Would’ve been an instant win for me if I could do a Switch-style hookup to the TV. Without that, it’s just another limited mobile gaming console.
There is a dock available for this purpose.
Valve Steam Deck
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Re: Valve Steam Deck
#422Typo in the title. It’s “Steam Deck”, not “Steam Desk”. Interesting that Valve is diving deeper into hardware. Remember when they still made video games? Remember when there was still a hope they would some day release Half-Life 3?
Haha, I read it and wondered why they put a computer in a desk. Buy a desk, get a free computer! What?!
Fixed now. (At one point the title on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27847007 said "Desk".)
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's much less than 3x the weight of a Switch. They list it at 670g and a Switch with Joycons attached is about 400g.
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Re: Valve Steam Deck
#424Won't these guys get in trademark trouble with Elgato's "Stream Deck" which is also a piece of hardware targeted at the gaming market?
Don't think so. Steam in this market segment is well known enough name. So they are very likely to get away naming anything Steam something.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#425Maybe a mod can correct the title to "Steam Deck". This post made me think Valve had introduced a second product, Steam Desk, in addition to Steam Deck.
Yes, fixed now.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#426First 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…
> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly. This makes buying the model with limited storage a bit of a no-brainer. I'm glad Valve supports external storage.
In my opinion, unless you only want to play extremely lightweight games (like less than 50 megabytes to load) such as older retro games, the SSD is a requirement.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't see why they would, they'd be on the hook for service costs as well.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#428I wonder what this might mean for the Valve Index. I mean, 1.6TFlops is still far from an RTX 2080 (10.1 TFlops), by a factor of 10, but still…
>>> 1280 * 800/(3840 * 2160)
0.12345679012345678
Assuming ideal scaling with resolution, this should be similar (or better) in terms of performance as playing in 4k on 2080
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The tech page says that it weighs "Approx. 120 grams" [1] Is this information incorrect? 1. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech edit: crtl-f mistake, that's the docking station
That's the docking station.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#430There’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 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.