I’m honestly surprised Valve hasn’t made an open source de-Valved SteamOS similar to what Google does with Chromium for these other devices. Valve likely isn’t making much from hardware sales alone, with most of the value for them coming from the Steam store being a mobile gaming storefront as well as moving users away from Windows where Microsoft is looking to compete with them. Getting competitors to run Linux distros with a user interface designed for mobile consoles would boost the amount of Linux gamers which would make Valve less dependent on their competitor Microsoft, make developers more keen to support Linux, and spurn further development for Linux gaming tools. These other manufacturers will without a doubt support Steam as a storefront since Steam is such a dominant force in the PC gaming market so users of these other devices would still be in Valve’s ecosystem
So, modest but capable hardware, and accessible pricing, enabled by scale and software sales. The modern handheld market might have had its roots in the revival of pocket PCs, but it’s by far at its strongest when it’s most console-like.
This is “the point” from the article, which is that we expect a portable handheld to provide an experience like a console portable handheld would, rather than a PC in a small form factor. My two cents is that I’ve found the Steam Deck’s “sleep” function to be very much like a console’s, and it’s not something that Windows does very well.
Yup. It works well enough if you know your gonna jump right back in, but god forbid you wait a couple hours it’ll be dead. I’ve just started to turn the whole thing off every time now. I wish there was a hibernation option.
You may want to look into that… mine sleeps for a day or two at least typically.
Yeah, reminds me of the original Gameboy. Weak hardware, terrible screen, great battery life, awesome first-party support, stupidly robust. Sold a hundred million or so. Up against the Game Gear and Atari Lynx, which although basically miniature consoles, had an unquenchable hunger for batteries and crap games. Complete turkeys. All of Nintendo’s other, very successful, handhelds continue the same idea; yes, a Switch is really underpowered compared to the newest Playstation, but that’s not it’s niche.
Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?
