Steam Deck officially announced by Valve

Armenius

Armenius

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A new handheld device to carry your Steam games with you starts sending out invitations to buy in December 2021 if you reserve starting today. The device starts at $399. You have to have made a purchase with your Steam account prior to June 2021 today and tomorrow to get a reservation.

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/

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To give an idea of the size:
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eMMC in base model is disappointing. Hopefully, they used standardized M.2 sticks for the higher end ones. If soldered on, disappointing.
Valve comes up with interesting stuff. Wish they would focus on getting VR 1) affordable* and 2) wireless.


*and not require FB account.
 
IGN published a portion of its interview with Gabe Newell where he says it was "painful, but critical" to hit the price for the Steam Deck. There are also clips of the device in action included. The full interview is to be published later this month.



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MavericK said:
Pricing is a lot better than I expected. Actually seems like a pretty cool device.
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Agreed. This is the console everyone was waiting for on the PC Master Race side who refuse to get a Nintendo Switch and what Nintendo feared would happen down the road. And if anyone was going to do it? Of course it would be Gabe and Valve Software! Out!
 
Armenius said:
IGN published a portion of its interview with Gabe Newell where he says it was "painful, but critical" to hit the price for the Steam Deck. There are also clips of the device in action included. The full interview is to be published later this month.



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GabeN makes good explanation of Valve's rationale. He is one of my favorite Tech business guys.
 
Oh man, already feeling the hype for this. Currently at work so can't really geek out over the features, but console-like pause/resume, video out, and the price point are all winning features for me.
 
RareAir23 said:
Agreed. This is the console everyone was waiting for on the PC Master Race side who refuse to get a Nintendo Switch and what Nintendo feared would happen down the road. And if anyone was going to do it? Of course it would be Gabe and Valve Software! Out!
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Not really. So called PCMR snubs will point their nose up this just as fast as the Switch. This will not compete with the Switch in anyway.
 
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So SteamOS and proton. I guess they think Proton has critical mass to launch a product on? hopefully than convince devs to test on proton also...
 
Interesting little device. Not sure if I'm a good candidate for it, though I do travel a bit for work and usually bring along a Surface pro tablet thing... can hardly game on it, but usually just use it to watch movies. Being able to play some games on this, especially if it has decent battery life could be appealing. Need more details, especially on the battery life; and if I can install netflix to boot for some offline viewing on an SD card or some such.. intrigued.
 
Armenius said:
IGN published a portion of its interview with Gabe Newell where he says it was "painful, but critical" to hit the price for the Steam Deck. There are also clips of the device in action included. The full interview is to be published later this month.



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So Gabe has shifted from the mom's basement look to the homeless kook look.
 
Without games developed specifically for it---this is dead on arrival. The specs basically mean its an indy games machine, only. Its very expensive. Doesn't come with a dock. Its huge. There is no good reason to get this.
 
Enhanced Interrogator said:
Their margins probably suck on the $400 model, so they need a way to get more out of people with disposable income.
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That, plus everyone who knows anything about the size of PC games knows that 64 GB is nothing, so everyone will go for the 256 GB model at a minimum.

MicroSD, sure, but I wonder how loading/streaming speeds will be off of one. They are slower on a Switch than internal storage.
 
As I've said before - these x86 devices are all going to be incredibly power-hungry, so these things are twice the weight of a Switch (massive cooling, plus much bigger battery)

Be prepared to buy a new heavy-duty backpack to shove this thing in, - along with claws-of-steel to hold that bulk!

The RDNA2 does look potentially interesting (Zen 2, could be a cast-off from broken PS5?)

see here: https://wccftech.com/amd-4700s-desktop-apu-faster-than-xbox-series-x-sold-diy-gaming-pc-china/
 
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chameleoneel said:
Without games developed specifically for it---this is dead on arrival. The specs basically mean its an indy games machine, only. Its very expensive. Doesn't come with a dock. Its huge. There is no good reason to get this.
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Ummm it will play 95% of anything sold on steam.... and by launch the other 5% will probably run as well. This isn't some odd thing. Its Valve Linux running windows games.
 
MavericK said:
That, plus everyone who knows anything about the size of PC games knows that 64 GB is nothing, so everyone will go for the 256 GB model at a minimum.

MicroSD, sure, but I wonder how loading/streaming speeds will be off of one. They are slower on a Switch than internal storage.
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Switch speeds from Micro SD depend upon the capability of the MicroSD card you buy.

The way they are classified is a mess, because there are like 3 or 4 different speed ratings----rating different types of data usage (I.E. U3, A2, V30, etc). But.....generally, anything rated U3 (from a decent brand) will only be a handful of seconds behind internal storage.
Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FCMKK5X?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details

Here's one of many videos, showing comparisons:
 
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ChadD said:
Ummm it will play 95% of anything sold on steam.... and by launch the other 5% will probably run as well. This isn't some odd thing. Its Valve Linux running windows games.
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The peak GPU boost clock on this is 400mhz slower than the recently released desktop APU, 5800G (Also 8 GPU cores). That's a lot slower. The 5800G is generally only good for 720p/60 in non-indy games which are 3+ years old (GTA5, Tomb Raider, etc). and can do 1080p/30 low/medium, in some games. Even though it is a newer GPU architecture, At 400mhz slower, Steamdeck has no chance of playing semi-current, non-indies (there will be this or that, sure. But this isn't going to be some mega machine, completely overshadowing all others). Especially without Steamdeck specific optimization patches, like you would get on something like a Switch.
 
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since the screen rez is relatively low, i wonder if valve will push devs to produce two sets of assets? one for PC and one for steamdeck - just to keep game install footprints smaller...?
 
The base (64 GB mmc) model actually starts at $492 for us behind the iron curtain, not $399.
Now, the problem is that the 256GB nvme version costs almost exactly what I'd have to pay for a (more!) capable laptop.

Other than that at $399 with the ability to use a good quality SD card along with the mmc it's not bad for me at least.
 
sc5mu93 said:
So SteamOS and proton. I guess they think Proton has critical mass to launch a product on? hopefully than convince devs to test on proton also...
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You can install a Windows on it if you want to. SteamOS is just what it comes with by default. This is still just a PC, just in Switch's skin.
 
I have no use for this myself but I am genuinely curious. Compared to Switch the price/performance ratio seems to be good. This has potential if gaming masses are willing to give it a try.
 
I'm kinda interested, but am even more curious if the controls they've set up for this totally-not-a-UMPC (even before the Switch, there were devices like the Samsung Q1 Ultra) will lead to a second-generation Steam Controller.

Still, I might just get one. Sure, I have a far more powerful gaming laptop... that overheats all the damn time and thermal throttles as a result, mitigating any performance benefits. If Valve can keep thermals in check and performance consistent, then I can accept a hit in hardware capability given the portability. Besides, I still have plenty of less-demanding games that would run fine on a Switch, but which I don't feel like buying twice for portability's sake.

64 GB eMMC is a hard no, though. Remember that eMMC is half-duplex, which severely gimps its speed whenever simultaneous reads and writes are involved, and that microSD cards are also fundamentally tiny MMCs and thus also half-duplex. (Samsung has UFS memory cards now, which should be full-duplex, but hardly anything supports them, not even their own flagship smartphones.) Guess that means I'm paying up for NVMe.

I'm also secretly hoping that the internal SSD on the NVMe models is some form of M.2 card and they just don't want you disassembling the Steam Deck to swap it, though we won't know until some group like iFixit does a teardown.
 
I'm likely to reserve one (and anyone talking about 'monopoly', keep in mind that it even says its a PC and you can install other OSes and 3rd party applications if you desire - there is no lock-in here!) though I am a little disappointed it is Zen2 powered not Zen3. If it was Zen3 Cezanne powered I'd feel a lot better about it, especially by Dec 2021. While Zen2 isn't a deal breaker necessarily (considering that modern consoles are Zen2 + RDNA2 if I recall) it would be preferable if they were able to do like some other projects and upgrade the hardware if the Zen3 alternatives are available by shipping (as they should be - we're seeing Cezanne type laptops already present. Likewise, 4c/8t is again a little disappointing especially on the higher end options. Even with Zen2 there were 8c/16t options like the 4700 and for modern gaming or streaming I'd like to see something of the sort - I'm willing to pay for it, and get that the base model may need to 4c/8t but there is room at the higher end.

Aside from that, it looks pretty promising. They learned from the Steam Controller and added both haptic pads + thumbsticks, along with a lot of other great control features including "paddle/rear buttons". I kind of get the resolution of the display, though I would have suggested 1080p and in any case it would be nice if it was OLED considering that that's what everyone's going to be talking about for the Switch OLED in october. There are some relatively minor questions but this device would be seen to compare with some of the niche/crowdfunded/chinese Ultraportable gaming widgets out there and if it does so at a better price and/or quality, while being more open (ie SteamOS 3.0 is ARCH LINUX based! THat's a good reason to support the thing in the first place along with Valve's general commitment to user-focused and open hardware) it could certainly be a winner. I like that there is an official Dock as well and that it will be able to output at 4K 120hz , which is fantastic for things like using it as a media streaming machine for Kodi , but I'm not sure that the onboard hardware could handle playing games at those res and quality natively. Now, it may very well be that its a great Steam Play streaming receiver so you can use your high powered rig to push through gaming at 4K / 120hz that is rendered through the docked Steam Deck, so that may be one solution - essentially only using the onboard hardware to play things on the go and at the onboard display resolution.

Ultimately though, I see a good bit of promise with this despite a few concerns I'd like to see shorn up before launch, but ultimately it seems better than others of its type and supporting Valve in such things usually has huge dividends for open and user focused play.
 
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