Steam Deck looks awful

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Mummelmann said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Well I think we all know it's a niche product and I haven't said anything otherwise. Just look at how Valve is selling it vs how Nintendo sells the switch and you can see the difference in their target audience. Nintendo is selling the Switch at every local store they can find. You can buy a Switch at Bestbuy, Walmart, mom and pop shops, etc. The only place you can get a Steam Deck is on the Steam Store. Valve is not selling it anywhere else.

The purpose of the Steam deck isn't to replace your PC. The purpose of the Steam deck is for being able to play PC games on the go for an affordable price. It also lowers the barrier to entry for PC gaming, especially in the current market. Sure you have to lock it to 30fps to achieve 3 hours on a moderately demanding game but how else are you gonna play God of War or Elden Ring on a handheld? On the Switch? Nope. How else are you gonna play Persona 5 on a handheld? On the switch? Nope. How else can you play Xenoblade Chronicles X on a handheld? On the switch? Nope. (Although maybe they will announce that on the direct tomorrow). But the list goes on. You can get a laptop but that's not only much more expensive, but you need a desk or somewhere to put it on. You can upgrade your PC but the Deck isn't aiming to replace your PC in the first place. Not to mention... How long can your PC play games when it's unplugged?

Yea it's not the prettiest thing out there but Valve focused on function over form so they can provide compatibility for 10,000+ games day 1. And the best thing is, if you already have a good library of games on Steam, you don't have to re-buy a single one nor do you have to pay for any online subscription nonsense. It's not gonna appeal to the mass market but Valve already knows that.

The key difference is that a console like the Switch needs to sell a ton of units in order for Nintendo to make money. If say the Switch 2 flops like the wiiU did, Nintendo loses a large chunk of their revenue because developers/publishers won't port games and Nintendo doesn't get their 30% cut. But even if the Steam Deck sells less than a million units, it won't affect Valve's revenue stream because majority of the new games will continue to be ported onto Steam. So Valve may not need to sell Switch numbers to consider the Steam Deck to be a success and I doubt they are thinking switch numbers in the first place.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I know that we both know it's a niche product. But my point still stands; who will actually buy it? It's a still a pricey bit of kit, and people who have more than a passing interest in PC gaming are likely to either get a laptop or a desktop. For those who don't even have a passing interest, there will be consoles and even phones instead. Consoles have been imitating the PC for at least two generations now, and it made sense, but the inverse really doesn't, given what the PC is in the gaming space and has been for a long time. 

To me it just screams product without an actual demographic, Valve tried before with the Steam Machine series. They started at about the same price, I think they ended up selling less than 500k units worldwide. Granted, a portable form may be somewhat more enticing, but we have both the Switch and some actual, passable mobile games available as well today. I think that it's too nerdy, and frankly, too expensive, to entice more casual consumers, and it's too limiting in its form-factor and potential for more PC enthusiasts such as myself. It kind of reminds me of when developers and publishers started watering down the mechanics of Strategy games and RPGs and losing customer on both ends for being both too complex and too simple all at once.

And we haven't even mentioned the storage issue, these won't be taking physical discs of any kind so internal storage will fill up incredibly fast. The 64GB model is a joke, modern games are often huge, and buying extra storage in the form of SD cards or other solutions is an extra expense for the consumer. Even the 256GB model will be having issues with storage with more than 3-4 modern titles installed. Heck; the only difference between the models seems to be the size of the drive, which reeks of Apple to me.

No, I stand by my point that this will likely be a dud.

As always though; I could be wrong. I like it when Valve succeed in their ventures, and they could use a boost right about now.

I think plenty of people will buy it relatively speaking. We had a leak during the initial pre-order period before it got fixed so we have somewhat of an idea. With in the first 90 minutes, the Steam Deck pre-orders count was at 110,000 units across it's limited number of launch regions. This is also when they had certain restrictions in place where you needed to meet certain requirements before you can place your order.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/html-holes-provide-a-glimpse-of-steam-decks-initial-preorder-numbers/

So I do think there is an audience for such a device. There is a big difference between the way Valve approached Steam Machines vs how they are approaching Steam Deck. Steam Machines was Valve not getting much involvement in Steam Machines themselves and letting third party companies do whatever they want. What ended up happening was many of the third party companies ended up releasing desktops that were much more expensive with the Steam machine badge than if you were to buy a similarly priced prebuilt or to build it yourself. With the Steam Deck, Valve is entering into a space that hasn't been previously explored by a large company. Not only that, they are subsidizing it. There's also a lot more differences but this would be like saying Nintendo can't make a successful product because they made the wiiU. Valve made the Index headset which was a success so it's not like they only make flops.

We have seen that there isn't much difference in running a game on a Microsd vs SSD. 64GB isn't much as base storage but I doubt Valve wants to have a PS3 situation where they are losing a ton of money on each unit. They are putting a lot of expensive parts into the Steam Deck already so I think the prices makes sense. Plus a 256GB Microsd is only like $30 so if you are willing to spend $400 on this in the first place, adding in $30 extra dollars for 256GB or $50 for 512GB of storage isn't much. Especially since you won't need to pay for online or need to rebuy games. And yes, modern games are pretty big but it comes back to, how else you gonna play them on a handheld? Spend twice the amount for an Aya Neo?

We can keep going in circles but there's a reason why small companies like GPD Win and Aya Neo are able to bring out continuous revisions to their PC handhelds and continues to get funding each year. I don't think there's that much point in speculating whether or not there's an audience because imo, the reality is we don't know. PC gaming handhelds are an unproven space because we didn't have the tech and we didn't have any companies that was willing on a relatively large scale. Maybe it will only sell that 110,000 units (unlikely because of the queue availability) or maybe it will sell millions. But I do think there are plenty of reasons to like it and too many people are focusing on it's negatives to see what it really brings to the table.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 08 February 2022