Valve Launches Steam Deck, a $400 PC Gaming Portable (techcrunch.com) 110
A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go. From a report: The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD.
[...] Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There's a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve's numbers.
[...] Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There's a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve's numbers.
Can't keep a good controller down. (Score:2)
A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience.
Ah so that's what happened to all those Steam Controllers.
the pic is an joke bigger then the screen (Score:2)
the pic is an joke bigger then the screen.
That is just begging for an bigger screen.
Also only one port that also changes at least have + HDMI
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I could be wrong but wouldn't plugging it into a properly configured USB-C monitor pretty much solve all the expansion issues?
Re:the pic is an joke bigger then the screen (Score:4, Informative)
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It sounds like there could at least potentially be compatibility concerns due to it being Linux.
Which century are you living in? Not the same century as me. In this century, Linux is the go to OS for hardware compatibility and Windows is the one that keeps obsoleting your hardware by breaking the driver APIs so the manufacturer needs to write new drivers for each Windows version and often doesn't bother, or can't because the original coders are long gone.
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Right, there are apparently power management issues with some, these hubs drawing an unexpectedly high amount of power. But there are plenty on the "works perfectly" list and it won't be long before the stragglers get covered.
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Good price (Score:4, Insightful)
This is far from the first type of this device GPD and some others have been making them for years. But considering the specs, $400 is pretty damn good. They seem to go for $700-1000 otherwise: https://www.theverge.com/circu... [theverge.com]
Personally though I'm way past caring about something like this. I do still play games of course but it's very easy to just read a book or do something else when I'm not at home, and just play the games when I'm at my desktop PC rather than paying a grand to struggle with shitty performance, small screen, and suboptimal controls.
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The other point is that the other devices come with Windows. It means better game compatibility. But, the fact that this is rocking SteamOS means Steam can better optimiz
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Oh wow, I overlooked the 64 gigs, Zen, RDNA 2, and 16 gigs of RAM seemed great so I didn't even consider they could go with 64 gigs as base, whcih is enough for maybe one game nowadays if you're lucky.
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Itch without the Sw (Score:2)
However, at that point you'd have to decide if it's worth it over a Switch.
I guess it depends on whether the games you want to play are on Steam or Itch.io or on Nintendo Switch, and whether you prefer to play them vanilla or modded. Switch [officially] uses a software whitelist, doesn't allow game mods, and isn't really interested in a studio's first three commercial titles. If you're fine with that and are interested in Nintendo first-party games, then go ahead and get a Switch. Otherwise, Steam Deck is your product.
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I was thinking, those devices, the best application for them, streaming devices. You know, serve up Netflix and Disney and well, the internet, to a big screen TV, need to up the resolution, but it hugely expands the market. They are really good portable TV streaming devices, all in the one thing, plug a usb lead into a power point and charging less of an issue.
You need to be able to hook those things up to big screen TVs like yesterday and support all the streaming apps and of course the rest of the interne
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PS I just looked at it from another view point, not as a portable game console but what would be the perfect big screen TV accessory, like the number one big screen accessory and that's the kind of device, interesting. All in one big screen control console, touch screen keyboard, all sorts of controls and picture heh heh out of picture. and it can play games. Use it in the lounge and in the bedroom, just carry it on over. Just another app on the device subject to achievable output resolution on the big scre
Netflix and Disney DRM compatible with libdrm? (Score:2)
I guess it's a matter of whether these video streaming services can make their DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) compatible with libdrm (Direct Rendering Manager). It might prove difficult because a free software stack doesn't meet DRM system's robustness rules [wikipedia.org]. I know these streaming apps are alongside games and tax software in the major categories of software that keeps people using proprietary applications on a proprietary OS [pineight.com].
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Someone emailed Gabe Newell about the storage and he replied that all 3 models just use 2230 form factor drives so if you get the 64 GB version and want more storage you can just pull out the eMMC 64 GB drive and slap as big a 2230 as you can find in it instead.
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To be fair they offer a 1/3 more expensive option with SSD.
So while eMMC and SD card storage will suffice for some people those wanting to install 80GB of something badly ported from consoles and needing lots of disk access will have that option.
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I'm wondering why it has a Ryzen 2 CPU (current gen is Ryzen 5). If they had just gone to someone like GPD to OEM it for them they could have had a more up-to-date system, with better battery life and performance to boot.
In fact I'm surprised they can even get Ryzen 2 parts now, must be some deal with AMD for long term support because I'm sure AMD would rather be making newer stuff.
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Presumably they're getting it cheap AF, and they don't care about the performance because they assume that you own a real PC to do the heavy lifting, and can stream games to it across your network.
I think that $300 is the acceptable price point for something like this though, because of those low specs. A $100 tablet with a split controller would do the same job, essentially. But frankly, I don't see people paying more than $400 for something in this class anyway when just another $300 or so will get you a
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It's a Zen 2 CPU, not Ryzen 2 - that's the architecture my Ryzen 9 3900X is based on, as well as the current XBone and PayStation generation...
64 GB model is a joke (Score:3)
I just want to point out that having 64 GB of storage on a mini-PC designed to play modern games is a bit of a joke. The even bigger joke is that Valve only stuck a UHS-I microSD port on it. You can only get up to 104 MB/sec read speeds at half-duplex, which is slower than an HDD. They couldn't even offer UHS-III support, which is up to 624 MB/sec at full-duplex, which is SATA SSD speeds. So you are basically forced to suffer read speeds slower than even a 5400 rpm HDD if you buy the base model.
Re:64 GB model is a joke (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure. Have you tried twitch gaming via Steam remote play over wifi?
No, I'll stick to games I can install on the device itself.
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You're going to twitch stream a game installed on a handheld console not designed for serious gaming? What's wrong with you?
No actually I'm glad you're here. Please keep going. I enjoy reading all the insane things you come up with which absolutely zero people would ever attempt to do. Let's hear some more of them.
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Twitch gaming and twitch streaming are two different things.
Twitch streaming is when you share a stream of your game online.
Twitch gaming refers to a style of gaming in which player reactions are integral to the gameplay, usually requiring a degree of precision and skill in the reaction responses.
I'm sure you can appreciate that network lag causes an additional layer of difficulty when reaction time is a factor.
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I think thegarbz just fell into the generation gap.
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Ahh right. Well I'm sure no one here is going to be playing competitive sports for monetary award on them. On the flip side streaming using Steam remote play is perfectly fine on Wifi networks even for FPS games or others which require fast reaction.
The compression and retransmission problem is dead. It has proven unfounded even in some very critical applications such as VR where the delay of an arriving image would result in motion sickness.
Now that I know what you're talking about, yes "twitch gaming" (fi
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Adequate does not mean 'well', and there's a substantial difference in performance and resultant gameplay if you're hosting the game locally, connected to a remote server via wifi, versus streaming the game from a remote server over wifi.
Steam remote play on wifi networks is not viable for competitive online play, which many gamers enjoy without needing to go professional.
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The latest Call of Duty won't install on a PC with 256GB SSD so I imagine it won't install on here either.
Depends on what games you play (Score:3)
For modern AAA games, 64GB is likely too small indeed, but if you play mostly indie games, you can fit a lot of them in 64GB. You don't really need an APU as powerful as this for those games, but the Steam Deck might still be more attractive than for example a Switch if you already have a gaming PC, since you don't have to re-buy the games and you can sync your saves between machines.
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I like indie games, I shun AAA crap, I have over 1.4tb of games installed. 512GB is a joke...
2TB NVME = $213 https://www.newegg.com/western... [newegg.com]
So 512gb for $250 more is just a cash grab.
64GB is utterly dumb when there are many many individual games now that will not fit in that space. It's like some idiot marketing drone decided what capacities to sell.
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Having not read the specs, my first reaction to you title was "Why? That seems like a pretty decent amount of RAM... oh."
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For AAA stuff sure, but there's plenty of great smaller games out there.
Like... Valheim is only 2GB. Surviving Mars is 6GB. Civ VI is 16GB.
If they didn't offer it this small, there'd be people complaining they don't want to pay for a bunch of space they're not going to use.
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Of the 188 games I have installed on my main gaming PC just two consume more than 64GB of disk space. One of those includes around 30GB of mods.
Another game needs 60GB so may not install but the other 185? No problem at all.
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give this 25 years
Pointless (Score:1)
If they want to make a splash they should be launching a streaming service that lets people play their games remotely, either from the cloud or from their own PC. Sort of like NVidia Now but with better integration to Steam. It's kind of mind boggling they haven't already.
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> They tried that years ago and it flopped. What has changed since?
Nintendo Switch.
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Yes. It does.
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Nope. Still makes a huge difference, just the reporting alone accounts for that.
Nothing wrong with being skeptical about it, I mean the price tag is pretty high, but your assertions are just lazy.
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This is a serious contender for the Switch/PS Vita space. It has joysticks, it has a reasonable shape, it's got triggers and grips, it's got the usual letter/shape buttons..
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Re:Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, you might be missing one tiny, tiny little thing...
It's some cobbled together half assed device with access to your steam library on the go. And if you don't think that's a big deal, you apparently don't know what steam is or how big some of our libraries are.
I would have multiple years of games to play if I bought this, without spending any additional money on games. How much is that worth?
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As opposed to the Switch or PS Vita, where games magically appear installed if you decide you want to play them midway through a trans-Pacific flight?
Oh, and sure, 20GB+ games on public wifi could be tricky. 20GB+ games on my mobile phone's 4G connection? Viable.
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My steam library is very small, mostly free and sub £5 games, because I feel very nervous about having my games tied to something that Valve could take away with little recourse. People have been wrongly banned for stuff like cheating in the past due to unusual set-ups, or if their account gets hacked, for example.
If you buy an individual game you are at worst out that one game. If you buy on Steam you can lose your entire library in one hit.
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You mean like Steam Link where you can do all that, built into the Steam software for no cost?
Streaming games is still a stupid idea, as far as I'm concerned, and I own a hardware Steam Link, built my own SteamOS machine when it first come out, and have the networking know how to do anything that my machines can do from anywhere in the world.
And I don't remember them trying a handheld. They tried SteamOS boxes. Which they gave away for free and people made themselves, so it was hard to sell them to them.
Questionable Design Choices (Score:1)
Those trackpads aren't going to be the subject of accidental swipe gestures or anything.
How many times has someone gotten a new laptop and then complained to the technology minded person of the family about how their cursor seems to jump around randomly? And how often is the explanation that their palms are touching the trackpad while typing?
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Valve Game Room? (Score:3)
If they design a multi-projector, multi-wall system for surround gaming, will it be called the Steam Room?
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Valve Sauna?
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PC Master Race (Score:2)
The REASON that we say PC Master Race is because of keyboard+mouse. Many/most games are ported between consoles and PC if there is a demand for them.
If I wanted to play a handheld, I'd get a handheld. My steam library of PC games ... will be played on a PC, with a keyboard and mouse. I don't want a controller experience for my PC gaming.
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I honestly thought the only reason people say "pc master race" was because they're idiots (or maybe parodying idiots?). Why would having a keyboard+mouse lead you to use a phrase like "master race"?
It comes from first-person shooters, where the character turn rate is directly tied to the mouse input, rather than being limited by a physics engine. A mouse shooter can turn to aim drastically faster than a joystick shooter, who is crippled with a maximum turn rate dictated by the software responding to maximum stick displacement. That turn rate is always lower than what can be done with a mouse because the tactile feedback of a physical mouse motion allows experts to achieve incredible accuracy. That
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The other thing that sets PC games apart, probably even to a bigger extent, is that you can mod them and run your own servers on a PC.
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> PC Master Race is because of keyboard+mouse
That's one of them. 144+ FPS, higher quality visuals, and more genres are some of the other reasons.
> will be played on a PC, with a keyboard and mouse. I don't want a controller experience for my PC gaming.
I use the far superior M+K too but there are some games I play with a gamepad such as platformers and (arcade) driving games -- such as Ori and the Blind Forest and Forza Horizon 4. I also use a driving wheel + shifter + pedals when playing the simrace
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I used a joystick on my PC in the 80s. I've used a controller and a steering wheel and a joystick for the past couple of decades.
I have options. I use those options. Keyboard and mouse are awful for flight simulators, lack the analogue control a wheel offers for driving simulators and just can't match a controller for some other games. Keyboard and mouse are also the best option for multiple entire genres.
Why would a PC gamer constrain themselves to just one input approach? If I want to play a handheld this
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As a member of the PC master race, allow me to say:
I use the most appropriate controller for the game in question.
I used joysticks for some games back in the ZX Spectrum days. Others I used the keyboard.
I have used joysticks, steering wheels, flight sticks, gamepads, keyboards and mice throughout my PC gaming years. Because although you can play a race game with keyboards (and I'm better at it than most people using steering wheels), having the proper analogue control is necessary to really perform at you
Arch Linux (Score:3)
So they expect their players to play it with Steam OS 3 which is based on Arch Linux with KDE and Proton !? What about the average windows player who will be upset because game X doesn't work well on his or her expensive device
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I assume you're expected to stream most of your games off your actual Windows PC. (I mean, the base configuration has 64GB of storage. You're not downloading a lot of games onto that.)
But I dunno, maybe they'll be able to convince developers to make Linux (or more likely Steam OS-only) ports of their games.
Re:Arch Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Proton allows for many windows steam games to work on Linux. And there are already native Linux games. So i don't think steam OS wouldn't be compatible with the most common distros. But i wonder what would people play on these devices.
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Proton allows for many windows steam games to work on Linux. And there are already native Linux games. So i don't think steam OS wouldn't be compatible with the most common distros. But i wonder what would people play on these devices.
Ultimately these devices will be limited, there are a huge number of steam games and only a few of them run on Linux. Sure a few thousand, but that is compared to the many hundreds of thousands of games.
I'm a PC gamer so I probably wont buy one but I see what they're meant for and hope they do well (despite Valves less than stellar forays into hardware in the past). This is the point of the PCGMR, you have choice when it comes to hardware (and software), you're not forced into a single configuration, if a
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For some time now Steam has marked on their store whether a game is Linux compatible or not. So I expect Steam will put out some kind of notice saying that only Linux / SteamOS compatible games will work. Which fortunately is quite a lot thanks to all the work they have been putting into Proton [protondb.com]. I for one hope that this takes off and pushes more companies to support Linux, even if it is only via Proton.
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I quote from their video https://youtu.be/5Q_C5KVJbUw?t... [youtu.be]
Our goal is for every game to work by the time we ship Steam Deck
So they obviously have some huge plans for Proton that they haven't announced yet.
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What about the average windows player who will be upset because game X doesn't work well on his or her expensive device
Fuck 'em. Oh wait, that's harsh. Better: they can go whine to the game dev about doing a proper Linux port. Creative whining - there's a use for everybody, no matter much they love running spyware crashware virus magnet Windows.
Chances are their favorite game will work perfectly under Proton anyway, and if it doesn't that's just pure incompetence on the part of the game dev and they should fix it.
A lot of Proton incompatibility is anti-cheat (Score:2)
Chances are their favorite game will work perfectly under Proton anyway, and if it doesn't that's just pure incompetence on the part of the game dev and they should fix it.
Or that the game's anti-cheating framework is relying on obscure behaviors of genuine Windows to distinguish authentic kernel-mode software from software that has been modified to allow cheating in competitive multiplayer matches.
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So in other words, software that is pure flaky crap might have issues. Gotcha.
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What about the average windows player who will be upset because game X doesn't work well on his or her expensive device
They would use Steam remote play from a Windows machine which is kind of one of the core uses for this device...
Burn it with fire! (Score:1)
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Ah, yes, the Steam Controller, I remember that. It worked surprisingly well right up until I tried to use it to play a game, and then I put it down and never picked it up again.
If you don't like the Steam Controller, good news! The touchpad on this Steam Deck thing is the same touchpad that was on the Steam Controller! But now there are two of them, so that's why the d-pad is some place where your thumb can't reach without twisting your hand.
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Physical joysticks are incredibly inaccurate for aiming, that's why all console shooters have autoaim, and a large part of the reason that PC-vs-console matchups pretty much always end in an ignominious stomping of the console player.
I have a lot more confidence that touchpad issues will be worked out than joysticks will ever get better.
Not all shooters are first-person (Score:2)
that's why all console shooters have autoaim
Do Gradius, Recca, Darius, Ikaruga, and Espgaluda have autoaim?
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Are they console shooters? Then probably.
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If you don't know Darius and Gradius then get off my lawn
They're actual shooters, not FPSes. Which makes them irrelevant to the current discussion. But they are enormously well-known titles...
Jesus (Score:2)
That thing looks massive! It appears to be the size of a keyboard.
RC base station! (Score:2)
I trust this unit is properly hackable. I'll buy a stack of them for radio control base stations. Lovely piece of hardware at that price, I can think of lots of uses beyond gaming.
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Its just a Debian machine (Steam OS).
No need to "hack" it.
You can wipe it and put any other x86 OS on it too.
No DRM on it, aside from their app.
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What I meant: no lockdown on the bootloader.
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Also, no encrypted hard drive (unless that's what I want...)
This was the single issue that made me swear off Sony and their misbegotten crap proprietary software... the encrypted hard drive . This prevented me from moving the perfectly standard hard drive from a broken box (they do break...) to a new one. Or put in a bigger hd of my own choice. Just fuck you, Sony, and goodbye forever.
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Actually, I think this new 3.0 version (codename "clockwerk") is based on Arch...
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An Arch machine, actually. They changed for Steam OS 3.
Ugh (Score:2)
Quantum AMD RX42069 Raytrace Five-Core 5400mhz 4nm GPU CPU blah blah blah, it used to be you could easily discern the power of hardware but now it's much more difficult as the speed of light is a factor in optimization now, and those nanometers make an increasingly bigger difference the closer you get to zero. I'd rather a prebuiltsystem like this would pick five games of varying heaviness on CPU, GPU, and RAM and say how many frames and ticks it gets under its most extreme circumstances.
LOTD via a handheld! (Score:2)
Steam Deck should make a dandy SFF Linux PC.
It bypasses intermediate categories of notebook and tablet while conveniently offering opposite extremes. Phones aren't good desktop replacements yet but Steam Deck running desktop Linux or Windows should have that more than covered. It's fast enough to run other Windows versions or Linux distros in virtual machines.