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?
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.
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.
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.
Okay, but, they did already do an incremental upgrade.
It’s ironic that Tim Sweeney is against Linux as it would give Epic more independence from Microsoft. Doesn’t he want to avoid “gatekeepers” like Apple and Google.
He just wants the keys
I bet he has a Steve Ballmer like thinking “Linux is cancer” and cannot think beyond his preconceptions.
They did sponsor/donate to someone who got the Epic Games Launcher working through wine. Don’t remember the exact details and can’t find a link though.
I think it was a one time grant for lutris or something, not Wine. It wasn’t out of their good heart or ethical fibre. It was also a one time thing 5 years ago for so little money that it wouldn’t cover even a single developer for a single year.
In his mind Epic doesn’t need independence from Microsoft because Microsoft isn’t taking a cut of his Fortnite money. Microsoft is bad but Apple and Google take it to the next level. Imagine if Microsoft needed companies to verify their software and with that verification Microsoft can take a cut of every purchase done in that software. So if Steam was verified games sold in the steam software would cost more than opening up a steam website and buying from there. That is Google and Apple in a nutshell. That is actually the case with Twitch subs, they cost more in the Twitch app because of the fee Google adds.
Valve are one of the major reasons that Microsoft’s attempts at the iOSification of Windows failed. Their investments in Linux are directly aimed at preventing what Apple is doing.
Tim Sweeney is a freeloader depending on companies like Valve to protect him from these threats to his company.
The steam deck is user repairable, has very good hardware, is reasonably priced, and has fully customisable software.
Obviously can’t speak for everyone but those reasons are why Valve got my custom. Personally I think it’s a fantastic device and I can’t praise it enough. Buying one was a no brainer for me.
(Apologies if this reads like an ad lol)
I was on the fence for ages over whether it was going to be worth it. Thought I was taking a risk when I ordered the OLED one at release on a whim. It wasn’t a risk, the machine is incredible. I love it.
I’d like to tinker with the hardware but unfortunately it’s just not necessary. Love the device
He doesn’t actually do the calculation required to give an estimate of what that number is.
Going on the stats in the article:
- assuming that Wukong has just surpassed the revenue of Steam Deck in the chart so we can treat their revenues as equal
- assuming Wukong price is $49.99 and average Steam Deck price is $500
- using the stat that 14m copies of Wukong sold on Steam so far
that would imply ~1.4m Steam Decks sold
The article does go on to say:
Keep in mind that by November last year, Valve said the Steam Deck had already sold “multiple millions”.
So really this (very rough estimate) is telling us nothing that we didn’t know already. The top seller charts are showing exactly what we would have expected to see.
The top seller chart only covers around 2 weeks of time if I recall right, and the Steam Deck has been near the top of it for years now.
So that would make it 1.4m in the last two weeks which makes a big difference.
It would have been nice for the article to actually discuss these specifics. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take away from it.
I think Wukong is $60 ($70 for Deluxe). At least the was the PS5 price.
That first paragraph is rough
Oof, you weren’t kidding.
They’re selling well but I don’t think they’re in the tens of millions sold
I love my steam deck much more than I thought I would.
Same. I’m playing a ton more games I had previously just sorta forgotten about.
All this assumes the top selling list is automatically generated based on sales data and not human-curated like most “top/trending” lists on many platforms.
I think it is reasonable to assume Valve will leverage automation heavily. Why pay someone to update that list when a script could do it?
I don’t have the source, but they confirmed it’s automatic. The caveat is that it is based on $ sold, not units. So the deck will count as 7 or 8 full priced games.
