There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite / mobile gaming.
Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move.
But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.
I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Frankly, I feel like it’s probably a decent number of people? Enough for this product to do okay, if not change the whole market. But people have been very confidently incorrect about almost every iteration of mobile gaming in the past. I guess we’ll see.
The Shield was Android with GameStream. This will run games directly on x86 Linux which, with all their Proton work, will result in a much bigger game library out of the box. There have been more niche handheld x86 devices, but they were even more money, and different form factors. Steam being as big as it is, I think this has way more potential than anything done before.
You have to consider that PC hardware is currently spiraling out of control in terms of price, and $400 for the specs it has presently is a fairly decent buy even if you don't care about the form factor.
I wonder if they're selling at a loss? Valve can afford it, plus it'd be no different than Sony/Nintendo/etc subsidizing hardware since they make most of their profits from software sales.
Only difference is that, unlike traditional game companies, this Steam Deck thing isn't a walled garden. But of course, Steam has a near monopoly on PC gaming so it's unlikely that'll be a problem for them.
I would bet that they do sell at a loss. There's an interview with Gabe[1] in which he keeps repeating that the price point was painful. He is very vague about it but he also mentions some calculus like "they'd have to sell 8 games to be profitable". So I have no doubt they're doing it like the consoles do it.
If Valve isn't locking the hardware down, but is subsidizing it, then they might run into a situation where cryptominers (or some other group) start buying these things up in bulk, but never playing any games on them.
I could see owning one of these as a non-gaming desktop.
They actually did a pretty smart thing, where you can only order it if you have a steam account that has spent money on steam before this month. I would guess that they also limit the amount of Steam Decks you can order as a single person so it would be some effort to start buying these things up in bulk.
Ethereum, because there are not ASICs for it. See the news about recent crackdowns on mining in China, that's where all the GPUs were at, mining Ethereum.
While this is true they are taking their time. Here is an article from 2017 that suggests they will have finished the transition to proof of stake by 2018:
I'm just making up hypothetical my friend. I can't really predict what these might be useful for as an alternative to gaming, but the world is full of bright people who exploit any opportunity.
Nintendo sells its consoles at a profit. It's why their hardware is always "behind" the other guys who are, as you say, selling you $4 of power for $3 and hoping to make it up over time on ecosystem purchases.
To be honest, I don't think your assumption is that far off. The way that Gabe talks about this device, I feel like the purpose is simply to extend the PC gaming market, which is essential for Steam.
PC hardware prices will affect this as well, since this is based on shortages and high demand... basically these will be almost impossible to get outside of secondary market.
You think Sony Computer Entertainment didn't wait until the supply chain was ready before launching the PS5?
It's not about being ready or not, it's about supply and demand.
An example from Valve themselves from early this year regarding Index, an interview with Gabe:
“We actually have components that are manufactured in Wuhan and when you’re setting up your manufacturing lines it doesn’t occur to you that you’re suddenly going to be dependent on this peculiar transistor that’s sitting on one board that you can’t get,” Newell said.
“Everybody ended up running into the same problem simultaneously — you go from, ‘Oh, we’re in great shape,’ to, ‘What do you mean Apple or Microsoft just bought the next two years’ supply of this just so they could make sure they aren’t going to run out?’ You went from a situation where everything was getting done just in time to people buying up all the available supplies.”
Newell says these constraints are also why the headset still doesn’t ship to some markets like New Zealand or Australia. “The only thing keeping us from shipping in New Zealand at this point is just getting enough of them made — we’re very much manufacturing constrained.”
> I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
At first glance at least, it seems like it may end up being much more than that. I see appeal here for non-gamers as well - or at least, for people who aren't only or even primarily gamers.
It's a very nice cyberdeck for general use, though granted it doesn't have a hardware keyboard. Given the size and form factor any keyboard they'd tried to graft on the thing would be basically unusable anyhow so I'm glad they didn't try.
I can totally see myself picking one of these up and throwing it in my bag alongside a small Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. For working in coffee shops in a terminal it'd be just fine. Connect it up to a TV via Chromecast or something and you've got a damned nice setup for less than a grand.
The extra keyboard is going to add a bunch of weight, probably more weight in total than something like the x1 carbon with a bigger screen and battery that weighs 1.13kg.
I call it the ipad effect, where an ipad + keyboard of the same size ends up being heavier than a laptop of the same size.
Convertibles also tend to have a touch screen and pen support too.
I find the 7" form factor only good for personal usage, if you want to play a multiplayer game on it, it's too tiny usually.
The mere fact that NVIDIA Shield Portable didn't take off doesn't tell us much. It had poor design sensibility (i.e. it looked like ass, like some kind of portable Xbox designed in the early 2000s), and it ran Android, which lacks a compelling games library.
Steam Deck at least stands a chance, although I'm worried about the weight and the battery life.
If it can do low-resource gaming for 8 hours, its not lie. And honestly, thats not something too far-fetch.
The only one lying here is you, since its not even released yet for you to test the claim. Not to mention how you conveniently left out "2-" from the battery life range
What? Did you expect to run Cyberpunk 2027 for 8 hours on single charge this machine?
I intend to buy and use it as a mobile workstation for programming, since it has a x86 chip, 16Gb Ram, Linux-compatible gfx chip, decent amount of storage. Basically this will fill the void left by the Nokia N900 for a lot of us. It being able to run steam/games is secondary for me.
Or, if AMD would please get on with it and release a small form factor like the Intel Nuc, that would be great. But this device does have a screen attached to it and a battery, so it would work fine as a nuc for me.
One major difference (besides the form-factor obviously) is that the Deck doesn't require WiFi + desktop to play your PC games. I'd also argue that the trackpads will be a major difference. The Steam Controller's trackpad wasn't perfect, but it made possible to sanely play a ton of designed-for-mouse games
The Nvidia Shield ran Android. So either bad Android games locally, os streaming. The Shield might do better today as a client just for Stadia, Xcloud or PS Now.
However, this is far better. Not only are the specs very impressive for the size/power, but it runs an OS that can plan anything (with Proton). It's like mixing the switch with a ps4. Imagine playing the Witcher 3, or Doom Eternal on this compared to the 480p blurry Switch version. I hope this does well.
> I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Does it even matter? For consumers, they get what they paid for even if Valve shows zero commitment as long as Steam does not actively shut them out. For game companies, support for controller and Linux/Proton is valuable with or without Steam Deck.
And for Valve itself, all the software investment is a long term hedge against the existential threat of Windows failing them, this is just an opportunistic bonus use. The only actual cost is the hardware side of the project. If it tanks in the market they'll simply refrain from doing a v2 and do damage control with long tail sales of v1. While taking comfort in knowing that the Deck hardware will at least have lured a few game companies into the arms of Proton, strengthening their Windows hedge.
It's interesting timing because the Switch Oled edition was just announced with no bump in power. So if you want a capable handheld with access too all the indies which will play games much better than your switch... here you go.
And you can still keep your switch for nintendo exclusives because they've just made it clear that they're not upgrading the switch in a worthwhile way for at least a year.
I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.
> I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.
PC gamers and steam gamers are often very different markets. Nintendo, for decades now, was about fun, not power. I'm casual gamer, just for fun, and steam deck, while super cool, is certainly not going to replacement my switch.
It will replace my Switch. I mostly play indie games, but the Switch can only play those indie games that get released to the Nintendo store, and then, usually at almost double the price of what you can get them elsewhere. As for experimental games that never even get sold? Not likely to happen on the Switch, there's just not enough incentive to publish.
That's great, but "Nintendo not being about power" doesn't change the fact that many of my 40$+ Switch games barely run on the device and run at such low resolutions that it feel like looking through an oily glass.
Seems like something is very wrong with either Switch hardware performance or Nintendo quality control.
Steam does have one huge thing over Nintendo. The PC platform is so backwards compatible that I can play games from the 80s on a brand new computer today.
Nintendo charges you money for new copies of each game you want to play on their latest hardware. You can't just pull out your old copy of Super Mario Bros and install it on your Switch.
Hell, I've heard that there are Switch games that have been out since the very beginning of the console that are still full price.
Its still painfully low spec even for casual gaming. Sitting for 5 minutes waiting for Animal Crossing or Crash team racing to load is not fun for anyone.
The Switch power bump would've probably only made sense in 4K docked gaming anyways, and people are probably not going to buy one of these for docked gameplay.
The biggest disappointment in the new switch is the lack of native bluetooth audio headphone support and becoming less picky about its hdmi travel adapters and chargers
>I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Yup.
Before clicking the "Reserve" link, I put a personal threshold for this thing at $300. If it was somewhere around that, it'd be an instant purchase for me.
Over $500 for a version with barely acceptable (by 2021 standards) storage? No thank you.
The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device. I can't imagine people not running out of space very, very fast (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs). Still, for $300, it'd be an instant buy for me - just to be able to play in bed.
I really hope enough people buy this thing, because I'd really want it to thrive - and the price to drop :)
> The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device.
I felt that way about the Quest 2, and opted for the maxxed-out version. As it turns out, I use it a few times per week and have ~40GB of storage in use.
I originally used Virtual Desktop to remote in to my desktop, mostly from across the house but also over 5G. Now that Airlink is available in beta I use it exclusively at home, and mostly play "PCVR" titles wirelessly.
The Steam Deck seems to be taking the same approach. I see myself using it to play games from my desktop library while in bed or sitting outside. Few if any games will actually get installed on the device, because I won't want to use the on-board processing and drain my battery anyhow.
I don’t get this, if you’re using it for gaming then storage isn’t a huge deal. Even on a dedicated gaming PC, most people don’t have their entire Steam library installed at once.
Not only is it just too much space, but it’d be wasted since there’s no way you’re going to play all of those games.
The 64gb version of this definitely is too small though. That’s less than the average AAA game. And while there are certainly people out there who don’t play AAA games, I don’t think the average Joe will do the math ahead of time when buying one of these, and will be very disappointed/angry when they find they can’t play the game they want (without using external storage/a dock).
But, if this thing does have an SD card slot (idk, I haven’t checked), it should solve the problem. SD cards aren’t super fast, but the Nintendo switch is proof that they’re at least good enough for gaming.
However, when the hypothetical average Joe you propose picks up a cheap 256 GB SD card off of Amazon and it takes five minutes every time they reload from a checkpoint in Control, I think they will be at least as frustrated as when they ran out of space on the internal SSD.
I have a single game that clocks in at 374gb. (Ark + DLC and 50gb of mods.) And I don't want to be limited to a single game. I am really hoping the 64gb can have an nvme drive added.
My guess is that to get the entry level price as low as possible, the BOM is cut to the bare minimum. That would probably imply that they preclude including the NVMe header - but who knows?
Most blockbuster games are over 64gb on their own these days. You couldn't install just one of: GTA5, Red Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Forza Motorsport/Horizon, Fallout 4, the list goes on.
At least Todd Howard can't sell Skyrim yet another time, it's already in my steam library.
Yeah 3D models and all their LODs, textures with all their layers, (one surface could have half a dozen layers used to render it), the myriad audio and music files. Games can be really humungous orchestrations these days.
> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.
Anyway, you can more or less do that today already with external disks, etc. You can certainly connect a USB3 SSD. I wonder if the nvme drive is user-replaceable? I guess not?
Though given the open nature of the device, expect mods sooner rather than later. Replacing a chip and telling Linux to override its size (or mod the bios/dtb) should be a breeze.
Since it runs Linux I don’t see any reason you couldn’t put your entire library on an NFS server in the other room. If I get one I’ll certainly be doing that
Sure, if you have one. I don't (I play games in bootcamp on an old MacBook Pro) but this perfectly fits my needs. I don't have anywhere to put a gaming PC in my apartment and have been considering getting a switch, but this is basically my dream machine.
I honestly can't believe the 64GB one isn't 128GB instead. I looked through my steam library and I have a lot of smaller games that would fit just fine on that.. but 1 AAA title would completely fill it. Plus, you don't get that whole 64GB, the OS has to take some of it. After the formatting and OS I'd be surprised if there was more than 50-55GB free space.
>But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.
People forget that these devices without marketing and consistency they won't go far.
Nintendo, Sony, even MS that came later to the party have hundreds (if not thousands) of millions poured to build their brands, over decades... Sega knew how to play this game and still didn't manage to hang on...
They are already taking the crops of nostalgia, that's for how long they have been around. Leveraging these devices base on hardware it's nothing in the great scheme of things.
It’s more less the same price as Nintendo switch and the switch is limited to expensive Nintendo games. Now if you are a fan of Nintendo games, great! But if you are a of gamer then this steam deck sound like a better idea!
This is my feeling. Money is no problem for me, but I'm not immune to purchasing stuff I don't end up using. So I'm cautious about that and I'm sitting here wondering about the value. Say, the $650 model.
On one hand it would be nice to have my Steam games on a portable without having to double-purchase(a problem ATM with Switch, on top of the higher typical costs of those games on eShop).
But I have the Switch and Switch Lite already which plays Nintendo exclusives. Honestly it's nice to get a break and dip into a catalogue that's not on my PC when I'm on the go. And I'm 100% not going to take two portables with me anywhere.
Then there is the cost. $650 for me would be better spent toward a PS5 if I could get my hands on one. I like the Sony exclusives(GoW, Last of Us, etc) and would really like to play Returnal.. Though it will probably go cross-platform before I ever see a PS5 with my own eyes.
The more I think about it's price point and value to me the more I get the Shield vibes, and the more impressive it is how well Nintendo knows their customers and rides a very fine line with their product placement.
Edit: As an added thought; I like to experience certain games, shows, and movies in a very controlled environment. I won't play/watch them on-the-go.
I view this as more of a tinker device. They’ve stated you can install anything on it. I just know I haven’t regretting buying the steam link or controller, so I may give this a go.
This is different than the NVidia Shield handheld in that hardware has come a loooong way since 2013 and it’s actually possible to run modern AAA games at 1200x800 using what is effectively a mobile chipset. No streaming from a PC required.
If I played more games I would absolutely buy one of these. I already own the NVidia Shield that plugs into your TV because it’s a great streaming box even if you ignore the gaming aspect.
This has so much more potential because its a desktop OS. You could e.g. play WoW using this. Not to mention the huge selection from emulators. I've tried gaming with Android before and the game selection is awful. Realistically, the only good gaming options are from e.g. snes emulators. On top of that, most phone GPU drivers are horrendously broken when doing advanced 3d stuff so even if a good game was released for android, you wouldn't be able to play it on 80% of phones.
Personally I find a lot of these devices backwards minded. I'd much rather just shell out for a service like Stadia (if the catalogue was larger) and turn my actual mobile device into something capable of playing pc titles. Especially if the implementation is platform agnostic like Stadia. Gaming devices of all stripes have become expensive enough that I'm more than happy to see cloud gaming takeover and leave hardware for the activists and bitcoin miners.
Your phone lacks the controller interfaces these devices have though. I guess it depends on if you can hook up a controller to your phone, or if you're able to play the games you like without to much fuss on your phone screen.
Matter of taste. A pc gamer will hate a mobile control scheme but I can play Cyberpunk fine on my S10 with the touch controller and if it had even the level of customization that CoD Mobile or Pubg Mobile offer the player I'd go so far as to say I could be happily comfortable. Imo, people underestimate both how poor the quality offerings are on mobile and how far ui control design has come (in the few top tier offerings that exist). Cloud gaming kills two birds with one stone in that it suddenly adds a plethora of games to mobile that are good in the real way while simultaneously mitigating the mounting costs of being a pc gamer (maybe consoles too but I can't speak to them) by letting me run high-end games on average hardware so long as I have a good internet connection.
I tried pubg mobile and a few other mobile FPS games. There's one major flaw with using a touchscreen for those kinds of games, you need to be able to aim, move and shoot at the same time. In my experience, touchscreens only allow you to do two of those things at the same time.
Apple had a solution to this problem years ago but made the very very very stupid decision of removing 3D Touch from recent iPhone models.
On phones with the feature, you can use your left thumb to walk, right thumb to aim, and 3D touch (press down hard on the screen to shoot). I know at least call of duty mobile supports it, and when I tried it out it felt revolutionary.
But rather than add new input methods, they’re removing them at the same time they’re trying to push harder into mobile gaming (with Apple Arcade).
It’s baffling as an outsider to see such obviously bad/stupid decisions like that from such a massive company.
I don't game on mobile, but wouldn't back-side tap be the obvious solution? I've never tried but I'd expect the accelerometer to be able to detect something like a middle finger tapping on the back of the phone with sufficient precision and latency (just the binary event, not the location)
I do remember a game that did something like that many years ago (posted on reddit I think?). It was an endless runner type game with a fox character IIRC, and you had to alternate taps on the back of the device to get it to move. I do remember that I couldn't get it to work reliably though.
Tapping the back of my phone now, I can see it maybe working for some types of games/shooters where you don't have to hold down the fire button, if implemented well (which probably isn't easy to do for all hardware). The tactile feedback of smacking the phone could help provide a good experience if paired with appropriate audio/visuals.
This isn't quite the same thing, but the Playstation Vita has a rear touchpad, and not a ton of games managed to use it well, even with the much higher precision (Tearaway[1] is the only good one I can remember).
Rear touchpad means you can't put it in a protective case. Unless you can figure out a way to make one that protects it from most of the kinds of drops a phone would take in normal daily use and still exposes the rear pad.
3D Touch was the stupidest idea apple had in the last decade and I don’t say this lightly given there’s also the Touch Bar, the trash can Mac Pro and canceling of the apple display.
It's not perfect but this, speaking as a casual observer, is something I think will improve with time. It took far too long to move away from fixed d-pads and now more games are experimenting with on-screen zones you tap to fire. There's still a lot of unwieldyness exactly as you noted but I think this is a surmountable challenge.
I'm not sure how this could really be surmountable. With a controller you have access to at least 6 simultaneous inputs, more if you do some finger claw tricks or have back buttons or something. A keyboard and mouse gives you around the same or more simultaneous inputs. On a touchscreen you can make 2 simultaneous inputs.
Most action games require at least 3 simultaneous inputs to be played effectively.
There's definitely workarounds like the ones you mention, but unless a game is actually made for touchscreen controls, as in optimized for no more than 2 simultaneous inputs, it's not going to be as playable on a touchscreen as it would be with anything else.
Unfortunately, some genres of game just aren't as suited to only 2 simultaneous inputs.
There's lots of fun touchscreen based games, but they're always better with game mechanics specifically suited to touchscreens.
Playing PC games on a cell phone is painful. You can't even see half the game because your thumbs always obscure the screen to operate the touch controls.
It's not that I couldn't it's that I wouldn't want to with an agnostic service like Stadia. That's money I could put towards a nicer smartphone or into nicer non-internal pc components like the monitor instead. But I also say this as someone who doesn't mind touch controls when they're done well so having physical things to press isn't as big a draw for me as I imagine it is to their target audience.
I think a better question is will games traditionally built for PC's hold up on a mobile device?
Mostly I'm thinking about controller vs keyboard+mouse. Typically you have more controls available on PC and when I play the same game on PC I am complete garbage at it because I'm used to controller, maybe I'm too old though.
The videos on the site show people playing Doom Eternal (FPS), Crusader Kings III (4x strategy game), Balder's Gate (top down RPG), and Disco Elysium (point-and-click adventure game). It looks playable to me.
Plus it natively supports "mouse" controls via a few input methods: thumb touch screens and tilt-o-whorl. And if neither of those work, you can use a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
Valve has been pushing their Steam Controller for quite some time now, it sits squarely in the no man's land between clear success and total failure. The core audience of this new product will know quite well what to expect.
I for one own a switch and has been waiting for a better quality product, I've also been looking to get a desktop gaming PC but the price + the space it takes has been putting me off for a long time. So this steam deck is an insta buy for me.
I'm absolutely in the market for this. I'm fixing to move six time zones from my friends, who all play. Instead of buying a gaming laptop to take with me I'd just buy this if it's let me play with the easily.
I for one love my Shield and would upgrade / buy again - real-time upscaling/upmixing makes YouTube into a competitive "channel" I regularly watch on my 4K TV.
The shield runs all the major streaming networks and there's now Airplay apps that run in the background, closing that gap.
As with all chrome-based devices, the Google voice assistant blows away AppleTV and Roku.
I wonder how really portable this thing is; it has PC hardware, a screen and a small factor in which to stick batteries: how long will the battery last?
Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move.
But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.
I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Frankly, I feel like it’s probably a decent number of people? Enough for this product to do okay, if not change the whole market. But people have been very confidently incorrect about almost every iteration of mobile gaming in the past. I guess we’ll see.