301–310 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arch is a surprising choice because of their rolling release schedule. How will software updates for Steam Deck work? Will Valve just snapshot Arch at a random time, and then stabilize it?
my guess is pretty much what manjaro does. i was surprised to see its running kde. i thought they just woulda launched a steam frontend and that's that.
First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it'll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn't matter much. Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart mov…
One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions. edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra w…
Battery: 40Whr battery. 2 - 8 hours of gameplay Having the battery as low as 2hrs is brutal. I know the early Switch consoles weren't much better running AAA titles like BoTW but they've revised the chipset a few times since, and newer models floor at ~4.5hrs (3hrs for the lite). I'm all for more competition, but I'm not clear on who the intended audience is for this device.
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 becom…
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.
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.
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 becom…
> 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…
I find its really hard to beat the convertible laptop form factor in general
I really hope that this market picks up steam (heh) and we get to see even more bigger names coming up with devices. The Aya Neo [1], OneXPlayer [2], and GPD Win3 [3] have all come out relatively close to each other with different ideas of what people want in a handheld gaming PC. Valve seems to want to get in on a price that is more competitive with the Nintendo Switch, so its hardware specs are a bit worse it seems…
I'm surprised they went with a custom AMD part. Seems expensive for what is likely to be a low volume product. Why not just do a laptop in a handheld form factor.
This looks like it will trounce the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo doesn't even have new hardware in the pipeline other than an iterative OLED screen. Now that Nintendo depends on a single portable console, is there a risk that they'll go the way of Sega?
This will trounce the Nintendo Switch as soon as Pokemon, Zelda, Mario Kart, and Smash Bros are released on Steam. Which is to say "never."
Gotta admit, I never saw that coming. I thought SteamOS was dead after the failure of Steam Machines and Valve was only continuing with their Linux efforts because it's still a useful hedge against Microsoft locking everyone in the App Store. I totally did not expect them to copy the Switch use-case with it. I'm anxious to see how this turns out. Valve's history with hardware is not so great, so it could go nowhere l…