Steam Frame starts at $1059 • Hacker News Board

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#651

Post by iririririr » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #390

iririririr wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

valve whole business model is invasive drm tho. far from claiming they are as low as meta, but that is their business model which never gets mentioned in this comparison, leaving readers to confuse gabe newel with RMS as some freedom authority

DRM isn't really the story with Valve. Their business model is offer good service. Part of that is not being hostile to users. Users don't want to be spied on and have their data sold, so Valve doesn't do that. People want autonomy over their hardware, so they give them that. It's even in their marketing material for the steam machine. The frame is a computer running arch. If you want to 100% opt out of Steam and wri…

valve service is terrible! they just have first mover monopoly advantage. absolutely fan boyism thinking they have good service.

steam was and always will be awful. they just publish whatever the game studio sends them. try installing gta V from steam... you get Two Launchers besides steam! all three ad ridden.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#652

Post by iririririr » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #500

iririririr wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

valve whole business model is invasive drm tho. far from claiming they are as low as meta, but that is their business model which never gets mentioned in this comparison, leaving readers to confuse gabe newel with RMS as some freedom authority

> valve whole business model is invasive drm As much as I like gog and their game distribution model and buy most games there, this is a huge exaggeration and actually false. A game studio/publisher does not have to use DRM in steam and many of them don't. Examples are Larian (baldur's gate 3), cd project red (witcher, cyberpunk), and quite a few small and big studios that don't. Basically afaik most games that are i…

valve ships ad ware launchers from ea et al. they don't do it for free. hence...

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#653

Post by dwaite » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #134

njovin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

This machine runs Linux, it comes with KDE. This is the open Apple Vision Pro alternative that you can use as a real computer. It comes with a black and white passthrough camera but you can add on a 5K color one. There's ongoing work for a full Plasma XR mode, so you aren't restricted to a "virtual desktop" experience: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8671

I agree except for disparaging the AVP as not being a real computer while the steam frame is.

One lets you one-tap download native Microsoft Office, one runs it through a browser or via bespoke vm/wine configuration.

Instead, I'd say the difference is that both are consumer devices, AVP geared primarily toward computing while steam frame is geared primarily toward gaming, but the steam frame is open enough for you to develop upon and customize to meet whatever use case you desire.