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It's Time to Bring Back the Steam Machine
(steamdeckhq.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Steam Deck
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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
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:
[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.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck 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.
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An Xbox Series S (or even X) but not locked down and able to run Steam games would be great. But that's the kind of price you'd be looking for. Price of a PS5 would be the absolute maximum. Any higher, and mainstream people won't be interested because they can just buy a PS5 for that.
I think it's achievable at scale (millions of units like the PS5), but it'd be a huge gamble.
So a PC in a cool case?
The problem with going proprietary is that then, well, it's proprietary. So either they use off the shelf components in which case it's basically a PC, or they use custom stuff which might improve performance depending on what they do, but will make it difficult to repair and upgrade. Then you rely on Valve producing hardware components, and they're not really a hardware company, although in fairness they're also not doing badly at it.
It's more about the hardware/firmware/software uniformity and reliability for some people. My friend is in this camp, he doesn't want to need to manage a PC, he just wants a box he can reliably turn on and use.
And to expand a little on your point, uniformity means devs can target specific optimizations/performance. I.e. this will run like this on a Steam medium system.
Internally, yes, basically a PC in a smallish form factor case.
If you're aiming at the console crowd, upgrades and end-user repairs aren't a primary concern. But you're thinking of it like a desktop aimed at the desktop market where those things are more important, and you could hypothetically just do the same thing on the PC you already have, so what's the point?
For a console the high priority items are being quiet, able to fit in most TV stands and the like without standing out too much, and having the smoothest possible UX - if it's more involved than unpacking it, plugging it into power, plugging it into the TV, connecting a controller, turning it on and logging into an account to go from sitting in a box on the floor to ready to play (or at least install) a game then you've already lost. If installing a game is more complicated than clicking the install button once and waiting for the process to finish, you've already lost. If you are required to fiddle with drivers, settings, tweaks or config files to be able to play, you've already lost. If you are required to think about package managers, libraries, or any kind of usual PC management stuff, you've already lost.
Not really a PC is it? You can't even buy an APU of the spec in a PS5/XSX and you certainly can't run it all from one set of unified GDDR6 (and I know people say you can't run a CPU from that, but you demonstrably can run it well enough to run modern games).
Even just buying a GPU on the level of a PS5 (and that's somewhere on the level of a RX 6700) is going to take nearly all your budget, leaving you maybe £100 to build the rest of the PC.
I don't think it's an impossible problem to solve, but you can't do it if you're selling a couple of thousand units.