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Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

arstechnica.com

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Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#61

Post by mobiledev2014 »

kogepathic wrote: post #31

Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1] Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2] As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-…

"Consistently positive reviews from users" are not enough.

Steam Link became obsolete, and the controller just didn't sell (despite being excellent IMO!)

This could see a similar fate, or it could be the breakout hit made possible by their learning from past hardware

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#62

Post by faitswulff »

kogepathic wrote: post #31

Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1] Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2] As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-…

Valve has the same problem Google has: no new venture will ever have the same margins as their primary cash cow and therefore won't be worth maintaining.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#63

Post by maxsilver »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #57
maxsilver wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, Valve needs to better support hardware to build trust. But I think some perspective is worth mentioning. Every Valve hardware device has had a longer maintenance and support lifecycle than any Google Nexus/Pixel device ever sold. Valve has consistently been better than Google about their hardware + software lifecycles. It's totally fair to compare the two, but that doesn't necessarily make them equivalent. V…

That's silly. The point is that the series of products has been discontinued; if Valve had a v2 version of the Steam Link or Steam Controller, nobody would be talking about this.

A company is allowed to iterate on products, and yes that sometimes includes discontinuing a specific product, but that's not necessarily the same as abandoning a market.

Nintendo has discontinued the GameBoy / DS line. Because they now sell the Switch Lite, which is their new way to solve that problem. You can argue "Nintendo sucks, they discontinued their handhelds, we can't trust them on hardware", and they sort-of have. But they gave that product line 10 years of support, and they haven't abandoned those folks, the Switch Lite exists for them now to bridge over to the new mobile gaming market. Not all "discontinuings" are of equivilant weight as Google's product-killings.

Steam doesn't sell a Steam Controller, true. Because much of the Steam Controller stuff now supports nearly any controller (Switch Pro / DualShock 4 / Xbox One XINPUT, including the full accessibility controller / etc). Yeah, it's not quite the same as the Steam Controller (no touchpad joysticks), but they didn't abandon that market. And every Steam Controller ever sold is still fully supported in software, even in new games made this year (6 years after launch).

Steam doesn't sell a Steam Link. But they didn't abandon it, they upgraded it. Steam Link now works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android TV + Android Phones, Samsung Smart TVs, and such. They don't sell you their own box anymore, because that would be super redundant, most of the TV boxes people already own can run Steam Link already, and they continue to support Steam Link on many different clients to this day. Last time I checked, even original v1 Steam Links are still fully supported in all software + service (6+ years after launch).

---

In comparison, Google often just hard up kills stuff. Google Reader died, replaced by nothing. Android Things died, replaced by nothing. Google Cloud Print died, replaced by nothing. There's an entire website dedicated to just listing random stuff Google's killed - https://killedbygoogle.com/ . At least half of those products or services have no graceful fallover or upgrade path to anything else.

I get that it's a fair comparison. But I strongly believe it's not an equivalent one. As someone who has bought plenty of Google and Valve hardware over the years, I'd be a lot happier with Google as a company if they put even just half the effort on the support and maintenance lifecycle for their products, that Valve already does for nearly everything they touch.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#64

Post by rightbyte »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #53
kogepathic wrote: post #31

Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1] Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2] As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-…

To be clear, it's not like there were never steam machines for sale, but manufacturers stopped making them. Here, you can see five for sale in 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160225105722/https://store.ste... I don't know that Valve were ever going to make physical devices themselves (other than the 100 they made for beta testers.) From pretty early on, and definitely by Steam Dev Days 2014, it seemed to me like…

I was going to say Portal 2 but realized that it is from 2011 ...

Dota 2 is atleast barely in a decade from 2013. But ye, it is underwelming.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#65

Post by hobs »

faitswulff wrote: post #62
kogepathic wrote: post #31

Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1] Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2] As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-…

Valve has the same problem Google has: no new venture will ever have the same margins as their primary cash cow and therefore won't be worth maintaining.

And this is why you separate your business units so that your hardware peeps can manage their own P/L.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#68

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

mobiledev2014 wrote: post #61
kogepathic wrote: post #31

Valve's track record with non-VR hardware is, to put it politely, not good. Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1] Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2] As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-…

"Consistently positive reviews from users" are not enough. Steam Link became obsolete, and the controller just didn't sell (despite being excellent IMO!) This could see a similar fate, or it could be the breakout hit made possible by their learning from past hardware

Steam controller suffered from doing too much, I think. People want plug-in and go from their couch games, having a fully programmable all-singing all-dance super controller turned out to be more effort than most wanted to deal with.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#69

Post by peanut_worm »

Hamuko wrote: post #67
peanut_worm wrote: post #66

I worry that it would get abandoned rather quickly given how Valve has released hardware in the past.

What about the HTC Vive and the Valve Index?

I suppose their VR hardware would be the exception.

SteamOS, Steam Machines and their controller all got abandoned even though they all seemed like pretty good ideas.

Re: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC

#70

Post by bob1029 »

Why did Valve get out of the AAA game development business? It seems like hardware has largely been a mistake for them. Sure, I can have 20 different variants of an x86 computer and various HMD interfaces, but if all the games suck ass what's the point?

Valve is still surfing on the inertia of their initial software-based innovations, and is only continuing to cruise along by siphoning off others in their (lightly) curated market.

How much money is sitting in the coffers at Valve Software? What practical force prevents leadership from allocating just 1% of that pile of cash to something like TF3? It almost feels like we are being intentionally suffocated by our entertainment industry these days. It's the exact same story at Blizzard/Activision, EA, etc., but at least in those cases you can blame the publicly-traded aspect of the organizations.

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