Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
view the rest of the comments
Their approach leaves me with conflicting feelings.
On one hand, I dislike how the Steam Deck is among the weaker offerings for performance. On the other hand, I appreciate that it's not a commodified device like phones, which keep increasing in price with only miniscule incremental improvements year over year.
It wouldn't be as conflicting if they had better competitors following the yearly-improvement business model, as that would give more of a choice for those who prefer buying a new device each year. But, at least right now, the competing devices are pretty shit. None of them have dual track pads and 4 back buttons in addition to the standard inputs, and they're all running Windows 11 with a bloatware bandage to cover up the fact that the OS is far from controller-friendly.
Honestly the Steam Deck could never become more powerful and I would be perfectly fine with it. Hardware reliability, ecosystem maturity and quality of life features are what actually matters. The deck already can run several lifetimes of indy games and that is just going to grow.
Chasing performance to improve Steam Deck sales I think is a subpar play, though that being said more powerful hardware is always welcome.
In my opinion the pc gaming market (excluding indies) has an irrational obsession on focusing only on making performance heavy games with extremely taxing system requirements, the Steam Deck blowing up in popularity with its subpar hardware is honestly one of the best things that could happen to the pc gaming industry.
I agree completely. I would love if the popularity of mid-range handheld devices like the SD convinced more companies to steer away from the obsession with ever increasing graphical fidelity.
It's also nice having a handheld PC that is so reasonably priced in comparison to a lot of the other offerings in the handheld PC market.