I remember one of my first thoughts on the Deck was “even if this fails commercially or can’t play any new games, I want it for old games and emulation. Even if it goes nowhere else, it would be worth it for me.”
Funny thing is, now that I have it I keep finding uses for it. Sure, some of it is “well I’ve got it now so why not?” but I didn’t expect a handheld pc of this configuration to be so handy to have around.
That’s me. Also it was based on Linux, so its not a waste of hardware, because I know a Linux operating system works well with it. I wasn’t even expecting it to play new AAA games developed for the newest console generations.
This is so important, especially as we live in an age where tech being churned out that ends up as paperweight is the norm. Being solidified in the Linux kernel we know this thing will live on for decades until in 2080 they will pull the plug on the x86 architecture and you’ll be one of the 3 people still around to remember it
I don’t think I make it to 2080, but otherwise agreed. :D
It ended up being more powerful than I thought it would be. I thought I’d just be playing some retro 2d games and really old 3d games, but it ended up running some new titles better than expected to be able to play them on the Deck.
Last night, I was playing cyberpunk without any problems. That’s pretty insane in my opinion.
I never would’ve expected a handheld console that could comfortably play Baldurs Gate 3 on an airplane. I got it for indie games, but it’s expanded beyond that for me
Running games at 800p targeting 40fps is a lot more viable than I would have expected just looking at the numbers. It looks great for a display that size and 40fps feels like it’s a lot closer to 60fps than it really is.
I get why people using it as their primary gaming device would want more power but as a secondary device for me it’s stellar.
and 40fps feels like it’s a lot closer to 60fps than it really is.
Counter-intuitively, 40fps, not 45fps, is the mid point between 30fps and 60fps, so it really is closer than what a lot of people think.
On the surface that seems impossible, but looking at frame times tells the story.
Let’s divide 1 second by 30, 40, and 60:
-
1 / 30 = 0.033s per frame
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1 / 40 = 0.025s per frame (0.08s less time per frame than 30fps)
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1 / 60 = 0.017s per frame (0.08s less time per frame than 40fps)
-
I think that perceived smoothness from 40 fps comes from the LCD screen they chose, and using a controller. Docking the deck to a monitor and using a mouse makes it much more noticeable; but running games at 720p makes it much easier to hit 60 fps.
The way I see it, is because of the controls. You have a much stronger reaction with a mouse than a joystick. Anytime you play with a mouse, the reaction time is expected to be lower because you I dictate where you want to be looking (like in am fps). The mouse acts as a view positioning device. It is not forgiving. A joystick however is a rotation device. It tells how fast you want to be moving around when looking, not where it should be looking. It is much more forgiving because you only dictate the speed of rotation. If you plugged in a mouse in your deck and played it on the deck you would immediately notice the difference I imagine. I think the trackpads do bring some aspects of the mouse to the deck too in that regard.
But yeah, my takeaway is, with a joystick you don’t need that tight of a latency as with a mouse.
I love this so much. It reminds me of how AMD Threadripper came to be.
Apparently Threadripper was a skunkworks project by some of the engineers at AMD that they worked on in their spare time. They wanted to see if they could basically slap together a bunch of normal CPU dyes into on mega chip with a high speed/bandwidth interposer connecting them together.
It was almost abandoned and they had to fight to get it taken seriously. But it proved to be a viable product, and singlehandedly was responsible for decimating what was left of Intel’s place in the HEDT market so badly, that after several years of failed attempts to keep up, Intel officially announced that they wouldn’t be competing in that space anymore.
It’s such a cool thing when talented and passionate people come together without having to be subject to strict marketability and just try to create something awesome and revolutionary.
The Steam Deck kicked off an entire new market for handheld gaming devices that had real power to play modern PC games. And despite a bunch of competing and copycat products, the Steam Deck is still king.
I love mine, have close to 200 hours on it, which for me is a ton. I’ve barely gamed on my main PC in the last year, it’s just so much more comfortable to play on the couch or in my bed.
It’s just too bad that AMD is also not competing in the HEDT space now, leaving no reasonable options whatsoever
and that’s the secret to a good product
And it’s why I hate capitalism as a consumer.
“People need an incentive to invent things!”
Well, if that incentive is making money instead of making a great thing, it’s probably not going to be a great thing. Great things make money.
Oh hey, that’s why I hate capitalism as an engineer. The endless pursuit of profit first rather than making good things that people want is disheartening as someone who just wants to make things that make life better
Listen. We need you to shave another $0.13 off the cost of the unit. Just like, reduce the quality a bit. No end user will ever notice.
3D printing is such a boon for this. You can make things for yourself put it online for free, and other people can also make it. There’s no need for a profit incentive. I hope in the future everyone owns a 3D printer.
Exactly, if you want a good product, have the developers make what “they” want. Usually works out.
This may work if the developer is a possible client too like in this case. But I feel that’s the exception.
Do what the clients want and not what developers, designers or management want.
my point was more broad. most products are design based on what the “market” wants, instead of what the individual making it wants. thus results in a diluted product that does too many things and all poorly
That’s how you end up with Arch Linux.
In the early days I thought it would be some niche gimmick that would never take off. Turns out it wasn’t and it’s the best handheld gaming machine ever made.
It feels good to be wrong!
To be fair I have invested in a lot of their “niche gimmicks that will never take off”. I’ve owned the steam link and the OG steam controller (my dad still uses that controller to game, he really likes it). I love the steam deck but none of the handhelds have the right ergonomics for my little hands except the Switch, and so I use mine docked. But even then it’s a game changer not needing a huge gaming rig to play games.
I adore mine. Not the best for GPU-intensive games like Elden Ring or Resident Evil 4 remake… But for essentially everything else it’s just the best.
Minecraft, 90fps Balatro, Slay The Spire, Binding of Isaac and similar… 90fps Dark Souls 1-3 - 90fps!
Very, very happy.
How are you playing DS1 at 60+ fps on your steam deck? I thought the game was limited to 60
Sorry that’s a mistake I made from happily typing ‘90’. You’re quite right, it’s capped at 60.
PTDE can be played above 60 through DSFix with minor physics bugs.
Remastered cant as all the logic is tied to the fps.
I only have a switch because of my nephew. It hardly gets any use otherwise. Then i found balantro and now it’s basically a balantro machine. I do wish i had a steam deck instead of a switch.
I’ll be real, before the Steam Deck existed, I was toying around with the idea of either building something basically like it, or how to slap a Steam Link into that kind of formfactor (3d printer, breadboard shenanigans, etc.)
Was very pleasantly surprised when Valve announced exactly what I wanted. Have been happy with it ever since.
When I heard of it, I was wondering who that was for and what was even the point. Since I got mine, I barely play on my desktop PC anymore. I really didn’t expect to live it this much.
This is a shared experience.
Every single person in my circle gave the biggest wtf to it and when they finally got it, talk about how they rarely use their gaming PC.
still loving and using it. grabbed bf1942 from the archive.org, now playing in lan with friendo and 255 bots. epic joy.
Old games from archive.org always seem more fun than newer games. Doom is SO FUN and it was made in 1993!
That’s how all products should be
While you’re all here what controller do you use for your deck? Been thinking of getting one of the hall effect 8bitdo ones, but I’m open to trying anything.
I second the recent PlayStation controllers. My friend gave me an extra PS4 controller he had and it’s basically a Deck controller minus the back buttons and a track pad. Works fine for most games I play with it, but I’m primarily a M&K guy.
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Some people like a lighter weight and different grips. Lots of cases have a kickstand where you can prop up the deck and use your favorite controller.
Can’t it also dock to a TV or monitor?
Yes
If you have a dock. Maybe I’ve been unlucky but I don’t recommend the official dock. Every time I want to use the deck in a docked mode I have to rewire everything in the correct order to get the dock to output a normal resolution. Wire it in the wrong order and you either get no output or you get low resolution output with weird artifacts.
I have the thin silver JSAUX one and don’t have an issue like that, but sometimes it refuses to charge until I reseat the AC adapter.
This is the dock I have. I’ve never had the issue you mentioned, but I also don’t take it on the go a lot.
I’ve used multiple docks and never had this issue on the official one. Do you have this issue on other docks, or just the official one?
I would guess it’s a software issue on the device rather than some kind of compatibility problem
Actually I’ve grown more fond of my ultrawide monitor and I don’t really couch game anymore, so I haven’t bothered to troubleshoot why it does that.
I agree that my specific issue is an uncommon one as it took a bit of digging on the web to find a working solution, and that alone isn’t an indication that the official dock is bad. The purpose of my comment was to shed light on the fact that it’s not as plug and play as the Switch dock is. You can’t just buy the official dock and expect everything to work.
Maybe a third party dock works better. I don’t really know, but it’s something to look into when you plan to buy a dock for the deck.
Oh I see. It definitely can be plug and play but you are right that there is a chance for it to have some quirks. I think it can vary from TV/monitor to what cable or version of Steam OS you’re currently on.
I only say this cause I have 2 and one is treated like a Switch. Very rarely it will fail to connect right away unless it gets restarted, which I think is related to the overarching bug that is present that people talk about.
For the most part though it is plug and play, some of the problems are the same that switch owners might run into (CEC handshake issues, something Nintendo has also released firmware updates for). But also yes, not 100% plug and play with the exceptions usually being specific hardware, sometimes because of firmware.
I use it in a dock most of the time.
I like the steam deck and use it as a controller, but you could make the same argument about the switch. Regarding the switch, my answer would be that while it is a controller, it is - IMHO - a poorly designed and uncomfortable-to-use controller.
While you and I like the ergonomics of the deck, others may not. One can hardly blame those people for wanting something they feel more usable.
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Xbox Controller.
I have the 8bitdo Pro 2 and I love it. Works great with or without a custom config, but in my opinion the config I use makes it worth it for the price.
I went ahead and ordered the hall effect version of the Pro 2. Excited to try it out!
OG steam controllers for me!
I wish they were still available
whatever controller is closest and convenient for me when i happen to sit down, or whichever one is charged lol.
I usually gravitate towards a wired xbox controller because its the one i have jurisdiction over in the household.
Strongly recommend a wireless mouse/kb with one of those couch cushions that is desk shaped. very good for playing some of the less controller-friendly games. I got a half-keyboard with a joystick on the thumbrest that i havent used yet.
I got a PS5 controller from a sale, even the touchpad works
Just got an Ultimate 2c. It doesn’t work well in some games. Specifically Sackboy, Moonstone Island
If I had another go I’d probably purchase the 8bitdo Pro 2 Hall edition as it can switch between xinput and direct input.
Isn’t that generally how Valve operates on the whole anyway? They don’t set out to make products; they just do what they want and if they actually finish it, they sell it.
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You would be surprised how much companies experiment behind the scenes, that you never see. Prototypes aren’t actually the most expensive thing, so its totally doable, especially if you have lot of engineers hyped for that. Given that the teams at Valve produced hardware before, its only normal to get money for new experiments. Also the structure at Valve is a bit different than most companies.
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Plans change and evolve. After the experiments looked good, more and more people got interested. Maybe the one guy who was successfull with previous hardware got involved and they started to see something bigger than anticipated. Its an organic growth. I mean I don’t have any internal knowledge or anything, just trying to think how it could have went.
The more I learn about Valve culture the more I realize they definitely have teams just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. I bet there are some really wild prototypes that we never get to see.
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You do not understand what you’re talking about.
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Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…
This actually is basically how Valve works.
They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.
They are a private company, not public.
That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’
(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)
(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)
…
They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.
Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over ‘its the same game in a new setting’, as well as not rushing anything.
A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.
People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.
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Steam made Valve more than $2,000,000,000 in 2021.
They have infinite money forever.
Gabe Newell runs a biotech company as well.
A couple million on a blue-sky product development pipeline is an incidental cost for the most part.
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I don’t know how you read that from what I said, or how I could have “said this as if” anything. It’s a fact that stands alone.
Do you think that devs and engineers pay for prototypes themselves?
Whatever bud, enjoy being convinced you’re right so hard that you get mad at other people I guess. I guess the end result of the steam machine project or the steam controller or the index or the vive or the steam deck and multiple people at Valve describing that’s how it works are just not real because how they came to exist at all don’t make sense to you.
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it’s frustrating and difficult to talk to you about this issue. I still am confused as to the point that you have. Feel free to continue to attempt to explain it, but I’m not interested in continuing to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
… What?
It… it goes into the company.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
They run an absurdly profitable business.
They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.
That’s after wages.
Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.
The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.
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The steam deck is making them money, that was a product developed by fucking around.
Some projects will end up being a waste of resources, but others end up printing a ton of money.
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this is how I know you’ve never created anything, lol. lots of times, you fail at making something, but you learn from those failures.
who knows what other projects they threw money at and failed, the only one I can think of rn were the steam machines.
I’m sure they learned from those mistakes, tried again, and here we are with the steam deck
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thats called R&D. I don’t personally spend millions of dollars, but I do spend money on things that never pan out but teach me a lot of lessons I can apply to my next project
If I owned a multimillion dollar company, probably yeah. There’s a limit but for a groundbreaking company the RCA labs are more a warning of “but they actually have to complete projects at some point and have direction” than a “everything needs to be rigidly directed”.
“Hey I have an idea for something I’d like to exist” is quite possibly one of the best things a business owner can hear out of an R&D engineer’s mouth. You provide oversight in accordance with the risk factors established by your financials, business plan, and how good of an idea it is. But if a bunch of them like it as a product that’s a good sign.
It’s not as strict as you are trying to make it out to be. My favorite job ever was a small company. The owner was fine with us programmers just working on pet projects on company time. I was goofing around at some point and ended up writing us some code that ended up being kind of a workshop for some code that us programmers would have to sit and work on. It allowed non-programmers to set up the same conditions and handled the ‘code’ part internally. It was all because I was just goofing around with program ideas and eventually got to that point where I had my eureka moment. I didn’t set out to waste company time and money, but the end result paid off in droves, which is exactly how it sounds like the deck came to be. Another programmers goofy side project turned into an accounting package that we ended up tying into our actual product. If our boss/owner had been looking at it the way you are describing, none of that would have come to fruition, but look at all the money he would have saved not letting us programmers do what we did. /s
It’s not a waste of resources if you learn something. Think of this as research rather than product development. You can try many things (from VR, to miniaturised computers, to cloud gaming, controllers with wonky form factors…) to see what results in a good experience. You don’t need to get anywhere near a full fledged product to understand those things, so the waste of resources isn’t massive anyway.
I’d bet at the moment people decided “this is useful, I even want this for me, so let’s turn it into a product” the steam deck looked more like a screen, a gamepad and a raspberry pi all taped together or jammed into a 3d printed prototype chassis.
If people have spare capacity to work on these projects, the material cost at such a point can be under <5k which is peanuts for a company like Valve.
Found the Buisness major
That user legitimately spends all day posting pedantic BS lmao, this is hilarious.
Literally the archetype of le Reddit neckbeard to a tee, Christ what a loser
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… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.
I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.
EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.
Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?
Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?
… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?
… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?
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Nothing worth doing is ever worth doing just for money. You’ll never innovate if you never put time into projects simply for practice, or better still, enjoyment.
Good thing you weren’t working at steam, huh.
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That’s pretty much the point. The steam deck was a huge success, but the only reason it could exist and be such a success was because they had the freedom to do what they liked and not worry about management with attitudes like yours.
When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…
Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.
Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.
Valve’s position allows them to do this.
Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.
As a certain wise old man once said:
“These things, they take time.”
It really shows, because it’s just a well thought out, no compromises device. I’m still crossing my fingers hoping that they’re getting somewhere with the steam controller 2 prototypes that I’m sure they’re playing with if only for shits and giggles
The first one didn’t sell that well, so doubt it. Which is a shame, since it’s the best controller I ever had. If they removed the buttons and put in a joystick (or removed the right Gaben nipple) it would’ve been perfect.
Imo I think the steam controller didn’t take off because it relied so hard on the touch pads (the touchpads also clicked, which I didn’t like). Now with the steam deck it adds two real joysticks, and pressure sensitive touchpads which are so much better. So if they were to make a steam controller 2 it should have two joysticks as well as two touchpads. Pretty much all they have to do is make the steam deck without the screen.
I would buy that, multiple even
But so many people have decks now, it would make sense to market a dedicated controller for docked mode. At least that’s what I’m desperately hoping for.
I got one to replace the Xbox that I’ve had hooked up to my tv’s since gen 1… absolutely no regrets.
I have a 14+hr travel day coming up in the next couple months and it’s going to get it’s first work out as a portable, lol.
I am impressed with how many games are now playable on Linux with Proton and how well they look and play, to think this game meanwhile has graphics glitches on the PS5. I might get one myself.
It’s also what got me to finally go linux full-time.
I had tried to a couple times before, but always ran into one too many snags.
When the deck was announced I thought to myself “that can’t work with every game, can it?” as I’d attempted that myself.
But I had to see for myself, and the improvements in proton were staggering. And it’s gotten even better since! Who would have though Apex Legends, Hunt Showdown, and a bunch of other holdouts and anti-cheat games would be running on linux within a year of the deck releasing?
it’s the year of linux on the toilet!
My toilet runs FreeBSD.
oh yeah? my bidet runs plan 9
Just flush its cache regularly.
