No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.
Hmm this makes me wonder if the Steam Deck 2 will be ARM. If the Steam Frame works well if that could be a way for Valve to push more performance/battery life out of the deck
I can’t wait to get the controller
I hope the Frame is as cheap or cheaper than a Meta Quest 3. It’s almost identical in the specs, but goes back to monochrome external cameras instead of full color. But also has eye tracking which the Q3 does not. I want eye tracking so fucking bad… I set up cameras for it before I was like “Hold up… They can’t see my eyes with the headset on 😬” lol
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Some important differences in the specs. It’s not the same SoC, should have like 20-30% more GPU power, then there’s their whole wireless streaming system (comes with the dongle). Could potentially do something better for audio but it certainly cannot be Index quality in that regard.
At the end of the day Meta does still do the console thing of subsidizing the headset with the software and Valve doesn’t always do that so how close or far it lands in price is going to depend on that too.
No way it is as cheap as a q3. All valve have said is that they are aiming for < the price of a valve index full kit. https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-hands-on-impressions/
steam deck is still incredibly good for what you get. i have on of the original ones with a 64 gb ssd and although i have some hangups with that i just put in a 1.5 terabyte sd card and it runs almost everything i throw at it. just discovered the other night it can do vr very poorly with a beta steam client and beta steam vr while streaming to my quest 3s with steam link. we really live in a new era.
I could have had one and didn’t get it because I never really go anywhere other than work. But boy did I regret it when I was at BLFC recently. My hotel roommates all had one and were playing Helldivers and Rocket League every night 😩
I could have brought my Quest… But I don’t have anything for the stand alone system; all my VR games are on Steam.
I had a horrible flashback to the Ouija, that thing traumatized me
Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.
Sometimes I think about how LOATHED Steam was when it launched. That was probably valid even. Still, it feels worth noting that Valve is maybe THE only company from my childhood that feels like it largely stayed true to its spirit, or whatever.
People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.
Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.
The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.
friends/chat was offline for literally months
Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.
What if he really wanted to make it up to you? Is there anything he could do to apologize?
I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.
Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.
Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.
I was one of the haters when it first launched because I was on dialup at the time and physical discs I bought were forcing me to install steam AND THEN install a massive patch that did not work on dialup. My first day playthrough of Skyrim was ruined because of that. Took a week for that shit to download even though I went physically to a store.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
It happened to me (with blizzard)…and it will happen to you!
A lot of companies turned to utter shit over the years but Blizzard hit me the hardest I think.
I just paid $20 for a physical copy Counter Strike, and I find out I need to install an additional launcher and make an account to play the game I just installed. It’s the principle of the thing!
It basically didn’t add any value to the experience. We just wanted to play CS, and steam just got in the way.
They have good PR and fanboy propaganda. They’re every bit as evil as every game company out there. Steam fans just got tricked into thinking Gabe was THEIR billionaire and steam is THEIR billionaire corporation, and they can do no wrong. No other game platform has a fan base as aggressive and hostile when you point it out
The downvotes seem to agree with you…?
As someone still using Steam Controller 1 on the daily, I am stoked to see that they have not abandoned the trackpads. Civ from the couch ftw.
After V, it more or less became a console game
I enjoy VI, but I know it is divisive.
My comment holds more generally true for anything mouse-centric.
The timing is great as I learn my healthcare premiums are likely to go up by over a thousand dollars a month.
I want them all, but mostly the Frame. Finally decent Linux VR? On a standalone device that can also stream from a PC? On ARM?! It seems too good to be true.
wonderful time for linux on arm as well. if i read the post right, it seems there will be standalone games that will be compatible with it- even non vr ones.
Allowing diversity of hardware and operation system environments is going to be amazing. arm is so much more efficient and being able to run linux on arm while getting mainstream games is going to be cool as fuck
And: "cheaper than the index“ Sure that only means less than 1000usd (unless they mean the headset only price at 500…?) but that’s still better than I was assuming it’d be.
NGL the cube thingy looks so damn attractive to me, especially as I don’t own any form of PC gaming…
Now please Steam, officially sell to Mexico god damn it!
I’ll buy you one and sell it. You gotta pay shipping to send it across the border. If the thing breaks, send it back to me in the U.S. and I’ll file a warranty on your behalf. I’m just a dude who wants other people to play games and have never done something like this before.
Dm me if you are interested.
Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.
I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?
No warranty in unsupported countries, and from what I’ve seen of Valve’s quality control you probably wouldn’t want to risk that.
and from what I’ve seen of Valve’s quality control you probably wouldn’t want to risk that.
Wait, what? Care to expand on that?
I didn’t even want to engage with a non official purchase of the Steam Deck yet for what has been already established here, and reading this kills the excitement even further 😅
It not being available to purchase directly from Steam means you have to get it from a 3rd party reseller, or order it to an address in an officially supported country and forward it from there yourself, both of which are generally more expensive than what steam is offering. The cheapest price I can find for a Steam Deck OLED in my country is a solid 20% more expensive than the price Steam lists on their website.
Ah, gotcha, so it’s middleman overhead. Thanks.
Dang. The new Steam Controller has a D-pad, buttons, thumbsticks, gyros, and trackpads.
And the thumbsticks are TMR (like Hall effect, but nicer).
As long as it’s comfortable to reach all that stuff, that’s gonna be a new bar for PC game controllers.
EDIT: and grip sensors.
EDIT2: and four haptic feedback motors, two in the trackpads.
I’ve been dreaming of this since the first steam controller released! I absolutely loved the first one but it definitely had it’s quirks and issues. This seems just like the upgrade that I wished for in every way possible with some nice additional stuff on top. I just hope it won’t be $100+
Now if it just had a replaceable battery…
It does! Verge reports that battery pops out like old cellphone batteries
Nice!
Edit: do you have to disassemble the controller (with a screwdriver or something) or is it accessible with just my hands? I swap (rechargeable) AAs on my XBox360 controller quite a bit, and part of why I like it is that I can do it quickly if the battery dies while playing.
Looks like you’ll have to remove the entire bottom shell. From GN’s video:
The shell doesn’t seem to have a separately removable battery cover, although I don’t see a reason why someone wouldn’t be able to just cut a hole or 3D-print an accessible shell. Dbrand comes to mind. Or that’s just a show piece and the retail product might have a battery cover.
It also looks like the screw posts don’t have threaded metal inserts, which is concerning.
FYI you can just post the link without shilling for your preferred search engine
but kagi is a good search engine
Companies are not your friend. Also a single douche can ruin the company.
It probably will. Watch Gamers Nexus’ video, it has a short clip that shows the battery, and it looks like it’s held in a receptacle like removable phone batteries. Valve have already said that you’d be able to disassemble the controller with a screwdriver, but no word yet on replacement parts. But based on the Steam Deck, I would be shocked if they didn’t offer at least replacement batteries.
I personally think the Deck is very comfortable given its bulk. I have a lot of faith in the controller ergonomics.
The first time I held a deck I was kind of amazed at how comfortable it is to hold. Bricks shouldn’t be that comfy to hold, but, it is. The ergonomics are spot on. Gotta handle the Steam Controller V2 myself before any verdict, but I have high hopes.
The 8bitDo Ultimate 2 has TMR sticks too, best controller I’ve used. Better than the Xbox Elite Controller Series 2. I do wish the 8bitDo had 4 underside buttons instead of only 2, but it’s still better. The sticks are insane.
~$25 for an 8bitdo ultimate 2c! The price is just too good. I know it doesn’t have TMR or the extra buttons, but it just works and feels really good to me compared to the xbox elite controller that got the shoulder button issue within 3 months for me.
The trackpads are unnecessary imo. Games made for controller aren’t going to expect the deck touchpads, they’re gonna expect xbox and playstation controllers without it. The touchpads just fit a very specific niche of people who want to play with the steam deck on a TV in games that are not fully controller supported and don’t have a keyboard and mouse paired for that use case. Always better to have options I suppose.
I have carpal tunnel syndrome and mouse heavy games hurt, but playing with a controller is great. If this can easily replace a mouse and keyboard setup then I’ll be playing with it a lot, and those track pads are a big reason why.
They’re also good for emulating certain consoles with quirky controllers, like the N64.
It can’t really replace mouse and keyboard though. Not unless developers start designing games to work that way, and these touchpads are exclusive to an ultraminority of the hardware market share. The deck gives you that virtual keyboard which kinda works with the touchpads but it’s not ideal.
There’s no shortage of amazing games that are fully compatible with controllers though, thankfully.
Btw have you tried a trackball? i’ve been using a thumb based one like a logitech M575 for the better part of 30 years, ever since I saw one at CompUSA. Professionally 100% of my time is spent with one, and I used to have top tier KDR in counter strike 1.X back in the day (though I use normal mice for gaming usually nowadays.)
The 8bitDo Ultimate 2 was like $40–50 or something, so cheap compared to the Elite 2. I got the dirt cheap 8Bit just to try it out for giggles because I’d never tried TMR sticks before. Bro I haven’t touched the Elite 2 since unpacking the 8bit.
I posted this in the other thread, but wanna share here too:
Most interesting thing to me is the Frame apparently runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is using SteamOS, implying official ARM support for SteamOS, Steam and Proton! Could mean steam and proton coming to android too.
Jeff Geerling is probably having a fit right now.
what does that homophobic ass have to do with it, is he not a fan of ARM or something?
And the base would be Arch Linux ARM, right? So that should see an uptick in development too.
Arch Linux has been implementing a build system for other architectures. Perhaps they’ll make ARM official by the time Frame comes out.
I’m still a little curious how that will work for games. Are they going to somehow emulate Win32 amd64 games? Do devs have to recompile them in some new way? Will engines support it beyond Unity and Unreal?
It was mentioned in the LTT coverage. Aside from native ARM games they have a translation layer(FEX) to play x86 games on ARM. They’ll have a “Verified” tag like the Steam Deck for compatibility. I assume you’ll still be able to force trying to run unverified games.
Edit: FEX is not a Valve thing, but an existing open source x86/x86_64 emulator that Valve is using. It’s not clear if they’re forking it or directly contributing though.
That same video says that “Valve has heavily contributed to FEX”
Well, that shows how well I was paying attention to the video
Yup, FEX to translate x86 to ARM.
The Frame isn’t playing the games on its ARM chip. It’s just streaming audio/visual data from the PC and relaying the controller inputs back to the PC.
That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on the Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.
Hm, guess I missed that part, my bad.
It is fascinating and a huge step, but I want to keep expectations low. It will work, but it will not be as compatible as x86 Proton, not at all. It is first and primarily an OS for streaming games and running VR. That is the VR rendering from the streaming computer, not the VR game itself. In other words, they only had to get exactly one app to run well enough for public use. According to the developer, it is working with a surprising amount of games. I agree, one game is surprising, but trust me when I say you will not be running Windows x86 games in ARM Linux for a long time.
It’s using an x86 compatibility layer, pex i think it was called. So apparently you will be running windows x86 games on it.
Edit: fex! https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
Edit 2, from tom’s hardware article:
The company also showed off the x86 version of Hades 2 running standalone (as in not streaming from a PC) on the Steam Frame. And the game ran just fine and looked good at what Valve reps told me was 1400p in a window inside the headset
I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/
The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.
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Only one company has apparently learned how to print money and not be ghouls.
Valve and therefore Steam is still privately owned, never went public. No share holders demanding things surely is a major factor.
Their entire profit margin is pushing gambling on children
I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that’s their business model.
I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It’s just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.
Why does it have to be? It’s basically free money for them, whereas they have to make deals and curate their store front a lot more. Games take time and energy (if you don’t just want AI generated slop, at least), so to get that to market takes time. Whereas microtransaction garbage is basically hit it and quit it and generates insane amounts of money.
Um, no?
I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it’s just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah… some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.
But hey, if you’ve got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.
To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscience, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.
I’d say it’s priceless.
Been waiting for a competitor to the meta quest. Looks like my patience has paid off. I hope it’s not too pricey/compromised
“The Frame headset won’t be priced higher than the Index”:
Why did I buy a PSVR2 with the pc adapter three weeks ago …
I appreciate the assist lol
A brief moment of KDE desktop shown.
2026 will be the year of Linux Desktop!
I hope they release an official Steam OS for desktop. Maybe a little Nvidia support.
Linux Desktop!Linux… facetop?
The quest runs on a variant of Android correct? Like everything else that isn’t desktop, Linux is already the industry stander in facetop computing 😎
Linux! It’s in your FACE!!!
The controller is exactly what I wanted. Take a Steam Deck, cut out the middle, glue the grips back together. Take my money.
Steam Dk
And even then there’s some nice QOL features like capacitive strips on the grips.
