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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
111–120 of 327 posts
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power li…
I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW, not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.
Valve–Roku merger. Someone buys a Steam Machine that they keep in the living room for both general purpose computering and as an HTPC that never, ever runs a game purchased from the Steam store, but they still make money. Easy peasy.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve: the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring native PC gaming to MACs.
The Nintendo Switch already provides >160 million reasons for gamedevs to care about native ARM support, but that hasn't moved the needle for the Mac. Being ARM-based is the least of its problems, the problem is that it's a relatively tiny potential market owned by a company which is actively hostile to the needs of game developers.
The switch is underpowered to the point that most A(AA) games cannot run on it without a ton of effort and compromise, an M chip powered device would be a different story. But anyway it's never going to happen, just daydreaming about a perfect gaming setup...
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#114I wonder if they(valve) sponsor servo
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Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail. But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
> and give refunds so they get a free pass. They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.
Also, competing stores like EA's Origin had a pretty friendly refund policy before Valve did, helping to put some pressure on Valve.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games... They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract t…
They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.
they're already effectively doing this by selling the deck at a loss
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
It's different definitions of "easy." With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes…
From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.
The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.
I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#118> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS. Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront. Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community. Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing…
They did the thing. Let’s judge their actions (which they have plenty of good and bad)
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#119Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#120Considering all this work is open-source, could some third party make a Qualcomm Snapdragon based handheld console, if Valve decides not to make a Steam Deck Mini? I really loved the idea of the Steam Deck, but I'd prefer to play something that's more like the size of a PSP or a Switch Lite at most.
There's already a ton of Snapdragon based handheld consoles, they're mainly marketed for retro system emulation but you can do whatever you want on them. They usually run Android out of the box though, not plain Linux.
And in fact, are able to play Windows games already with Winlator or GameHub. Performance is getting impressive as well, with newer chips like the Snapdragon 8 Elite.