A particularly fun bit:
So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits “tens of millions of users” that it “would actually make sense to support it”. We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that’s sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?
The article says “no need for steam deck 2”. Valve is on record saying they wouldn’t do an incremental upgrade, they want to wait until there’s a major advance in the available technology.
Good. The only thing I imagine as being better, would be a framework like way to upgrade it.
Or it being 5 years in the future with significantly more efficient SOC’s and batteries
That being said, the Nintendo DS’s last US patents should expire in November. Maybe they could do a dual screen?
Homer’s car
Why not 3 screens and a rear touchpad and a mic for blowing into and a camera attachment and a detachable keyboard and detachable left and right controls and a side crank and proprietary memory cards with their own screen and…
Yes to all. Just want to know what I can use the side crank for?
Winding up your hadouken.
And what would that help with?
Are you telling me you don’t use multiple screens while gaming?
That would be absolutely wonderful. If they could somehow future-proof their board design even if you had to have tech skills to replace it, enthusiasts could do it on their own and people who don’t want to could take it to the local tech repair shop.
Even if they were working on it, they wouldn’t tell, otherwise a bunch of people would be waiting on the steam deck 2 instead of buying the current one.
They’re gonna make a Black Myth 2? We’ll shit, I can skip the first one.
Alternatively…
What if they might make a Steam Deck 3? Better skip the 2nd one as well.
We all know there isn’t going to be a steam deck 3. Best we can offer is a steam deck 2 episode 2.
The Deck is a beauty, but let’s face it, people would “run” to buy a deck 2. We had thousands selling their old handheald when the new oled model came out and it was barely a (very good) mid-gen upgrade.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
That’s a poor comparison, as Black Myth has just come out and games take a long time to develop. And the Steam Deck 2 literally doesn’t exist yet.
If Nintendo announced a Switch 2 tomorrow, saying it’s compatible with existing Switch games, do you think sales of the Switch would go up, or down?
Valve can be lethargic but they generally know when not to fuck with something that works.
That on its own is quite grand.
because itd be a pain for devs to optimize for a platform if said platform changes too often. one of the benefits of a console is that the platforms life is about 7-9 years so both audience and devs dont have to worry much about having to go through the decision of deciding which generation to support.
it would do a LOT of gen 1 steam deck buyers a disservice if a gen 2 one came out faster and a dev arbitrary targets the newer device as the baseline.
Once you commit to PC you’re already targeting an ever changing amount of components?
devs on pc have to decide which set of hardware to optimize for. it’s a step that they choose based on harwdare adoption trends. There is always a point where something is too hardware demanding that it would greatly hinder sales when making a decision. With a fixed hardware platform, devs have a concentrated point in hardware adoption to target.
For instance, say you developed a game where the minimum hardware requirement was slightly higher than a steam deck. If enough steam deck sales exist, the dev might have an incentive to optimize the game more just to get access to said market.
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Wasn’t the steam deck OLED the incremental upgrade? I thought they did a sight spec bump along with the screen upgrade.
yeah, but same basic parts. Same APU, smaller node. slightly faster RAM
Specs are the same, the APU is just now 6nm instead of 7nm which is more efficient and lets it run a few degrees cooler and therefore boost a bit higher without overheating, and the RAM bandwidth went from 88Gb/s to 102Gb/s.
Consensus seems to be somewhere between 5-10% better fps, which means a game that ran at 50 fps might go up to 55, or one that ran at 28 might finally hit 30.
Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.
If a vendor strangely insist on not working on a new product, it’s lying.
In this case it’s obvious, considering we already got 2 minor revisions of steamdeck HW.
What are the two revisions? I know of the OLED version but what’s the second?
I think they swapped out thumb sticks and fans at some point before OLED? It wasn’t a major thing.
Wasn’t the new motherboard released even before the OLED?
If I were them I’d be waiting for ARM based processors to catch up in terms of interoperability layers.
Okay, but, they did already do an incremental upgrade.
These new Snapdragon CPUs seem like a “major advance”, if they can get SteamOS working on them…
Also the new Ryzen AI chips are crazy efficient.
So I’d say we’re there already, but also hardware targets for devs are important.
I mean, I’m sure they have breadboards set up. It’s not like they are just sitting around waiting for manna from heaven.
I don’t know what this comment means.