Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices (igalia.com)

TingPing

617 points

Showing single thread. View full discussion?

stavros

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

zem

16 hours ago

I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.

palata

16 hours ago

Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU solution since then.

I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).

stavros

16 hours ago

Yes! The Deck is the closest I've gotten to getting into gaming. I especially loved the "press the power button and your game is immediately right there" aspect of it.

I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.

pipes

16 hours ago

It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact that it's properly an open platform is amazing.

joshstrange

12 hours ago

This is my experience. I played some Xbox here and there and every once in a while fell down the Factorio hole but I wasn’t gaming a ton. I got the steam deck somewhat cause it was cool, and somewhat as retail therapy but now I play it almost every night. I love playing smaller indie games on it, it’s a great device. Compare that to my Switch 2 and I’ve played it about 1/100th of the time I’ve played on the Deck. The Switch 2 is nice and all, just the Deck is way more flexible.

Replaying my favorite GBA/DS/etc games again on the Deck was so much fun. Huge screen for my (older) eyes, ability to speed up/rewind/save slots, and other tweaks if I wanted were all a blast. I played back through some of my favorites as a kid and enjoyment and nostalgia were both off the charts.

bryanlarsen

15 hours ago

The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games...

They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.

Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

layer8

15 hours ago

There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.

huseyinkeles

16 hours ago

That’s what happens when you don’t need to please the shareholders.

charcircuit

15 hours ago

Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

bauble

12 hours ago

I'm staring at the EOL of Windows 10, which I use on my game machine. I'll happily get one of the cubes for my next box. I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage.