Forbes blogger misses the point completely. News at 11.
Here’s the thing, horsepower means nothing if that’s the only thing the device has. People don’t want just raw performance, there are other soft factors in play, like comfort, convenience, build quality, easy of use, etc. The simple fact that the competitors come with Windows and have no trackpads is already a major turn-off, this by itself makes them inferior products, since Windows notoriously bad with touch-screens, especially when said screen is as small as 7", then there’s the windows updates… Ughh…
Then the compatibility issue. Sure, in theory Windows should be more compatible, in practice… try to run some really old games, like the author casually mentioned. Many will run better with Proton then on Windows itself, if you can make them run at all. Linux already have two excellent library managers, Lutris and Heroic, that make installing non-steam games easier than in Windows, without the need of several resource hogging launchers constantly on the background, so it’s a moot point.
Sure, some multiplayer games don’t run because of the anti-cheat software, but then again, is this really such an issue ? My answer is a big fat NO ! Why ? One word: Gyroscope. Or the lack thereof. Of all 3 devices mentioned in the article, ROG Ally, AyaNeo 2S and Steam Deck, only the deck has it, and guess what, it’s pretty freaking hard to aim properly with sticks in shooter games. Without a gyro, the Ally the 2S players will always be at a disadvantage, which makes the whole endeavor an exercise in frustration, so why bother ?
All in all, a pretty bad, even trollish article. Pretty much what I learned to expect from those Forbes bloggers.
The Ally and AyaNeo 2S both have gyroscopes, although the Ally suffers from a profound lack of first party software support and so far users are having to use two layers of input mapping software to get practical use out of them.
Exactly. The Ally is available in my country (and with discounts I can get it cheaper than the equivalent Steam Deck even), but no track pads is a huge huge minus. I play a lot of games that use a mouse, why'd I want something that has inferior mouse support?
Moreover, more performance in a portable device is often a trade-off. The board will draw more power, reducing battery life, and it will often generate more heat, requiring more ventilation / fan power which might also further affect battery life (and potentially, its lifespan). You end up paying more for a worse experience, imho.
The new Ayaneo needs a battery that's more than twice the capacity of the Steam Deck in order to be able to even compare to the Steam Deck in autonomy... if Valve launched a revision of the deck with an updated battery it would be a huge improvement, likely doubling its runtime, it's much more efficient than the competition in its power usage.
I'd much prefer games start being designed for low spec devices. What I want is more innovative gameplay and interesting mechanics... if the game wastes immense amounts of power for easthetic reasons, it doesn't make me want to get a portable powerhouse of a console, what it makes me want to do is skip playing that unoptimized game.
It’s rather interesting to me how nobody puts any value on the Deck trackpads in comparisons like these, and yet they are basically essential if you want the device to be able to play anything but console-optimized games / games that are built for gamepads first.
Playing something like Skyrim on one of the alternative portables can certainly be done, but being able to comfortably play games like Against the Storm, Anno, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Homeworld, Northgard, OpenTTD, Stellaris, etc is where the Deck really shines and where all the “alternatives” fall completely flat.
Edit: Not to mention that trying to run Windows without any kind of direct mouse input is really painful, and all the “alternatives” keep doing exactly that.
Something similar occurred with the Steam Controller, which I loved. I’d show it to people, and they’d be like “OnLy OnE aNaLoG sTiCk, WhAt ThE hEcK?” and completely miss the point of the trackpads.
I can play strategy games with a freaking controller from the couch. That was always the appeal. You aren’t gonna be able to do that with a DualSense.
Also, the virtual trackball haptic on the Deck was developed for the Steam Controller. It’s surprisingly intuitive feeling.
Yeah, it’s weird they all ship with windows instead of SteamOS. It’s not like Valve would’ve said no to anyone trying to use it, they’ve been trying to find partners for ages.
Yeah but they're already spending so much on hardware just to edge the Deck on performance alone. They're ignoring all the other stuff that makes the Deck great which is decent performance but fantastic flexibility.
games like Against the Storm, Anno, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Homeworld, Northgard, OpenTTD, Stellaris, etc
Note that none of those games are "Steam Deck Verified". They are at most "Playable", and often the controls is not the only issue Valve warns about (many also have small text that's hard to read). So playing them, while technically possible, is not really that great of an experience.
The issue is that not everyone wants to fiddle with controller settings, and sadly there's very few games that do take advantage of the trackpad and actually have proper first-class support for the Deck, with seamless idiot-proof integration.
And I say that despite being a Steam Controller owner (and I'd love a SC 2). The experience with "Verified" titles is much more seamless than having to check your controller mappings to understand what you need to press (or having convoluted layers / combinations for the more keyboard heavy ones... like say, ToME).
It's a bit sad that the trackpad is not getting much love from game devs. I'd have hoped that at least some games started allowing simultaneous input for gamepad and mouse, just so that they can earn a "Verified" badge. But that's still a problem, though some engines handle it better than others.
Eh I don’t think being verified means all that much because in my experience there are games that are verified that just don’t play well on a deck because the game doesn’t lend itself well to deck controls and there are others where the control factors keeping them from being verified are trivial but not addressable given valves strict definitions of ‘verified’. Example: Noita sucks on the deck and it’s verified. It’s like 10x more difficult to aim on the deck relative to a M+K setup and makes it feel clumsy as hell. Meanwhile, Against the Storm, Soulstone Survivors, Dwarf Fortress, and Civilization all have great experiences on the deck and I’ve happily played multiple hours of each chilling on my couch without a thought about the controls and none are verified.
And people wonder so many people never read the article. Usually clickbait with an overly long article and an ad-ridden page — I’d rather just read the headline and the expert commentary in the comments.
I habitually started skimming the first paragraphs of many articles because for SEO or AI reasons a lot of them tend to recount generic stuff about the subject matter with many key words first and only get to the meat in the bottom. And not even in the way where you need to know some stuff to understand what the actual news is about, it's often just trivia and worse, something that doesn't even has that much to do with the matter, just something that will improve SEO. E.g. refering to the currently popular game or movie.
Hard disagree. Steam Deck is good because it fills a niche that no other handheld PC fulfills. You can’t really nitpick when there isn’t really any competitors.
The Deck isn’t the most powerful, its display isn’t the best, it isn’t the cheapest. What people like the author seem to miss is that the Deck wasn’t marketed to be the most powerful, or the best display, or the cheapest. It was designed to balance all these design considerations, such that even though it’s not best at anything, it’s not bad at anything either. That’s really the allure of the Deck for me, that I don’t really need to work around any limitations
Yeah I dont get the sentiment at all. If it was trash and couldn’t run anything it wouldn’t sell. But it’s not, and it runs damn near everything, even if some higher end games will destroy the battery in 25 minutes, it’ll be a great 25 minutes. You can also stop at any point in any game and just come back later and it resumes seamlessly, almost instantaneously, and with next to no battery loss. I’m not being sarcastic, I’ve never had ANY game system that can do that. The closest is the PS5 with rest mode but it’s still way behind ateamdeck in wake up time. It’s a first gen release and it’s capable of things no other console (maybe switch - I don’t actually know, I don’t have one) handheld or otherwise, has been able to do.
Like love or hate valve all you want, but there’s really not a lot to shit on the steam deck about. It’s had like three competitors come out and two most people already forgot exist (Logitech something, and some other one). The Asus one seems capable but is bottlenecked by using windows. Let’s not forget Google’s attempt at a revolutionary gaming product.
Just because it isn’t a real competitor doesn’t mean that it wasn’t meant to be one. It was developed targeting what Logitech thought would be the biggest use case for deck, which was playing games that could be streamed, and have other hardware do the bulk of the lifting. The problem is that deck can also do that, and does it better. It was probably a fairly low effort cash grab by Logitech, but they still made it and sunk a ton of R&D costs into getting it out near the deck release.
It was probably developed directly in response to the deck being announced, in order to compete in an open market. If it wasn’t directly in response, then they still felt strongly enough that it would compete that they didn’t cut their losses after the deck was announced.
Thank fuck for Steam incentivizing removing launcher spam with the Steam Deck. Yes, it reduces functionality and also yes, Steam is itself a launcher. Publishers have to start cutting out with the launcher practice tho.
Really, he didn’t SLAM anybody? Nobody is OUTRAGED over anything? This isn’t the LAST NAIL IN THE COFFIN for the Steam Deck? I’m not sure what to think, somebody please tell me what extreme reaction to feel about this.
It honestly reminds me of some statistics implying that deaths due to violence may be overrepresented in media perception, while deaths due to cancers and heart problems are seemingly underrepresented in coverage by comparison.
Can’t say anything bad about this. They made a good product that people want, it doesn’t have a walled garden, and it’s supporting the Linux community at the same time.
I hope they continue to keep hold of the values that gave them this success.
They likely will until Gabe either sells his shares or someone else inherits them and sells them. (Though maybe whoever inherits his shares might continue the legacy, who knows). At that point Valve will probably either get acquired or go public, and become another shitty tech company, beholden to quarterly growth above all else.
Valve is a great example of a private company not becoming another cog in the machine, but that probably won’t last forever
I really like Valve. They have done a few things that really annoyed me (usually owing to their refusal to sell stuff outside of the US)… But you can’t argue with their excellent support of the community and loyalty to their customer base.
I’m seriously considering giving up my gaming desktop in a year or two and switch to a Steam Deck instead of building a new battlestation. I’ll likely keep my desk and get a docking station for it.
The fact that it’s open and let me run games outside of Steam (I have many games bought on GOG) is a major selling point. Plus almost all of the apps I rely on are available in Flatpak format, which should work great when I’m not gaming.
Valve is in a pure win-win situation. The popularity of the Deck has led to an explosion in PC handhelds. Even if they take it easy, they have shown there is a market for people wanting to play their pc games on the go (or just in this form factor). Even if they’re not exactly buying the SD, Steam is still the choice storefront for devices like the Ally , Go, and the 50,000 smaller companies (Ayaneo, GPD etc.). I initially bought my Ally for GamePass and found myself buying more games on Steam .
This is a FUD panic article. Trying to invoke the steam machine debacle to make the steamdeck fail is a poor tactic.
Confusion and inconsistency alongside varying prices and compatibility made the steam machines fail.
There is one* SteamDeck. Valve only advertises The Steam Deck.
We’re not getting an Asus deck or a Gigabyte deck. And I’ve heard people in the wild talk about the deck in a positive light. The Steam deck is never going to be like the steam machines.
*one in the sense that there is one model without drastic changes in design. Although the Glare-resistant screen is an outlier, most consoles have tiers of storage and even a pro/normal variant model.
Which is clearly not correct. Take a look at eg. this benchmark; many workloads take a sizeable hit. Even plain 'ol glibc sin and cos take about 8% longer, and the most pathological hit was the MariaDB workload which took almost 200% longer. Looks like many tasks related to math or heavy-duty string processing will be at least 10-20% slower, but it’s hard to say yet what this’ll do to games. I’d expect CPU-heavy games to be affected
As of press time, Tomlin had browsed the Steam store while riding to work and bought Hi-Fi Rush, Dave the Diver, and Street Fighter 6, before ultimately just booting up Vampire Survivors again.
Didn't expect to be called out like that first thing in the morning holy shit.
We have just shipped an updated Steam Deck Client to the Stable (default) channel.
GeneralImproved library performance for users with large numbers of collections. Fixed a hitch that some players with large libraries might encounter every 15 minutes while playing a game. Fixed presentation and localization of items in the Special Offers section. Fixed notifications for achievements not firing when offline. Fixed a case where the wrong FPS limit could be applied on startup. Fixed a case where the controller input thread could operate at normal instead of high scheduling priority. Fixed styling on the login error screen and made the retry button accessible to the gamepad.
LibraryAdded the ability to sort by date added to library to shelves and game grids.
Steam InputAdded the ability to copy and paste mappings when setting up controller inputs. Improved navigation in the configurator when navigating from the Preview screen. Repeatedly going to Preview then an input will no longer build up loops in the back stack and you can now go back with a single B button press if you’ve not interacted with the left column. Fixed some cases where navigation changes from the previous beta could result in a blank page in the configurator. Fixed changing effects on PS4 and PS5 controllers when Steam Input is not enabled.
Desktop ModeAdded In-Game setting to allow enabling or disabling display scaling in the overlay. Changed behavior of overlay tabbed browser to clear all tabs when the close button is clicked and added a minimize button to hide the browser as the close button previously did. Fixed wallet balance not updating in title bar when balance hits zero. Fixed incorrect display of “Notify me about additions or changes to my games…” setting in interface settings if it had never been changed before. Fixed a case where the UI would show the wrong image when switching between small mode and normal mode. Fixed main client window taking focus from other Steam windows when navigation menus are hovered.
Developer consoleAdded a setting to display timestamps in the Steam console window. Changed Steam console window to keep the last several seconds of output even if that would exceed the normal buffer length. Fixed command echo sometimes appearing on the same line as the previous output. Fixed clear_console command not doing anything.
Hard disagree. If nothing else it motivates Sony to make it playable on Linux.
There’s good reason to believe there will be more Linux devices from Valve (they are contributing to Nvidia open source drivers), which is good for Linux, and ultimately good for everyone.
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