggernaut) without encroaching on anyone else’s terrain, and gets their user’s enormous libraries out into the world, potentially enabling new kinds of games in the future.
Well, but the same is true for brands selling desktops or laptops with windows, where they only make money once on the hardware (and maybe some additional money by installing subscription crapware like mc afee etc.).
That’s true. And that’s the reason why you’ll get one or two firmware/driver updates and that’s it. These companies have work to do on the other hand. A laptos or desktop is a widespread product. Valve had to go a long way to make the Deck happen.
The idea of a console where the manufacturer doesn’t have total control over the OS is ludicrous, no way a Windows box is ever going to “kill” the deck
Yeah, Sony lost me when they broke my Linux install and degraded the DVD playback functions, within six months of me buying my PS2. Similarly, the last “good” smartphone I had, was the Palm Treo (650p\680p\Centro); since then, I’ve never had a single phone that granted direct hardware access & allowed unloading/sideloading the OS by default.
Manufacturers want deep control these days; way beyond mere root permissions.
Difference between a console and a PC is that the OS is open source
Fucking hell the “Steam Deck killers” is a stupid trend.
They really do hit you with all the specs that are supposed to put the deck to shame, but the reveal their ludicrous price, completely ignoring the major advance the things has.
That’s a simple trick, but cheap and dirty, so it’s pretty garbo anyway. No respect for handhelds themselves or anyone reviewing them or taking any sponsorship that do anything like that.
That’s because normal Linux won’t be as optimised but unlike Valve they don’t want to put actual work into optimising it.
Less “not optimized”, & more “not supported”; IE, accelerations that don’t turn on, because companies like Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, & NVidia, have a long history of only giving preferred partner devteams, prerelease hardware access, much less any peeks at unobfuscated firmware.
Not so bad if you can just install another OS to 'em like they were just little mobile computers.
Where are the true killers with arm based chips? And how is the linux version of rosetta 2 doing? Can we run x86 games on arm Linux?
Don’t Apple’s chips have specific hardware support to make Rosetta 2 as effective as it is? I’ve been really hoping other manufacturers find a way to do something similar.
Yes they do, and you can bet that’ll go away as soon as Apple thinks x86 isn’t important (to them).
Totally agree.
Not only they can’t sell the device at a loss, but also they have to use Windows for driver compatibility.
What’s holding back the Steam Deck, and the whole gaming on the go, it’s x86. For the rest, it’s x86 plus Windows plus drivers.
The one to win will be who makes a tightly coupled device that’s also efficient. Apple is good at that, but has nowhere near the catalogue than Steam and lacks a Steamworks SDK.
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It’s a gif, I had to tap on it before it played (on Jerboa)
Wouldn’t it be rather simple to install Linux on them though?
You could, but what makes Steam Deck special is that it’s SteamOS is built specifically for that hardware, enabling functions you wouldn’t normally see in gaming PC hardware.
