Newer handhelds might have more power, but I still think the Deck is the best value for what it offers.
I care less about power and more about silence. I would pay double for a Steam Deck that doesn’t sound like a hair dryer when I try to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on low.
That’s kinda about power though. Think about going up a pulling a trailer up a hill with a vehicle that has a small engine versus a bigger one.
The small engine vehicle might make the hill, but it’s going up gear lower, rev higher, and probably heat up a bit.
The bigger vehicle will handle the hill and load with more grace, but may also use more fuel in everyday situations or cost more.
BG3 is kinda stretching the Deck’s engine (APU), and the fans are running like made to compensate for the heat running at 100% for longer periods. I’ve a few games that stretch the Deck’s capabilities so for those I just stream from my more powerful PC
Once again Valve proves they actually understand what people want; a relatively cheap and effective system that lets people play the games they want to play
Two things massively help Valve:
Steam is a goddamned money printing machine, they are the most profitable software company per capita, per employee… possibly bar none.
Also… they’re not publically traded.
They do not have investors constantly forcing maximization of short term profits at the cost of literally everything else.
… So they can afford to … not price gauge everyone.
Also… they’re not publically traded.
They do not have investors constantly forcing maximization of short term profits at the cost of literally everything else.
I fantasize about the idea of starting private companies for things currently dominated by public companies, with the sole idea of not being greedy and shitty.
I honestly don’t understand why most companies aren’t private instead of public. Like which founder looks forward to answering to investors when they could just be answerable to themselves and their employees and maybe board, like are they looking for a massive exit payout by going public or to raise funds to become a bigger company, but I argue if you are making enough to be profitable why chase being bigger
Probably the biggest advantage they have is that they can sell devices at cost or even at a loss and still profit from increased Steam game sales, like how other console makers operate.
3rd parties can’t compete with that. Not even close. If there’s no profit from the device itself, there’s no motivation to make it. And apart from the hardware cost, they also need to pay for the R&D and corporate maintenance. They can’t compete with the Steam Deck. If they made an exact Steam Deck clone, they’d have to make it, idk ~$40 more to make a profit, but no one would buy it because the Steam Deck is the same for less. They have to give it slightly higher specs to give it a niche. That might take hardware cost up to $500 and then charge $150 more to make up for the distributor fees and then $100 to make it actually profitable. But at that point, they’ve already lost most budget and casual gamers, they might as well aim at whales and enthusiasts and make profits $300. If a $950 device sells half as well as a $750 device, it’s still more profitable.
Edit: more realistic numbers
The Steam Deck is not sold at a loss. The initial pricing for the 64 GB unit was barely profitable, but this quickly changed with production ramping up.
This was confirmed by Valve themselves in an interview that happened months after Gabe’s famous comments about the pricing.
So yes, Valve profits from the games too, but that’s not used to subsidize the Steam Deck’s price.
Yep, this is a good explanation of more of the nitty gritty of it in more granular detail!
When you can afford to eat some of the cost… or… you don’t have shareholders telling you not to do that… well, then you get good ole ‘how capitalism is supposed to work! ™’.
Problem of course being that uh, you can just chase the luxury market for greater profit margins, stop making shit for the poors… this can work well in the short/medium term, but in the long run… if everyone does that…
… then you destroy your customer base, and the entire economy, and probably yourself.
And that’s not even getting into how companies have their own version of ‘keeping up with the joneses’… its called going into massive debt to fund an expansion because your competitor just did that… and then going into more debt to finance a stock buyback… but hey nbd, companies can fail and go bankrupt, no problem, everyone other than those helming the ship get fucked, they get golden parachutes.
Sure would be neat if we maybe had some other kind of system idk
I think the big difference is that they seem to be optimizing for customer satisfaction where others are not.
My favorite example I use often is how the Steam Deck comes with a case. It’s free and there’s not even an option to not get it. They know you need one, they include it. The Switch doesn’t come with a case. They know you need one but they don’t care. You’ll buy one if you want it bad enough and that’s more revenue.
It’s just a different type of optimization.
I have a switch that never left the house, definitely not needed.
I have a switch
I’m sorry for your lo$$.
Don’t forget battery life. Most of those systems get some pretty awful battery life, or are comically large.
the two things that made the game boy a success: “good enough” system with a great battery life all for a great price
its partly windows, and partly 8 core AMD CCDs that handhelds dont need.
Lenovo was given a holy ball (Z2 go cpu, basically 4c/8t zen 3 cpu and 12 rdna 2 cu cores (as apposed to the zen 2 and 8 cu rdna2 the steam deck has) and if they priced it at 600 tops and go down from there. it would be extremely competitive.
lenovo is basically like nah, 750$ it is. and i think its the reverse (starts at 600 and goes up)
They have advantage of being able to sell at almost cost because they make so much on game sales. Like the other console vendors.
Actually kind of unfair business practice.
Ironically, leveraging this kind of tactic is what allowed Google, Amazon and Apple and Microsoft to become as huge as they did, as fast as they did.
Got a whole bunch of lines of business that can functionally subsidize other ventures, so they can make a push for market share.
But of course this doesn’t take too long to turn your whole economy into oligopoly, and thus your society into oligarchy… at best.
I… I think Gabe really just isn’t as fundamentally awful of a person as most other tech company heads.
Yeah, he’s got a yacht, but he could be so, so much fucking worse…
I mean that’s just how consoles are, except Valve does let you just use it as a normal pc so you can use other stores if you want to. Still an advantage to them
This is just… not true?
The Deck ranges from 420 to 680. The Legion Go S is 520, right in the middle of that. The Z1 Extreme ROG Ally is 670, right in line with the top of the line Deck (and noticeably more powerful). The Switch 2 is 470, on the cheaper side and also a fair bit beefier.
This article is arguing that having next-gen chips in boutique devices for 1K is a) a new development, and b) a bad thing. It is neither.
Before the Deck went mass market with PC handhelds they would routinely be a lot more expensive. The original Ayaneo was between 800 and 900 in 2021. The Pro model went up to 1200.
I want those things to exist. I want GPD to cram a Strix Halo into a handheld with a removable battery. I want Ayaneo to build a dual screen clamshell. I want Odin to slap a Xbox controller around an iPad. I want them to make a dumb console that spits out its buttons so you can flip them around. I want vertical handhelds. All that kooky weirdness is experimenting with new form factors and parts in ways that will move the segment forward. Without Ayaneo, Odin or GPD being dumb enough to cram a laptop into a handheld there’d be no Steam Deck in the first place.
Let the people who like weird hardware dump a grand or two into those weird things and that’s how you eventually get a comfortably priced for-the-rest-of-us device from Valve or Asus that takes the ideas from those that work.
Total agreement.
It sucks when a device category dies and disappears. Most people might not care, but those who do really do, and it sucks when you can’t upgrade to what you want anymore.
I’m not a handheld guy, but for me, it’s phones with keyboards.
So if there’s somebody making boutique devices for niche audiences, more power to them!
Handheld gaming PCs are really not necessary devices, so if you can’t afford a high-end one, get a cheap one. And if you can’t afford that, stick a gamepad on your phone and boot up a switch emulator or winlator.
Leave people their niche hobbies!
Mudman here with the most salient point and better written then my “fuck off if you don’t want those devices you don’t have to buy them” but also the used market for those devices is way weirder, I grabbed a Z1 extreme Ally for $250, I’m also for sure ordering a Ayn Thor at 10 tonight, but I enjoy playing with weird hardware more than I do the games tbh
I choose to read that as a genuine compliment.
And yeah, man, these weird devices are being sold to weird people who like them for what they are. Which also means when the next weird thing comes out those weirdos are likely to get upsold and resell older stuff. All of these things are going to be fantastic eBay haul Youtube videos from retro hardware people in the 2070s, assuming we avoid going full Mad Max Idiocracy that long.
It was, I read that like a beautifully worded rebuttal. And yeah once you’re really in that subculture you kind of learn to buy and sell and it mostly washes out as a free hobby. I buy a handful of lower end shit on Aliexpress during a sale, get to try stuff out, put Cfw on it and sell for a small profit, I then use those profits to buy other shit
I don’t really know what demographic you’re chasing if you’re going after people wanting top of the line specs on a handheld.
I find this train of thought weird, because these are all niche devices.
It’s strange to hear that there’s no demographic for boutique handhelds at the same time any mention that the Switch sold an order of magnitude more than the Deck gets a dozen responses that the Deck is “experimental” or “a first try” or “not competing directly”.
And hey, all that’s true. The Deck will never move 150 million consoles or sell 5 million in a week. There’s value in limited run hardware that does things that aren’t mainstream propositions alongside the “let’s get every kid to get one of these from their grandma” devices.
The only companies that can really compete with Valve for scale are MAYBE Asus. And if they just release approximately the same SKU as Valve or one with minor updates they can maybe get some market share but… why would you not buy the Valve one in that case?
So we instead get a case where they leverage something closer to their gaming laptops SKU… and the price goes up a lot. Although, to be clear, 1k for a “gaming laptop” is actually a REALLY good price… which is why gaming laptops are a stupid purchase.
And that mostly just leaves the Aya Neos and GPDs of the world. They more or less paved the way for Valve but they just can’t produce (and import) at scale to compete so you mostly get niche SKUs that specifically target a type of gaming (often emulation) or come with keyboards everyone hates and so forth.
Which sucks because I really would like there to be competition to encourage Valve to keep pushing the envelope… and Valve would likely like it so they don’t have to release a new gameboy every other year.
They probably fear that Nintendo already has that market secured.
@etchinghillside @Fubarberry I guess if your device is not really scaleable, the only way to make any money is shoot for the top end.
Steam has the platform to recoup the hardware costs. They are selling PC-based consoles, while the rest is selling handheld-shaped PCs.
The joke is you n all of them - I’m an adult and I enjoy coming home and playing PC games on my PC with its large gaming PC monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
I’m glad you all love your handhelds, but I’m good without one.
Well, this sure is an useless comment
I have a gaming pc monitor, keyboard, and trackball (no reason to debase myself and use a mouse) all on my Steam deck. And if I want to take my Steam deck with me to work, I can do that too.
