Handheld PC makers are slowly losing touch with Valve's successful Steam Deck template of affordability, and that's very concerning
Handheld PC makers are slowly losing touch with Valve's successful Steam Deck template of affordability, and that's very concerning
Valve can easily sell Steam Decks with $0 profit. Can't say the same for other OEMs.
If only there was something to be done to slash the price while not losing anything important like using an OS that is FREE... But alas, there's no such thing, I guess we'll have to stick with windows, adding the license price to a hardware that is already expensive...
Technically the OS isn't free: Valve pays a team of developers to maintain the SteamOS and also donates money to Arch and Ubuntu foundations as well as to the Proton and Wine dev teams as well as contributes code to the linux kernel. All costing them money, that they eat but could easily find a way to charge the end user
I mean... bazzite? ChimeraOS? You don't need to go to steamOS to find a free linux distro that works well with games. Hell, you could even customize one based on any of those so you don't have to pay for a windows license for your products.
Technically the OS isn't free
And practically, that doesn't matter. Valve isn't charging anyone a licensing fee for the software they've developed, so as far as the cost of the device goes SteamOS is free. Just because they could charge for it doesn't change that.
Any device that come with SteamOS by default, is a device that doesn't come with both Windows and Xbox game store by default. Basically Valve isn't paying for the OS, it's paying for devices that run Steam Store by default (instead direct, unfair, competition from Microsoft)
Can Windows PC come by default with Steam Store? Of course... if Microsoft allow them to.
The only part they could realistically charge for is the Steam store access. Everything else is open source and portable
Steam has the steam store to recoup this cost. This is the same model MS and Sony follows to sell the hardware at or below mfg price.
But MSI, Asus and others don't have their own platform, so they have to sell for more to maintain their bottom line.
Do you pay to download it?
Do you need to pay for a license to use it?
If not, it's free.
Tip: (F)OSS aint free. The devs working on those programs also donate their time to the project
Who supports that?
At least Windows is only one plattform in comparison to the bazillion linux-distros.
Same issue devs face with consoles vs PCs.
Tell me you know don't jack about linux without telling me you don't know jack about linux in 25 words or less.
Steam on Linux defaults to providing a container based standard Linux environment which is independent of the underlying OS, providing access to all the expected software libraries and OS calls that games need to run.
This is integrated into SteamOS. It's also available via Steam on any other Linux distro. (And if you wanted to you could cut that part out and run it without Steam.)
When running Windows games it even runs Proton within this container environment.
That gives you a single very predictable and version controlled software environment.
Meanwhile Windows randomly deprecates stuff that somebody might have invested tons of development effort into (silverlight, mixed reality, etc)
they're also forgetting the touchpads. the touchpads are so fucking good, and they add so much usability and flexibility. so much, I think, that no amount of superior performance, resoution, or battery life can make up for the lack of them.
That title is cringe as fuck. There's nothing concerning about it at all. Market saw Steam Deck's success so they dove in. Whether they survive is dependent on if they provide good price points or justification for a higher price. Super simple.
I mean there will be customers for those products, I just don't get why they're leaving the mass appeal demographic on the table
Sell 15K units at 900 a pop, or sell 150K units at 500 a pop...
We don't know the margins on these things but I'd think that higher volume sales would be better. But what do I know.
I suspect they don't have the means to produce higher volumes, or aren't willing to take that risk
I just want something that I can play up to say Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 level emulation
I dunno what this article is on about, you can find thousands of those from the likes of Anbernic, Powkiddy, Miyoo, Retroid, etc.
It's called enshitification, we knew it was coming.
"slowly"
Nintendo can make sure their handheld has affordable hardware yet can play all their AAA games as they were meant to. Steam Deck can't ever have that luxury. Some Steam Deck makers will make expensive ones that can play most of them, some will make cheaper ones that aren't made for those games at all.
This is very difficult to explain to the casual buyer (think parents buying as a present for their kids).
This is nothing new. Before the steam deck came out, Handheld PCs have already been
overpricedexpensive. Other manufacturers haven't bothered about affordability before, during ot after the steam deck.That said, Gabe Newell said the steam deck was priced "painfully", which means they probably had very low margins on the hardware and are making it back on sales on their store. Other manufacturers do not have that luxury.
They can find some margin in using a rolling Arch distro instead of paying for Windows, Gabe helpfully provided the template that you can reuse.
I doubt Windows is the reason these are more expensive. Microsoft wants Windows in the handheld PC space, so they are likely to provide licenses for free and likely help subsidize the costs a bit, especially if they include trials for gamepass.
Which if anything is other manufacturers benefiting from the R&D that Valve have done with Proton and just making it freely available to anyone.
I am not aware that you are able to use SteamOS on anything that isnt an AMD CPU and GPU (only APU?).
If it's not yet generally available for any hardware combination it would be very tempting to switch.
Already used the desktop of the deck quite a bit to customize some behaviour (automatic start of syncthing after (game-mode) boot to sync save states to my PC, EmuDeck, emulators in general)
Steam Deck hits a sweet spot. You can make it more powerful, but it'll cost significantly more. You can make it cheaper, but you'll cut out too many games people want to play.
Also, anything like this with a resolution higher than 720p is wasting pixels and GPU power, IMO.
I wouldnt call devices like the GPDwin overpriced considering it's probably lower volume production and niche use case.
But they are overpriced in direct performance comparison.