I have a feeling 90% of the appeal of this product is playing video games without leaving the bed. "Portable" doesn't actually mean it's going to leave the house, and a laptop can be unwieldy without a table, especially on a soft surface where it might overheat.
I think people focus too much of the mobile aspect, it's like saying it's the only reason people buy a switch (it's a factor, nothing more).
steam deck is also an easy solution for consoletards to get in on the mustard action, same way some nintendies use the switch docked to get bing bing wahoo - however valve would've to push it into the normie conscience for that, and I doubt they plan to do a lot of marketing in the normiesphere for that to happen (they probably don't have the production capacity for it anyway).
The Steam controller and Steam machines were created as an attempt by valve to try and take over the console market. The reason it failed is multifaceted. The take that "hur dur normies dont want to deal with le complicated pc" was pretty much what Valve went off of. Since that take is retarded, the product was also retarded.
yeah, because mainstream consumers are the technically inclined kind that have plenty of time to learn about things they don't give a shit about and are rational consumers in general.
"taking over" is retarded, no one's gonna replace sony or ms. however millions of sold consoles means there is demand, so getting a piece of that pie is a sound business idea. the problem was the execution, "steam machine" doesn't mean much if it's just another prebuilt pc with random specs that won't run half the games normies give a shit about.
The steam controller was designed to be a one size fits all. But anyone with a brain can tell you. You design your game around controllers(or keyboards), you very rarely design controllers trying to player every game genre that appears on pc, because its impossible. Some of the titles that valve advertised had controller profiles for the steam controller on launch. But for the majority of games you were in the cuck shed setting up your own inputs, which is actually complicated for a lot of games. The actual build of the controller itself is just shit, one of the worst controllers I've held.
the steam controller was designed to bridge controller with mouse/keyboard, it's one of the reasons it has touchpads and not sticks. no one was gonna use it to play games that already had proper xbox/dualshock/whatever support (you could, but if you played those games you most likely had a normal pad anyway; "complicated" means fuck all when you just have to apply a community profile or even simpler the basic twin stick layout).
in the end like the steam link it's cheaper to just do it in software, lot of games these days have controller support out of the box.
Finally there is compliance.
steam doesn't need hard compliance, it has reviews and a refund policy.
PC being an open platform means it's harder to get console normies involved even with a system like this. Plus it removes multiple of the benefits of an actual PC, such as decent user-end repairability and upgrading. Publishing issues so far have only been shown to matter to enthusiasts so I don't get how that works for attracting an actual audience.
While this has the benefits of a pc in the pricing of games, it removes the ability of doing what you want in most hardware regards unless you're decently experienced with fucking around with that kind of thing. And nothing's come out about battery life yet, we won't really know until people test the thing. The Switch was already abysmal in that regard and this thing has better hardware. Kind of makes the mobile point moot other than sitting in a corner keeping the thing charged it's entire use.
open platform in software. modular hardware is irrelevant when you can still do whatever you want to do software-wise. you're still ignoring that normies want simple choices they can understand, if they even want a choice at all.
they're already used to buy a new phone every 2 years or whenever it breaks with more and more removed features like replaceable battery (muh thin) or headphone jack (muh airpods, cables suck). no one gives a shit about sustainability or extending life when it's cheaper and easier to just buy an upgrade. same way they don't care about a closed platform or vendor lock-in, else they wouldn't buy consoles in the first place.
How long did it take their exclusives to port over? Some of it took years. Timed exclusives are still effective for the layman.
How well will emulators emulating other mobile hardware perform on this unit? Like I already said we know nothing of the power throttling even though the components look decent. Laptops already experience a good deal of this. This is more compact hardware ever more reliant on battery. Yes, in every other regard emulating older hardware it has consoles beat in some regard, but this won't steal market away. People are already hacking Xboxes to do this kind of thing, and the Switch has been broken into since nearly day one.
undocked switch isn't that great either, point is you can still use it docked and don't have to worry battery life - same as the switch, so that argument is a bit disingenuous.
as for exclusives, what's there outside nintendo, which isn't just another mario platformer? I mean seriously and not as a mustard shitpost. you mentioned drive club, what made it better than any other comparable drive sim available on pc? and how much worse are the alternatives?
and that doesn't even consider the exclusives itself - which pc has an abundance of too, literally every game not available on consoles is one. fuck, you could even go as far and cause some nintendie butthurt pointing out pc (and thus steam deck) technically has a bigger virtual console library than the switch.
from what I remember sony/ms exclusives aren't even the biggest sellers (on average, tsushima is offset by games like knack or shit like TLOU2), most people use their console as a multiplat machine to play whatever their friends play.
No argument on the OS side, Windows 10 is made to run on a potato even if it'll eventually bloat out to cook it. I also agree that the average person does not want to screw around with learning PC hardware. But as far as M and KB in front of a TV, that's no longer really an issue (and hasn't been for years) if you find it a pain to use default pc hardware just sitting at a couch, get a lap desk. They're cheap. Hook up a wireless keyboard and mouse and there are no issues. And if you can't fit your pc under a tv or inside a table or whatever nonsense you can hook it over ethernet or powerline ethernet and it shouldn't be too big a deal. But any laptop these days can easily hide among that mess if someone opts for one. Regardless though Micro ATX builds are basically shoeboxes made for this scenario and there are plenty of cases that blend in with all of the other black boxes that manufacturers put out. So this doesn't remove the enthusiast or general techie audience here. Unless someone's trying to actually put their RGB gamer lingo minifridge case in front of the TV for some reason.
that's what you and me have been doing for years, but it's still too much of a hassle and unattractive for most people. again, why do consoles sell? either people are aware of all the handicaps and shortcomings and are ok with it for various reasons, or they are happily ignorant and don't care.
How can they expect devs to go out of their way to optimize games for this hardware along with the billion different combinations of hardware that they already have to somehow make work with their games? It helps that it's made with parts that are fairly typical, but outside of that I don't see it until Valve has a massive base of users on this thing, if they can get that. But as for the tech illiterate gravitating to this because it's somehow simpler than a prebuilt I doubt it. They would still have to learn how to fix bugs in games regardless among many other things. It's outside a lot of people's comfort zones.
because it's run of the mill hardware with a single spec. if devs want to be lazy they just need to cap resolution to 800p and apply a preset of graphical settings when started on the steam deck via command line. there, done.
outside total disasters like cp2077 at worst you get some logic bugs, technically most games usually work (outside some nip port or some devs being especially retarded, like ubisoft that goes full retard with it's
multiple copy protections to the point you have to disable virtualization in the bios) since they're simple enough - either that unity game works or it doesn't - or it comes along with console certification where shit has to be solid. can't even remember when I last had to deal with a gamestopper outside said ubisoft bullshit.
you're also forgetting that
a lot of those issues stem from people's combination of hardware, state of windows and myriad of other issues where some shit (if not windows itself) fucks with the game which would run fine otherwise, no QA is able to test for that. the advantage of single spec hardware is you only need to test once and you know how it will run on any other device. people can still fuck with the software side, but linux is easier to fix (and harder to break too) than that shitheap windows, and that's if valve hasn't thought of that putting limitations in place to stop dumb people messing it up etc.
But this is all speculation and I guess we can just see what happens. Valve's track record outside of VR hardware makes me think it will not work out though.
same, mainly playing devils advocate here. given the western trend and valve being valve I doubt they somehow got smarter. however there is a chance they could establish a foothold and go from there, as gabe said it's to see if others jump onto the train too (which means it's not limited by valve anymore). just thinking about the possible long term effects almost makes the spergposting worth it...
