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
With Valve talking about open ecosystems so much, I have glimmer of hope that they’ll move to RISC-V.
Probably not gonna happen though… At least not yet
That would be amazing, but given how speculative the Framework and other RISC projects are I feel like that would be a massive headline for Valve.
Where’s my Steam Phone Gabe ?
With the fact there’s apparently surprisingly reasonable evidence of a new half life game, I wonder if that’s likely to get announced when they give these a release date. I could see them bundling it with the steam machines at least. Assuming the rumors turn out to be true.
I’ve been under the impression that it is very likely to be a sequel to Alyx. Possibly a launch title for the Frame.
But I don’t think any of the rumors expected a new Steam Machine. We thought it was gonna be a new Deck.
Indiegames cube!
Did Valve just announce THREE of something?
Holy shit you’re right.
That controller makes me swoon.
Swoon worthy indeed. So many features.
Didn’t Steam already have some home console like hardware a few years ago? That flopped so badly I don’t even remember the name
Yeah, the Steam Machine was the name. It came out before Linux gaming was really a thing if I recall. Before Proton. So I think they just expected game makers to make Linux ports?
It was mostly a steaming device and assumed you had the hardware and networking to support low latency streaming from another capable gaming pc. This is much more standalone and could almost be targeting consoles or people who don’t pc game (or at least don’t call their main pc a rig)
I believe you’re talking about the Steam Link. Which if you had ethernet running everywhere worked pretty good.
The old Steam Machine branding was more a set of guidelines / branded manufacturer specs for mini-PCs. Not many actually came out and yeah it got shut down pretty quickly. Though it was the origin of Steam OS / Big Picture Mode and what became Proton.
I give exactly zero fucks about any of this until they show prices.
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/
The cameras can’t track eyes with the headset on …Unless they make it like the vision pro, where your eyes show up on the headset’s outer screen. ಠᴗಠ
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?
HALF. LIFE. FUCKING. THREE.
Exactly. How tf do you propose to get it if you digest him? You’ve hit on the crux of the issue here.
because most people got exposed to steam’s launch on HL2’s launch. Where they bought the physical game, came home, installed it off like 5 CDs… then had to run steam to decrypt it and download more files because the fucking install was encrypted, and the goddamn fucking decryption took like 8 hours if you didnt have the worlds greatest computer.
Nope, I’m still totally not salty about not being able to play the game I fucking bought until the day after cause bullshit encryption fuckery, why would you ever think that.
I still have that goddamn box somewhere… i need to dig it up and see what release retail HL2 is like compared to HL2 you’d downlaod today from steam…
Well, I bought Half-Life and OG You Don’t Know Jack on discs at Target, then had to return them because HL didn’t run and YDKJ was “too worldly.” So.
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.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
Man how quickly people forget what things were like before the lawsuits forced valve to make steam more consumer friendly and regulatory abiding…
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.
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
Technically no PR. Their MO has been to let others do the work. Their games come from hired modders, with many skins made by the community. Their localizations are from the community. The game devs and publishers have to moderate their own spaces on Steam. The players do product promotions by using the social network of Steam. Valve is practically unreachable for the press, and their actual press releases are the rawest I’ve seen: infrequent, featuring no images and little information. Their press account is run by Kaci Aitchinson, the local Fox News host who was originally hired to present The International for Dota 2, but ended up doing a bit of everything, like many at Valve.
The downvotes seem to agree with you…?
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!
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.
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.
The timing is great as I learn my healthcare premiums are likely to go up by over a thousand dollars a month.
