Steam Deck looks awful

[DonFerrari]

the-pi-guy said:

DonFerrari said:

Seems like just as the desktops Valve failed again in designing HW.

Well Chazore already mentioned already.

Valve didn't design the Steam Machines. On the whole, Valve mostly was pushing SteamOS, because they were worried MS was going to close them out, by the MS store. So they didn't really care about it, after MS didn't do anything.

They did design the Steam Controller, Valve Index.

I know the Steam Controller was more love it/hate it than something that Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony would probably make. The Valve Index, I'm not aware of any big issues. It's very outdated and overpriced today. But at the time it came out, it was a genuinely good product at a good price. The closest comparison was the HTC Vive Pro which was $400 more, and the Index came with better speakers, much, much, much better controllers, better screen even.

The Index controllers still haven't been matched feature wise.

The previews that I saw were very solid for the Steam Deck. It has some minor issues that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft wouldn't put up with in a commercial product. But I wouldn't say it's a bad product, or a failure, just because it's not as good as it probably should have been. It overall seems like a great piece of hardware, and it's doing stuff that no other hardware is doing (in its price range). It's going to be running games that the Switch 2 probably won't be able to. And it's running PC games better than the much more pricey competition.

I know I'm repeating myself, but giving a free pass to Valve because they didn't care isn't a good atittude by customers, sure we can agree they didn't designed the hardware, but they gave it their stamp when calling steam machines and I severely doubt there were no absolutely minimum requirement or some agreement on specs and prices (and in the lack of it then is even more failure from the company).

Making a good controller doesn't help in experience on making a "console", or would we expect some of the 3rd party accessorie sellers on consoles to be able to make their own console? And sure we need to wait for the product to properly release to have it working and fully tested on the market.

It is expected of fixed HW to run games better than more pricey competition even more when the first is subsided (sold at loss) and the second is sold for a big markup (reason why even with some Sony games going PC I'm still not moving, the price of PS5 as a whole doesn't buy even half of the equivalent GPU in Brazil unfortunatelly). But still some of the glaring issues of the steam deck is from their lack of experience and I don't know why defend it as non-issues.