this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
250 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
68864 readers
4718 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I like the concept... isn't that a bit of what killed the initial steam machines. IE they basically encouraged everyone and their grandmother to release one... and the end result was the name was dilluted down so badly that no one knew what a steam machine was.
The problem then was the immaturity of Linux for gaming. Valve has done a shit ton of work to make that possible and focused on a specific experience with the steam deck for several years. Now they're just expanding and building on that success, which is awesome to see.
I fully agree that was "a problem". but I fully hold to the fragmented hardware also being a significant problem. IMO the steam deck still significantly makes gains from being a consistant hardware target for dev's to base things on, in addition to basically having little to no consumer confusion, if a game says "will run on steam deck", it's safe to assume, it will run on a steam deck. This time around valve specifically hasn't released a steam deck 2, because they want to avoid any hardware confusion.
The key problem why "Runs on SteamDeck" exists is not the raw power of the SteamDeck (or lack thereof) but the compatibility with Linux. Unless someone decides to utterly cripple a handheld for the sake of battery efficiency any game labeled with SteamDeck support will also run on any other handheld running SteamOS.
The problem with the SteamMachines ultimately was the lack of game support. The hardware confusion was just the cherry on top. You could even argue that the lack of supported games back then meant a limited number of customers would be interested which in turn led to companies releasing underpowered hardware. By that logic one can even claim the failure of SteamMachines is entirely down to the piss poor Linux support then.