(We&#x27;ve merged from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27846843" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27846843</a> now, which points to that link)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a> might be a better link? Has pricing information, for one.The rumors were discussed a couple of months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27288653" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27288653</a>

Very cool. Seems like a steam-powered Switch.
Wonder how the other console manufacturers will react.

It is! A new version, in fact. It includes Proton.(I&#x27;m not sure if SteamOS v2 and below were already Arch-based, but it&#x27;s interesting to know that v3 is, given that the Steam Linux Runtime is mostly Ubuntu-tested)

It is indeed SteamOS, though they&#x27;re claiming that Proton will be improved for this:&gt; For Deck, we&#x27;re vastly improving Proton&#x27;s game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.

I noticed one of the screen shots was using KDE on the connection to another screen. Honestly that got me to realize it&#x27;s another PC and made me consider getting one. Worst case scenario, I just have another PC that&#x27;s marginally better than those small box office PCs.Edit: I read further, it is a fully fledged PC. You can install or do whatever you want to it.

I wonder what this will mean for Linux support on the Steam store in general? Since this is SteamOS[0], then manufacturers will have to support Linux &#x2F; Proton in order to have their games on this machine.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;software</a>

Glad to see two sticks in addition to the trackpads.The Steam Controller with its one pad&#x2F;one stick approach was...interesting but I just couldn&#x27;t adapt to it for most games.

Does anyone play AAA titles off of SD cards? Wouldn&#x27;t it take forever to load stuff?

All the next gen consoles have SSDs though, so games are going to be designed around that. Current AAA games might be playable on a microSD, but I doubt any of the AAA games currently in development will.

Aren&#x27;t read speeds a little too slow for heavy game loading?

They explicitly say the storage is not upgradable, and it&#x27;s absolutely not surprising given the form factor.

Valve doesn&#x27;t try to prevent it. But if it&#x27;s soldered, it won&#x27;t be easy.

You&#x27;ll probably be able to hack it and add your own NVME drive. Everything is standard and won&#x27;t be locked down like Apple&#x27;s hardware.

Storage seems like it&#x27;ll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it&#x27;s got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like Doom Eternal won&#x27;t fit on the base model, and the next step up with more sufficient storage is more expensive than the next gen consoles.

Steam Deck just doesn&#x27;t seem to roll off the tongue, maybe it will grow on me.

The closest competitor to this is called the switch.  Other competing products are called a station and a box.

&gt; &quot;My Deck is bigger than yours!&quot;Ah, the rallying cry of EDH&#x2F;Commander players everywhere.

I&#x27;d like to believe they named it that simply so kids could pull a &quot;My Deck is bigger than yours!&quot;.

I mean, yes, but isn&#x27;t Neuromancer where the term was born?

It’s a term used a lot already for DIY’d portable computers in a kind of cyberpunk aesthetic, apparently from the game series Shadowrun<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;cyberdeck&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;cyberdeck&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cyberDeck&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cyberDeck&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shadowrun.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cyberdeck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shadowrun.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cyberdeck</a>

Not a William Gibson fan I take it - I heartily recommend you read Neuromancer if you enjoyed the Matrix &#x2F; any cyberpunk at all.

&gt; DeckWhat an uninspiring name! (with unfortunate mispronunciations). Looks very interesting though, price point (starting at £349) seems very competitive.

I don&#x27;t think you come at the Nintendo Switch expecting low volume. Whether another company can be successful at it is a good question, but if you build expecting low volume, that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re going to get.

I&#x27;m surprised they went with a custom AMD part. Seems expensive for what is likely to be a low volume product. Why not just do a laptop in a handheld form factor.

I really hope that this market picks up steam (heh) and we get to see even more bigger names coming up with devices. The Aya Neo [1], OneXPlayer [2], and GPD Win3 [3] have all come out relatively close to each other with different ideas of what people want in a handheld gaming PC.Valve seems to want to get in on a price that is more competitive with the Nintendo Switch, so its hardware specs are a bit worse it seems than the others in the market. The plus side to this is that the base model comes in at just $399, though that is with eMMC storage, while the next bump up uses NVME. The other specs seem to be identical across the 3 SKUs, though.The trackpads a la the steam controller seem appropriate for the types of games that require a mouse on PC, which is unique in this product market. Gyroscopes are also built in, which I&#x27;d presume would work similar to the Wii U and Nintendo Switch for aiming. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll be as good as a mouse, but I&#x27;ve found that aiming with gyroscope on the Wii U was much easier than using just the analog stick, so hopefully it makes FPS games with a controller more pleasant for me.I also think it&#x27;s interesting that it is using SteamOS, which had been kind of abandoned by Valve for quite some time. This also means that it is depending on Proton for game compatibility, which in itself is a huge statement on their confidence in the maturity of it. Without it, this would be a complete failure like &quot;Steam Machines&quot; were. If it works out well, maybe we&#x27;ll finally see a real product instead of a tech demo from Dell and other PC manufacturers. Exciting.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ayaneo.com&#x2F;aya-neo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ayaneo.com&#x2F;aya-neo</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;onexplayer-best-performing-handheld-game-console#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;onexplayer-best-performin...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;gpd-win3-the-world-s-1st-handheld-aaa-game-console#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;gpd-win3-the-world-s-1st-...</a>

I wonder if the triggers are also two-stage, like the Steam controller&#x27;s. I loved that feature, found some niche uses in some games.

Well I guess their time developing the Steam controller isn&#x27;t all for naught. Looks similar in concept, except with dual joysticks and thumbpads (instead of just 1 each) and extreme deemphasis the traditional X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;A&#x2F;B buttons, and 4 (instead of 2) back paddle triggers. Which is great, I loved the paddles on my Steam controller.

1€ ~= 1.18$ US
So, probably not just a conversion thing

$399US is ~338€ though. Even adding in 19% VAT we&#x27;d come out at a nice round 400€, so I don&#x27;t really understand the 419€, which is just a weird number from a marketing perspective as well.That we&#x27;re getting overcharged on this side of the Atlantic isn&#x27;t new though, but happens with basically everything.

Isn&#x27;t that a tax thing? Prices in Europe are displayed VAT-included, while prices in the US are VAT-free, are they not?

It looks like it is $399 USD, so the price point may mostly be a conversion thing.Edit: Just looked up the conversion rate, right now 399 USD is 288 GBP? Weird. The mid tier is 529 USD, so something like 382 GBP. Upper tier is 649 USD, or 468 GBP.

&gt; Reduce your steam tax for the companies that provide a native linux buildThe idea that this would move the needle seems like wishcasting. Ten percent less of 0.89% of the Steam hardware survey is a couch-cushions rounding error. Meanwhile, Proton is a really good way to get hold of that rounding error as-is and works with surprisingly few problems across most games I&#x27;ve tried; For the amount of noise that 0.89% of the audience makes, Valve&#x27;s spent quite a lot of time-and-effort to come up with something that works quite well.

yeah i can&#x27;t play MMOs, yayi can&#x27;t play most multiplayer games, yayi can&#x27;t play most AAA titles because of DRMs, yayproton is a waste of timemost of the time you have to fiddle with weird settings, portable console appeal more to casual people, majority of them are tech illiterates, if something bug or doesn&#x27;t work properly and requires tweaks, it&#x27;ll backfire at both the devs (they bought the game after all), and valve (they bought the console)if they don&#x27;t push native builds, it&#x27;ll flop due to lack of proper NATIVE ecosystem&quot;daddy, why this game doesn&#x27;t work, this console sucks&quot;this only asks for a proper windows based machine, if XBOX releases their XBOX portable, it&#x27;s game over for valve

Where have you been? Valve has been pushing native Linux games for about 10 years.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=MTcxMTY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=MTcxMTY</a>

Finally a linux gaming consoleNow valve, for the love of god, PUSH NATIVE LINUX GAMING, proton only as a way to supplement the library..Reduce your steam tax for the companies that provide a native linux buildI will not buy this if your main selling point is &quot;proton&quot;As for the price, 419€.. very bad marketing, 399€ would have been perfect... you got greedy for 20€, that&#x27;ll hurt sales

The Switch has had the same problem, which causes me to basically never keep AAA games installed for long, but they are still quite successful.The Switch also tops out at 64GB with the new OLED model, whereas that&#x27;s the starting point for the Steam Deck. There is also a history of consoles being offered with a wide variety of different storage sizes (Xbox 360), and I don&#x27;t remember that causing any serious problems for them (if you ignore the humongous size of the Xbox dashboard at the end of its lifetime, which is an avoidable problem).

&gt;64GB is about 1 AAA game, and 0 in some cases.They will just use an SD card. Yeah it&#x27;s not as fast as SSD but it&#x27;s the low end device.

It will be easy enough to hack it to add your own storage. Probably just a screwdriver is needed and you insert your own NVME drive. Everything is standard hw.

I don&#x27;t disagree, but I think the $399 version might be their undoing. 64GB is about 1 AAA game, and 0 in some cases. So people are going to get this one for their kids for Christmas, the kids are going to say it&#x27;s shit, and it&#x27;s going to get a bad reputation, even if the high end models are good.Maybe they have solutions lined up for the problems that will come with low&#x2F;slow storage, but we&#x27;ll see!

The pricing even doesn&#x27;t seem unreasonable. If the device is of a good quality, this could sell pretty well.

In many ways this is clearly their second-take on Steam Machines. They learned the first time around that licensing the name to third party hardware vendors didn&#x27;t work (a lesson they could have learned from the 3DO), and that people didn&#x27;t really like streaming games from PC to TV.

It was pretty clear why they dropped them, which is most people hated it (while a few very much loved them). I loved my Steam Controller but right now I&#x27;m using mostly my Xbox controller for PC.The Wii U was a failure, but I feel (and I guess the sales can confirm that) that Nintendo learned from their mistakes.

Steam Link and Steam Controller were dropped because they weren&#x27;t selling very well, but the steam link application continues to be updated, and the Steam Controller continued to get firmware updates until 2018.If this Steam Deck thing sells well, they&#x27;ll probably make another one. If it sells poorly they&#x27;ll probably keep the software updated and use put discounts on it to clear out stock.

To me this seems like a decent combination of all of their past hardware experiments. It’s a steam machine, but in a portable form factor. It has the streaming capabilities of the link, and the touch controls of the steam controller. If this takes off, I’d expect to see them continue to release accessories and iterations of it. Maybe we’ll eventually new steam controllers for use in the docked mode.

I&#x27;m looking forward to the 2nd generation of Steam Deck. There won&#x27;t be a 3rd as we all know.

Valve, you created a lot of products that were great but then you dropped them for some or another reason.I would like for once for you to keep working on a singular product, release multiple iterations, make it better and make it the market leader.

I have a Valve Index VR headset. It was clearly the best on the market when I got it last year. The controllers and headset tracking are great and the video quality was a notch above the competition (though recent newer headsets have closed the gap). However it did have some hardware issues such as crackling audio in one of the speakers, so I ended up removing the headset speakers and wearing my own headphones. Anyway, overall I&#x27;m satisfied.

The people who have used their VR hardware say it&#x27;s excellent.

Steam link and the controllers were great. Too bad they dropped support for them so quickly. Went looking to replace one that finally broke down and found you couldn&#x27;t buy them anymore.

They have a tendency to drop their hardware quite early - I had a Steam Link so I could play computer games on my television, it works really great.

I think the issue is that both of those are dead products now.  Dropping support&#x2F;sales for hardware so quickly is a bit of a turnoff.

Do they? My Steam link still works, and its great. As is the controller.

The Valve Index is one of, if not the best, VR headsets on the market.  Quest 2 is a very close competitor and arguably better when you consider price + wireless ability.  But the Index is no slouch.

The Steam Link was awesome. Their VR headsets are the industry standard. The controller was niche but I heard good things. Steamboxes weren&#x27;t really a hit, but I don&#x27;t consider them a failure either (users still got fully functional gaming rigs).So no, I would disagree with that assessment.

They&#x27;ve got a good record with making hardware, but not making it mainstream.

I think their hardware has been great. The Index VR headset is high quality, and so was their controller although it didn&#x27;t seem to find market fit.

I&#x27;d argue the opposite.The Steam Controller was a work of technical art (albeit without the centuries of experience in ergonomics its competitors had).The Steam Link was a few years ahead of its competitors.And the Steam Vive&#x27;s Lighthouses were a literal light-speed ahead of the Oculus for a while.Fully agree however that you&#x27;re right that they&#x27;re too small to support a hardware long past its release when the market share is too small.

Happy index&#x2F;steam controller customer here, had to RMA one of the index controllers for a weird resetting issue but they handled that really well so I feel I’ve got my money’s worth. I may be biased though because valve is actually the company I have been a customer of the longest in my life

Valve&#x27;s arguably biggest most obvious failure are the Steam Machines [0], but that doesn&#x27;t feel like a track record failure in the way that, say, a PS Vita was. Weren&#x27;t Steam Machines basically just branded (and reasonably priced) PCs pre-loaded with SteamOS&#x2F;Linux? Not even the Steam Controller feels proprietary. I mean, in the sense that I can still use it handily on macOS despite its ending production 2 years ago.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;its-time-to-declare-valves-steam-machines-doa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;its-time-to-declare-v...</a>

They have a great track record with hardware. They have a poor track record of hardware adoption.I have the Steam Controller: it&#x27;s fantastic, so versatile, and everything it claimed it would be. I have the Steam Link: works great, brings my desktop to any TV in the house. I haven&#x27;t used their VR equipment but from those that have, seems like basically the reason get Oculus instead of Valve is because of Oculus exclusives.I&#x27;ve been dying for this form-factor for years, since long before the Switch came out. Valve has been losing tons of money from me in the form of purchases, because games in their library haven&#x27;t been in the right form factor, so I&#x27;ve bought them for mobile and for Switch, when really I&#x27;d rather have bought them in Steam with a mobile-play option.I&#x27;ve explored the mobile-phone-with-controllers-streaming-from-a-desktop option, and it&#x27;s just not what I&#x27;m looking for. I&#x27;ve been looking for a feasible option in this space since the Razer Edge came out in 2013, and there just hasn&#x27;t been a good one...not with phones-with-controllers-attached (have to stream), not with mini-laptops (bad ergonomics and performance), etc. I&#x27;ve looked into a number of homebrew efforts to try and get Steam games onto my Switch (streamed or otherwise) but it&#x27;s just not worth the commitment of time and effort when I could spend the same $10 for that indie game I want on Switch instead of on Steam.I reluctantly got a Switch two years ago. I was reluctant because although I&#x27;ve been wanting this form factor for years, I also wanted a device that was compatible with my Steam library. Since buying the Switch, I&#x27;ve only bought Switch games (and not a single Steam game) mostly because being able to play on that form-factor is worth the price-premium to me.It&#x27;s Valve&#x27;s excellent record of delivery on hardware that makes this a pre-order for me. Super excited about this.

Valve has a pretty bad track record with hardware, do they not? I&#x27;m not very aware of this industry, but the vague impress I have is that they&#x27;ve tried this a couple of different ways and it hasn&#x27;t gone well for them. I&#x27;m curious why they would make this play again.

I can confirm this. The index is a marvelous piece of tech in so many ways. It&#x27;s a premium bit of kit (with the associated premium price) and I have zero complaints about it.

Does the Index VR work with the Steam Deck?

My understanding is that their Index VR hardware is quite good too.

Alyx is a VR game, not a video game in my book.

Yet another successful game vs Yet another failing hardware device.

Honestly I&#x27;d much rather have Hardware Innovation and Linux Gaming Enthusiast Valve than Made Yet Another AAA Shooter Valve.

Fixed now. (At one point the title on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27847007" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27847007</a> said &quot;Desk&quot;.)

Haha, I read it and wondered why they put a computer in a desk. Buy a desk, get a free computer!What?!

I thought Half-Life: Alyx was basically our HL3? It certainly got critical reviews&#x2F;scores suggesting it deserves its moniker of Half-Life.

Typo in the title. It’s “Steam Deck”, not “Steam Desk”.Interesting that Valve is diving deeper into hardware. Remember when they still made video games? Remember when there was still a hope they would some day release Half-Life 3?

They&#x27;ll surely host their own repository rather than use Arch&#x27;s directly. There&#x27;s no reason to question stability when they&#x27;re in control of both ends, and Arch is light with excellent tooling.It&#x27;s a good fit.

I find that odd too, but in my recent experience, Manjaro has been the best Linux experience I&#x27;ve had since Ubuntu 14.04. Just install and everything works. Although Gnome was a bit of a hassle, xfce and Cinnamon run beautifully.

Both Debian and Arch are very fine distributions. Your other three options aren&#x27;t really good for what Valve is going for.Gentoo is source based, and while distribution of binary packages is possible with it, why would they do that?NixOs ignores FHS, and while it is possible to install a steam compatible runtime, why would they do that?And Fedora belongs to RedHat, and why would they do that, when they actually try to switch away from a OS distribution controlled by one company?I am not saying those distributions aren&#x27;t good, just that it would not make sense for Valve to use any of those.Debian (via Ubuntu) and Arch are probably the most well tested Linux distributions by gamers, that do not belong to a single company.

And they switched from Debian to Arch. Can&#x27;t say I don&#x27;t understand them, but I would have thought there would have been better bases than a rolling distribution (Gentoo, NixOS, Fedora).

It&#x27;s based on Arch? That really is exciting. I never expected something like this.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech</a>&gt; Operating System: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based)&gt; Desktop: KDE PlasmaThis is sure to excite the Linux community.

You can plug it to a bigger screen, so a bigger resolution could be useful

It&#x27;s about the same size as a large smartphone. Having a screen with half the ppi of an iPhone would definitely be noticeable.

7&quot;, bigger resolution would be useless, and a waste of ressources tbh, it&#x27;s a portable console, i&#x27;d rather have better FPS and better battery life than higher resolution with lower FPS

Tech specs – <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech</a>800p resolution is a bit disappointing, but I guess that&#x27;s the only way to get a good frame rate without a massive power-hungry GPU.

I was more disappointed that it didn&#x27;t support 802.11ax.

What, no 5G? Just WiFi? That seems surprising.

All the more reason to buy Steam Deck, I guess.

The site Crashed my browser (chrome) as soon as I scrolled down.

This looks great. A Nintendo switch with more than a handful of AAA titles and shovel ware and power. I’ll be buying I think since the Nintendo DS is dead, switch isn’t for me, Sony gave up. This looks like a winner.

If you click to the site and go to the Software tab it talks about it being SteamOS with Proton etc.

What os does it run? And the more important follow up: what games can it therefore run?I _assume_ it&#x27;s linux, but that must limit the games to protondb and linux compatible games which, speaking from a lot of experience, misses quite a few.

Nope, it&#x27;s on the dock. One USB-3, two USB-2. There&#x27;s no power consumption reason for the dock.

USB 3&#x2F;C has really fine grain power control - using &quot;PD&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...</a>), it&#x27;s possible to negotiate the rates pretty finely - so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s that.

There are a surprising number of USB devices that don&#x27;t work right when plugged into USB 3. I figure it&#x27;s a compatibility-driven move to support random cheap janky controllers&#x2F;keyboards&#x2F;mice that customers will inevitably try to use.

USB 2 on a mobile device might be for limiting power consumption?

The best part is that you don&#x27;t need to buy games if you already have a Steam library full of games.

They specifically mention Arch Linux (with KDE Plasma desktop) in the software specsSteamOS 2 was Debian-based

By Arch, do you mean Arch Linux? According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.game-debate.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;25482&#x2F;valve-counts-to-3-steamos-3-0-is-inbound-codenamed-clockwerk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.game-debate.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;25482&#x2F;valve-counts-to-3-ste...</a> , it seems to be based on Debian 9.

That’s almost a deal breaker. My hands get tingly after playing in hand held mode for too long. Not sure if it’s the weight or ergonomics.

It&#x27;s much less than 3x the weight of a Switch. They list it at 670g and a Switch with Joycons attached is about 400g.

As someone with with incredibly poor wrists, the OG switch is already too heavy.

The tech page says that it weighs &quot;Approx. 120 grams&quot; [1] Is this information incorrect?1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;tech</a>edit: crtl-f mistake, that&#x27;s the docking station

I&#x27;ve been thoroughly unimpressed with the build quality of the Switch, I&#x27;d probably have paid more for a sturdier &#x27;pro&#x27; version, to be honest.

This is such a short-term knee-jerk reaction. We should be thanking Steam for their wonderful push to get gamers into shape. Toned arms might seem like a bit of a joke but when you consider you get your biggest exercise wins doing literally anything at all this will literally save lives. How can you not be for it? Is it heavy enough is the only question to be asked here. There is nothing valve won&#x27;t do for us!

One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions.edit: On closer look that&#x27;s comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that&#x27;s still a lot of extra weight to hold in your hands.

It&#x27;s ancient and Valve had to do tons of backports to support it properly. I imagine they didn&#x27;t like that very much.

What was wrong with SteamOS being based on Debian? I’ve not used SteamOS myself, but I wasn’t aware there were problems in that regard.

Aren&#x27;t up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?

dnf adds a layer of complexity that&#x27;s really unnecessary; pacman keeps things much simpler.

I don&#x27;t think either of those points are correct.1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don&#x27;t get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch.2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It&#x27;s a better model, especially when kernel&#x2F;drivers are improving gaming quickly.3. Arch has a stable base and gets small updates every day. Regular software services tell us this is a better model than infrequent large updates. Things like RHEL are the exception, but take years of QA, and leave you with old drivers in between releases.

&gt;They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It&#x27;s now got an Arch base.I&#x27;m a little surprised they didn&#x27;t go with something like Fedora. The kernel &#x2F; drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.

Micro SD is an order of magnitude slower than the NVMe option, though.

Regarding that storage thing: in the hardware section, they specified that the storage could be expanded with a microSD [1] card which should already improve storage capacity by a lot if you wish.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;hardware</a>

Loading times will likely be a lot better on the high storage versions due to NVMe. And PC loading times can be brutal so I think the upgrade will be very noticeable.

Eh, UHS-1 is pretty slow compared to an SSD.I think for the types of games I’d want to play on it (emulation) that’d be just fine, but for some it could be a bit annoying.I think they should have gone with a faster interface though.

In my opinion, unless you only want to play extremely lightweight games (like less than 50 megabytes to load) such as older retro games, the SSD is a requirement.

&gt; All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.This makes buying the model with limited storage a bit of a no-brainer. I&#x27;m glad Valve supports external storage.

my guess is pretty much what manjaro does.
i was surprised to see its running kde.  i thought they just woulda launched a steam frontend and that&#x27;s that.

Yeah, it&#x27;s not that hard to hold updates back a bit.

Arch is a surprising choice because of their rolling release schedule. How will software updates for Steam Deck work? Will Valve just snapshot Arch at a random time, and then stabilize it?

Presumably most people use usb for peripherals that don’t require usb3 spec. Webcams, input devices, etc.

It&#x27;s not really a mobile chip, it&#x27;s a full laptop-grade Zen 2 processor.

&gt; Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?Almost certainly has to do with cost and PCI-E bandwidth. Mobile chips like this only have so much bandwidth, and USB3 requires more dedicated bandwidth than USB2, not to mention more complicated circuitry that drives up price. And when your expected use case is attaching keyboards and mice, which generally are USB2 only anyways, it reduces the cost and bandwidth needed to support that many ports.

&gt; Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?Because it&#x27;s cheaper to produce and easier to design for USB 2. The cpu and chipset are limiting factors as well.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;chipsets-am4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;chipsets-am4</a>Scroll down to the table at the bottom of the page to see what AMD&#x27;s chipsets can support.

&gt; Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes?there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch.Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there&#x27;s the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.

There&#x27;s unattended updates and GUIs for everything, bruh.The adage that you have to use a terminal if you want to run a distro has been out of date for over a decade.

I would have thought Fedora Silverblue would be the perfect OS for this kind of thing. The OS is a read only image you mount and to update you simply mount the newer image. Its the same model mobile OSs use and it means update failures are almost non existent.

I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I&#x27;m not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it&#x27;s package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don&#x27;t know or care thst they&#x27;re running on Debian or Arch).

My assumption is that the intended use of the USB 2.0 ports are mouse + keyboard.

I agree on the reasoning, but at the same time, they might as well have just gone with a single USB-2 port and had people buy a &lt;$10 USB hub off Amazon or something (or offered it as a peripheral for $20).  Although, you can buy a few port USB-c hub for almost the same price, and if they just had two USB-c ports it would all work just as well with the addition of a hub (since you only need to add a keyboard and mouse when stationary).

&gt; Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?I think it&#x27;s not a case of &quot;having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 slots&quot;, I think it&#x27;s instead a case of &quot;having precisely two USB-2 slots&quot;, no matter how many USB-3 slots there are. The reason for exactly two USB-2 slots is obvious: one of them is for the keyboard, the other one is for the mouse. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse need more than USB-2, so there&#x27;s no reason to have the more complex USB-3 hardware for these two ports.Other than those two ports, it makes sense to have the rest of the USB ports be USB 3, which seems to be the case here, even though there&#x27;s only one (the USB-C port seems to be meant to be always plugged into a charger, so it might also be USB-2 only).

&gt; Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?Most of the prospective users don&#x27;t need more USB-3 ports than they have.

In my experience USB-3 generates interference that messes with wireless gaming device dongles.  I use a Logitech wireless headset and gamepad and they work far worse in USB-3 ports.

First impressions:Really good hardware for the price.They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It&#x27;s now got an Arch base.They&#x27;re definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it&#x27;ll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn&#x27;t matter much.Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days?Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart move, given how small the display is.

I initially clicked this link thinking it was a Valve-branded Stream Deck. Only then did I realize it was a Valve-branded Switch instead. :P

Sort of an unfortunate name since it&#x27;s so similar to &quot;Stream Deck.&quot; I imagine there might be some confusion between the two if this takes off.

The Shield was Android with GameStream. This will run games directly on x86 Linux which, with all their Proton work, will result in a much bigger game library out of the box. There have been more niche handheld x86 devices, but they were even more money, and different form factors. Steam being as big as it is, I think this has way more potential than anything done before.

This is different than the NVidia Shield handheld in that hardware has come a loooong way since 2013 and it’s actually possible to run modern AAA games at 1200x800 using what is effectively a mobile chipset. No streaming from a PC required.If I played more games I would absolutely buy one of these. I already own the NVidia Shield that plugs into your TV because it’s a great streaming box even if you ignore the gaming aspect.

That’s a really good point, viewing this as an accessibly-priced entry into PC gaming makes it even more attractive.

PC hardware prices will affect this as well, since this is based on shortages and high demand... basically these will be almost impossible to get outside of secondary market.

I wonder if they&#x27;re selling at a loss? Valve can afford it, plus it&#x27;d be no different than Sony&#x2F;Nintendo&#x2F;etc subsidizing hardware since they make most of their profits from software sales.Only difference is that, unlike traditional game companies, this Steam Deck thing isn&#x27;t a walled garden. But of course, Steam has a near monopoly on PC gaming so it&#x27;s unlikely that&#x27;ll be a problem for them.

PS5 and Xbox are using PC hardware too. The only difference is that they might have secured some supply for those customized parts in advance.

You have to consider that PC hardware is currently spiraling out of control in terms of price, and $400 for the specs it has presently is a fairly decent buy even if you don&#x27;t care about the form factor.

I&#x27;m willing to shell out so that I don&#x27;t have to buy all the games I already paid for.

It’s more less the same price as Nintendo switch and the switch is limited to expensive Nintendo games. Now if you are a fan of Nintendo games, great! But if you are a of gamer then this steam deck sound like a better idea!

The Nvidia Shield ran Android. So either bad Android games locally, os streaming. The Shield might do better today as a client just for Stadia, Xcloud or PS Now.However, this is far better. Not only are the specs very impressive for the size&#x2F;power, but it runs an OS that can plan anything (with Proton). It&#x27;s like mixing the switch with a ps4. Imagine playing the Witcher 3, or Doom Eternal on this compared to the 480p blurry Switch version. I hope this does well.

Had to google what you meant by NVIDIA Shield (wrt portable gaming): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;NVIDIA-SHIELD-Portable-pc&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00E3667XQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;NVIDIA-SHIELD-Portable-pc&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00E3667...</a>One major difference (besides the form-factor obviously) is that the Deck doesn&#x27;t require WiFi + desktop to play your PC games. I&#x27;d also argue that the trackpads will be a major difference. The Steam Controller&#x27;s trackpad wasn&#x27;t perfect, but it made possible to sanely play a ton of designed-for-mouse games

Most blockbuster games are over 64gb on their own these days. You couldn&#x27;t install just one of: GTA5, Red Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Forza Motorsport&#x2F;Horizon, Fallout 4, the list goes on.At least Todd Howard can&#x27;t sell Skyrim yet another time, it&#x27;s already in my steam library.

&gt;&gt;&quot;augment your built-in storage with a microSD card and fill it up with even more games.&quot;I think that hints that you can install games... hopefully :).

&gt; The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device.I felt that way about the Quest 2, and opted for the maxxed-out version. As it turns out, I use it a few times per week and have ~40GB of storage in use.I originally used Virtual Desktop to remote in to my desktop, mostly from across the house but also over 5G. Now that Airlink is available in beta I use it exclusively at home, and mostly play &quot;PCVR&quot; titles wirelessly.The Steam Deck seems to be taking the same approach. I see myself using it to play games from my desktop library while in bed or sitting outside. Few if any games will actually get installed on the device, because I won&#x27;t want to use the on-board processing and drain my battery anyhow.

I don’t get this, if you’re using it for gaming then storage isn’t a huge deal. Even on a dedicated gaming PC, most people don’t have their entire Steam library installed at once.Not only is it just too much space, but it’d be wasted since there’s no way you’re going to play all of those games.The 64gb version of this definitely is too small though. That’s less than the average AAA game. And while there are certainly people out there who don’t play AAA games, I don’t think the average Joe will do the math ahead of time when buying one of these, and will be very disappointed&#x2F;angry when they find they can’t play the game they want (without using external storage&#x2F;a dock).But, if this thing does have an SD card slot (idk, I haven’t checked), it should solve the problem. SD cards aren’t super fast, but the Nintendo switch is proof that they’re at least good enough for gaming.

Since it runs Linux I don’t see any reason you couldn’t put your entire library on an NFS server in the other room. If I get one I’ll certainly be doing that

&gt; (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steamdeck.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;hardware</a>&gt; All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.Anyway, you can more or less do that today already with external disks, etc. You can certainly connect a USB3 SSD. I wonder if the nvme drive is user-replaceable? I guess not?Though given the open nature of the device, expect mods sooner rather than later. Replacing a chip and telling Linux to override its size (or mod the bios&#x2F;dtb) should be a breeze.

I honestly can&#x27;t believe the 64GB one isn&#x27;t 128GB instead. I looked through my steam library and I have a lot of smaller games that would fit just fine on that.. but 1 AAA title would completely fill it. Plus, you don&#x27;t get that whole 64GB, the OS has to take some of it. After the formatting and OS I&#x27;d be surprised if there was more than 50-55GB free space.

&gt;I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”Yup.Before clicking the &quot;Reserve&quot; link, I put a personal threshold for this thing at $300. If it was somewhere around that, it&#x27;d be an instant purchase for me.Over $500 for a version with barely acceptable (by 2021 standards) storage? No thank you.The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device. I can&#x27;t imagine people not running out of space very, very fast (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs). Still, for $300, it&#x27;d be an instant buy for me - just to be able to play in bed.I really hope enough people buy this thing, because I&#x27;d really want it to thrive - and the price to drop :)

Your phone lacks the controller interfaces these devices have though. I guess it depends on if you can hook up a controller to your phone, or if you&#x27;re able to play the games you like without to much fuss on your phone screen.

Why couldn&#x27;t you use this with Stadia?The price isn&#x27;t out of line even if you consider it as a &quot;thin client&quot; gaming device.

Playing PC games on a cell phone is painful. You can&#x27;t even see half the game because your thumbs always obscure the screen to operate the touch controls.

Personally I find a lot of these devices backwards minded. I&#x27;d much rather just shell out for a service like Stadia (if the catalogue was larger) and turn my actual mobile device into something capable of playing pc titles. Especially if the implementation is platform agnostic like Stadia. Gaming devices of all stripes have become expensive enough that I&#x27;m more than happy to see cloud gaming takeover and leave hardware for the activists and bitcoin miners.

The Switch power bump would&#x27;ve probably only made sense in 4K docked gaming anyways, and people are probably not going to buy one of these for docked gameplay.

&gt; I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.PC gamers and steam gamers are often very different markets. Nintendo, for decades now, was about fun, not power. I&#x27;m casual gamer, just for fun, and steam deck, while super cool, is certainly not going to replacement my switch.

I&#x27;m guessing you could run Breath of the Wild better on the Steam Deck with CEMU emulation than the Nintendo Switch.

It&#x27;s interesting timing because the Switch Oled edition was just announced with no bump in power. So if you want a capable handheld with access too all the indies which will play games much better than your switch... here you go.And you can still keep your switch for nintendo exclusives because they&#x27;ve just made it clear that they&#x27;re not upgrading the switch in a worthwhile way for at least a year.I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.

But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for oneAtari Lynx. Sony PSP. Sony Vita. Nintendo Switch. Any others I don&#x27;t remember?

&gt; Sega knew how to play this game and still didn&#x27;t manage to hang on...I see what you did there :)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hang-On" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hang-On</a>

&gt; People forget that these devices without marketing and consistency they won&#x27;t go far.But seeing Valve&#x27;s track record, marketing isn&#x27;t their strong point too.

&gt;But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.People forget that these devices without marketing and consistency they won&#x27;t go far.Nintendo, Sony, even MS that came later to the party have hundreds (if not thousands) of millions poured to build their brands, over decades... Sega knew how to play this game and still didn&#x27;t manage to hang on...They are already taking the crops of nostalgia, that&#x27;s for how long they have been around. Leveraging these devices base on hardware it&#x27;s nothing in the great scheme of things.

Id just want a smaller laptop at that point then?I find its really hard to beat the convertible laptop form factor in general

&gt; I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”At first glance at least, it seems like it may end up being much more than that. I see appeal here for non-gamers as well - or at least, for people who aren&#x27;t only or even primarily gamers.It&#x27;s a very nice cyberdeck for general use, though granted it doesn&#x27;t have a hardware keyboard. Given the size and form factor any keyboard they&#x27;d tried to graft on the thing would be basically unusable anyhow so I&#x27;m glad they didn&#x27;t try.I can totally see myself picking one of these up and throwing it in my bag alongside a small Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. For working in coffee shops in a terminal it&#x27;d be just fine. Connect it up to a TV via Chromecast or something and you&#x27;ve got a damned nice setup for less than a grand.

The battery life is a straight up lie. 8 hours on a single battery charge? What game were they testing, Solitaire?

The mere fact that NVIDIA Shield Portable didn&#x27;t take off doesn&#x27;t tell us much. It had poor design sensibility (i.e. it looked like ass, like some kind of portable Xbox designed in the early 2000s), and it ran Android, which lacks a compelling games library.Steam Deck at least stands a chance, although I&#x27;m worried about the weight and the battery life.

I wonder how really portable this thing is; it has PC hardware, a screen and a small factor in which to stick batteries: how long will the battery last?

Valve has been pushing their Steam Controller for quite some time now, it sits squarely in the no man&#x27;s land between clear success and total failure. The core audience of this new product will know quite well what to expect.

The videos on the site show people playing Doom Eternal (FPS), Crusader Kings III (4x strategy game), Balder&#x27;s Gate (top down RPG), and Disco Elysium (point-and-click adventure game). It looks playable to me.Plus it natively supports &quot;mouse&quot; controls via a few input methods: thumb touch screens and tilt-o-whorl. And if neither of those work, you can use a bluetooth mouse&#x2F;keyboard.

I think a better question is will games traditionally built for PC&#x27;s hold up on a mobile device?Mostly I&#x27;m thinking about controller vs keyboard+mouse. Typically you have more controls available on PC and when I play the same game on PC I am complete garbage at it because I&#x27;m used to controller, maybe I&#x27;m too old though.

I&#x27;m absolutely in the market for this. I&#x27;m fixing to move six time zones from my friends, who all play. Instead of buying a gaming laptop to take with me I&#x27;d just buy this if it&#x27;s let me play with the easily.

&gt; I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”Does it even matter? For consumers, they get what they paid for even if Valve shows zero commitment as long as Steam does not actively shut them out. For game companies, support for controller and Linux&#x2F;Proton is valuable with or without Steam Deck.And for Valve itself, all the software investment is a long term hedge against the existential threat of Windows failing them, this is just an opportunistic bonus use. The only actual cost is the hardware side of the project. If it tanks in the market they&#x27;ll simply refrain from doing a v2 and do damage control with long tail sales of v1. While taking comfort in knowing that the Deck hardware will at least have lured a few game companies into the arms of Proton, strengthening their Windows hedge.

&gt; the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolutionOther than emulators, Android is a barren land for good controller based games. Specially compared to Steam.

This has so much more potential because its a desktop OS. You could e.g. play WoW using this. Not to mention the huge selection from emulators. I&#x27;ve tried gaming with Android before and the game selection is awful. Realistically, the only good gaming options are from e.g. snes emulators. On top of that, most phone GPU drivers are horrendously broken when doing advanced 3d stuff so even if a good game was released for android, you wouldn&#x27;t be able to play it on 80% of phones.

I for one love my Shield and would upgrade &#x2F; buy again - real-time upscaling&#x2F;upmixing makes YouTube into a competitive &quot;channel&quot; I regularly watch on my 4K TV.The shield runs all the major streaming networks and there&#x27;s now Airplay apps that run in the background, closing that gap.As with all chrome-based devices, the Google voice assistant blows away AppleTV and Roku.

I view this as more of a tinker device. They’ve stated you can install anything on it. I just know I haven’t regretting buying the steam link or controller, so I may give this a go.

When comparing value with the switch, factor in:1) Nintendo switch game prices2) The size of your existing PC-compatible library (including emulators).That drastically changes the value proposition to me.

This is my feeling. Money is no problem for me, but I&#x27;m not immune to purchasing stuff I don&#x27;t end up using. So I&#x27;m cautious about that and I&#x27;m sitting here wondering about the value. Say, the $650 model.On one hand it would be nice to have my Steam games on a portable without having to double-purchase(a problem ATM with Switch, on top of the higher typical costs of those games on eShop).But I have the Switch and Switch Lite already which plays Nintendo exclusives. Honestly it&#x27;s nice to get a break and dip into a catalogue that&#x27;s not on my PC when I&#x27;m on the go. And I&#x27;m 100% not going to take two portables with me anywhere.Then there is the cost. $650 for me would be better spent toward a PS5 if I could get my hands on one. I like the Sony exclusives(GoW, Last of Us, etc) and would really like to play Returnal.. Though it will probably go cross-platform before I ever see a PS5 with my own eyes.The more I think about it&#x27;s price point and value to me the more I get the Shield vibes, and the more impressive it is how well Nintendo knows their customers and rides a very fine line with their product placement.Edit: As an added thought; I like to experience certain games, shows, and movies in a very controlled environment. I won&#x27;t play&#x2F;watch them on-the-go.

I for one own a switch and has been waiting for a better quality product, I&#x27;ve also been looking to get a desktop gaming PC but the price + the space it takes has been putting me off for a long time. So this steam deck is an insta buy for me.

I believe it&#x27;s more about gaming on sofa than gaming on train.

I intend to buy and use it as a mobile workstation for programming, since it has a x86 chip, 16Gb Ram, Linux-compatible gfx chip, decent amount of storage. Basically this will fill the void left by the Nokia N900 for a lot of us. It being able to run steam&#x2F;games is secondary for me.Or, if AMD would please get on with it and release a small form factor like the Intel Nuc, that would be great. But this device does have a screen attached to it and a battery, so it would work fine as a nuc for me.Super excited!

There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite &#x2F; mobile gaming.Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move.But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution.I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”Frankly, I feel like it’s probably a decent number of people? Enough for this product to do okay, if not change the whole market. But people have been very confidently incorrect about almost every iteration of mobile gaming in the past. I guess we’ll see.

I guess that would be a reasonable complaint if it wasn&#x27;t so that Steam is already Valve&#x27;s main product, and that this device is intended for playing games from Steam!

This seems more like an opportunistic rant about Valve&#x27;s marketing than a sincere response to the particular situation. The name makes perfect sense given its a slab that plays steam games and if you&#x27;d pay attention to the website beyond the background colour (???), you may notice how it has several pictures, animations and videos illustrating the product in far more detail and clarity than many console launches. It worked for me anyway because I studied the site cover to cover so to speak.Granted, I agree that Valve did a genuinely poor job with the Steam Controller and Steam machines but in the former case, it was because even Valve themselves didn&#x27;t quite understand what they had just made and in the latter, things were complicated by having to deal with multiple third parties.

Whoever named this an idiot, my first thought was reading “Stream Deck” and I thought it was streaming device.  Valve makes good hardware but their marketing is terrible leading to abandoned hardware that enthusiasts rave about.  The marketing page is white... it is Valve... why is the marketing site white?!?!

Huh yeah that is odd. Valve is typically pretty good at ergonomic hardware, maybe the buttons aren&#x27;t the primary interaction tool for this.

Judging by the image in the &quot;Speeds and feeds&quot; section, there are only four shoulder buttons. Also, looking more closely at the placement, it looks like they&#x27;re putting more emphasis on touchpads over the joysticks, and certainly over the D-pad, much like the Steam Controller.

I just hit the site on my desktop. Like the steam controller before, it&#x27;s got a lot of back buttons that you can likely remap (R1 to R4 and L1 to L4). So yes, the front buttons are backups.

The button placement seems really high, but it might be comfortable to play while resting the bottom on a table.

Source? The console market (~45 billion) is larger than the PC market (~37 billion) [0], but I wouldn’t describe PC as ‘fairly small’. Maybe you have different data though?[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newzoo.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;articles&#x2F;newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newzoo.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;articles&#x2F;newzoo-games-market-num...</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t count on the Switch going anywhere. PC gaming is a fairly small market compared to consoles these days.

I believe the Switch itself is evidence that Nintendo’s success is driven by strong IP, not strong hardware.

Considering their immense success with the Switch so far, I think worrying about Sega seems miles away.Raw spec peeping is something enthusiasts like to do, but I think they&#x27;re a small chunk of the market.

I doubt it. Nintendo hasn&#x27;t dominated in hardware specs for several generations. They survive by primarily being developers of great games that just happen to only be available on their whatever-hardware-we-could-get-for-$250 platform.

If Valve goes through with this and sticks to the device, it could become a serious competitor, though.

i know what you&#x27;re saying and this wouldnt be out of the box, but wait till someone gets emulators running on it, within a year i&#x27;d say

This will trounce the Nintendo Switch as soon as Pokemon, Zelda, Mario Kart, and Smash Bros are released on Steam. Which is to say &quot;never.&quot;

IMO Sega’s problem was started by having a confusing lineup of too many products. Then they fumbled the US Saturn launch and faced stiffer competition than before. Then the Dreamcast was a victim of the PS2 _also_ being a DVD player, which made it a much more compelling option in its early days.In this case, Nintendo has a large and dedicated fanbase, hardware that they (IIRC) sell at a profit, and a truly enormous warchest. They’ll be fine.

This looks like it will trounce the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo doesn&#x27;t even have new hardware in the pipeline other than an iterative OLED screen.Now that Nintendo depends on a single portable console, is there a risk that they&#x27;ll go the way of Sega?

Valve Steam Deck