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.
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
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
They could sell them at a loss assuming the average Steam outlay per device exceeded the loss. This figure would be dragged down by people buying them as generic portable PCs, using them solely with emulators, using them as drone controllers (apparently the Ukrainian military do that), and such.
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.
… So they can afford to … not price gauge everyone.
They must be too busy enabling children gambling on hats
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.
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
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…
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.
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
And Steam sales subsidize the deck, too.
Sure. Maybe? The Deck isn’t that expensive, and despite being relatively limited runs it definitely has some benefits from scale. For one it’s a custom APU, so you have to assume there’s a specific deal with AMD.
Valve is certainly a first party that benefits from software sales primarily, so it makes sense for them to go to some lengths to invest in bringing people over, but I’m not sure that they are actively subsidizing the Deck, the price seems pretty reasonable. I’m sure they don’t make a ton of money from it, though, so they definitely get to thin those margins up a LOT compared with the pure hardware manufacturers, let alone with the tiny companies making handhelds one at a time.
Fair enough, Gabe has even said they don’t have a tie-in ratio, just that pricing was both painful and a test. Thin margins is the conclusion I came to as well, but knowing they expected to expand game sales with it, too.
I completely agree. I passed over the Steam Deck and went for the MSI Claw 8 instead. I was willing to pay the extra for a waaaay better CPU/GPU combo and - the killer feature IMHO - not one, but two Thunderbolt ports. Long term, this means I can expect a longer life out of my MSI than the Steam Deck is likely to get, but also means when the GPU does start to chug I can connect an eGPU to it’s dock.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean I don’t rate the Steam Deck - I really, really do - and it’s level of capability and price-point will act as a stabalising point for the wider industry, but I paid more for a better device and got my money’s worth.
You went for an Intel handheld? I salute you, sir, that’s a deep cut.
As one of the five people on the planet who own an Intel GPU I firmly believe we are in a very exclusive club that will one day do wonders for hardware archaeology.
We had a bunch of laptops at work with ARC GPUs in them. The vendor supplied one of them as test units saying they were ideal as portable 8K video editing machines, to which I replied - in exactly these words - “oh, fuck off”. But then we tested them and they’re honestly excellent and run a lot cooIer and longer than the AMD/Intel+Nvidia equivalents. I had to apologise. I got to test the Claw side-by-side with the Steam Deck playing RDR2 and Forza Horizon 5 and that sealed the deal. And when the ARC GPU does start groaning then, like I said, it’s eGPU time. The ARC is probably never going to bother the top-tier GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, but for portable and, I dare say, midrange desktop gaming it’s ideal.
You put linux on it or still using w11?
Newer handhelds might have more power, but I still think the Deck is the best value for what it offers.
I would love to see a lower powered and low budget focused one. Powerful enough for locally running a web browser, normal Linux stuff like SSH and some low spec games like CDDA. Otherwise most games would be played by streaming it from your desktop.
So essentially a Steam Link/Moonlight thin client? Yeah, I like the idea of that.
This is a neat idea and contrary to what the other commenter said, I still think it’s a valuable proposition because many folks, myself included, would rather have a Linux device rather than an Android one.
I just want something that runs Minecraft so I don’t have to keep up to date with workarounds on the Switch that Nintendo keeps trying to block
also fuck bedrock edition
my switch exists primarily for Minecraft. I don’t use it much because the experience is terrible. if there was something that did the same thing but for Java, I’d buy it
I do this with my RK36XX emulation system (powkiddy RGB30). It has a port for the moonlight streaming app
It even plays stardew valley and quake 3 arena through the onboard ports really really well
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.
They probably fear that Nintendo already has that market secured.
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.
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I mean everything’s price is out of control. But, other than that, yeah, I’m not surprised. It’s not surprising that massive companies just wouldn’t understand what made the Steam Deck great in the first place.
I still recommend it to most people. I still think it’s the best on the market. Because I still think that the more open nature of the device, its trackpads and that SteamOS are killer features.
The price of everything is out of control, because it turns out the people who set wages have a different idea of inflation than the people that set prices.
This is the only gen I can think of where console prices have gone up from what they were at the start. And that’s before you get tariffs from everyone’s favourite orange dickhead.
And PC component prices are even worse.
A big part of console/computers getting cheaper has been thanks to decreasing transistor sizes (aka moore’s law). But we’re seeming reaching the physical limits of how small transistors can get, and as a result hardware won’t get cheaper simply from being remade with smaller chips.
#TuckFrump
Crys in Australian
Crys in already bought a rog
