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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

>I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”

Yup.

Before clicking the "Reserve" link, I put a personal threshold for this thing at $300. If it was somewhere around that, it'd be an instant purchase for me.

Over $500 for a version with barely acceptable (by 2021 standards) storage? No thank you.

The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device. I can't imagine people not running out of space very, very fast (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs). Still, for $300, it'd be an instant buy for me - just to be able to play in bed.

I really hope enough people buy this thing, because I'd really want it to thrive - and the price to drop :)

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> The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill device.

I felt that way about the Quest 2, and opted for the maxxed-out version. As it turns out, I use it a few times per week and have ~40GB of storage in use.

I originally used Virtual Desktop to remote in to my desktop, mostly from across the house but also over 5G. Now that Airlink is available in beta I use it exclusively at home, and mostly play "PCVR" titles wirelessly.

The Steam Deck seems to be taking the same approach. I see myself using it to play games from my desktop library while in bed or sitting outside. Few if any games will actually get installed on the device, because I won't want to use the on-board processing and drain my battery anyhow.

To be fair, many Quest games are very small (1gb-5gb). In contrast, GTA V on Steam is 72gb.

I don’t get this, if you’re using it for gaming then storage isn’t a huge deal. Even on a dedicated gaming PC, most people don’t have their entire Steam library installed at once.

Not only is it just too much space, but it’d be wasted since there’s no way you’re going to play all of those games.

The 64gb version of this definitely is too small though. That’s less than the average AAA game. And while there are certainly people out there who don’t play AAA games, I don’t think the average Joe will do the math ahead of time when buying one of these, and will be very disappointed/angry when they find they can’t play the game they want (without using external storage/a dock).

But, if this thing does have an SD card slot (idk, I haven’t checked), it should solve the problem. SD cards aren’t super fast, but the Nintendo switch is proof that they’re at least good enough for gaming.

It does have an SD card slot.

However, when the hypothetical average Joe you propose picks up a cheap 256 GB SD card off of Amazon and it takes five minutes every time they reload from a checkpoint in Control, I think they will be at least as frustrated as when they ran out of space on the internal SSD.

I have a single game that clocks in at 374gb. (Ark + DLC and 50gb of mods.) And I don't want to be limited to a single game. I am really hoping the 64gb can have an nvme drive added.

My guess is that to get the entry level price as low as possible, the BOM is cut to the bare minimum. That would probably imply that they preclude including the NVMe header - but who knows?

Most blockbuster games are over 64gb on their own these days. You couldn't install just one of: GTA5, Red Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Forza Motorsport/Horizon, Fallout 4, the list goes on.

At least Todd Howard can't sell Skyrim yet another time, it's already in my steam library.

Any game devs here willing to share how large the code/compiled code output is for these games?

You mean code without resources?

The required storage is listed on the steam store page, Cyberpunk for instance requires 70 GB free.

Yeah - the actual “meat” of games of this scale, I guess most of that is video and texture images or similar

Yeah 3D models and all their LODs, textures with all their layers, (one surface could have half a dozen layers used to render it), the myriad audio and music files. Games can be really humungous orchestrations these days.

> (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs)

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware

> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.

Anyway, you can more or less do that today already with external disks, etc. You can certainly connect a USB3 SSD. I wonder if the nvme drive is user-replaceable? I guess not?

Though given the open nature of the device, expect mods sooner rather than later. Replacing a chip and telling Linux to override its size (or mod the bios/dtb) should be a breeze.

Since it runs Linux I don’t see any reason you couldn’t put your entire library on an NFS server in the other room. If I get one I’ll certainly be doing that

If you're at home, you might as well just stream from a gaming PC anyway.

Sure, if you have one. I don't (I play games in bootcamp on an old MacBook Pro) but this perfectly fits my needs. I don't have anywhere to put a gaming PC in my apartment and have been considering getting a switch, but this is basically my dream machine.

>>"augment your built-in storage with a microSD card and fill it up with even more games."

I think that hints that you can install games... hopefully :).

SD cards are slow. This is important for large size games that need to load large assets. Loading times will be long.

I honestly can't believe the 64GB one isn't 128GB instead. I looked through my steam library and I have a lot of smaller games that would fit just fine on that.. but 1 AAA title would completely fill it. Plus, you don't get that whole 64GB, the OS has to take some of it. After the formatting and OS I'd be surprised if there was more than 50-55GB free space.

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