Why I think Valve’s retiring the Steam Deck LCD
gardinerbryant.com
gardinerbryant.com
There were news/rumours that it was originally designed for Magic Leap 2 and Valve got the leftovers for cheap: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/steam-decks-... .
If they're going to spend a premium on ordering a new batch, they might as well order the APU for the OLED model they charge full price right?
I already did a lot of research on the device, plus i have over a thousand games in my Steam library, so this made it a very logical purchase. I ordered a 1TB disk from Amazon and installed within 15 minutes thanks to the IFixit documentation.
It’s a very versatile piece of hardware if you want it to be. Game emulation is very easy. Open Office and Kodi work flawlessly. HDMI output can be done with a cheap chinese adapter. Bluetooth takes care of other devices.
It’s BIOS is pretty easy and can boot from almost any device you can connect via the USB-C port.
Even running Windows 11 is possible, because Valve supplies the drivers for it. I tried it just for fun. How to reinstall the (Arch) Steam OS is well documented.
My kids love playing Lego City on it. I love playing Beat Hazard 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim and The Witcher 3 on it.
Will i buy the Steam Machine? Depends on the cost and it’s possibilities. If it can run streaming media like Netflix easily, it could make a very interesting replacement for the current media pc we’re using.
Going off a tangent but LibreOffice should be preferred as most OpenOffice contributors moved to LibreOffice following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
& wow checking up on it now, things have not been going well at Apache for last decade
Can't you switch to desktop mode and launch a webbrowser?
By cutting the LCD, particularly the 256GB model, Valve avoids internal competition where their "budget" option cannibalizes sales of their premium OLED units, which offer a much better user experience.
furthermore, with whispers of new hardware like the "Steam Frame" or a revamped "Steam Machine," Valve needs to clear the stage. The LCD Deck served its purpose as a pioneer, but keeping it alive indefinitely dilutes the brand's focus.
For consumers, it’s a double-edged sword; we lose the most affordable entry point into PC handheld gaming, but we gain a clearer, more unified path forward. Ultimately, this move signals that Valve is confident the OLED is the new standard, and they are aggressively pivoting resources toward whatever comes next.
The china's supply chain will let it be, what about you?
I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect a sizable segment of PC gamers aren’t going to view this as the impetus they needed to splurge on the OLED. I doubt very many of those people see this as a double-edged sword. It doesn’t particularly matter to them what Valve’s confidence in the product is if they can’t afford to buy one. While some may buy the step-up model, many won’t. Valve loses out on the sale of the hardware and on the sale of the software to run on it. And I’d be concerned that ceding the lower end of the market is going to poison the well like video game consoles in the early 80s.
With that said, Valve almost certainly has the data and would know better than me. It seems like a gamble to me. Maybe the post is correct and this is all about price anchoring for the new Steam Machine and Frame.
Is anyone here aware of whether developers are using the Deck as a minimum spec and thus their technical constraints?
At work it depends on the title but we've definitely used it as a test target. Usually in the minspec range
All this hubbub about chip shortages has me wondering if it's going to extend the lifespan of these devices. Already in the Legion Go line, its successors are much more expensive but not much more performant. The line bifurcated into an entry level and a premium option, and both have a variant whose chip is derived from the same 7840 as the original model. That is, the Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 are both priced higher than the original, with a lower screen resolution and identical (or nearly identical) chipset. The only reason to choose one over the original is if you really need that extra RAM.
Like the Steam Deck, the Legion Go is still a perfectly serviceable device years later. The Deck competitors from Lenovo, ASUS, OneX, AYANEO, etc. are all built around basically the same chip that's a bit stronger but less power efficient than the Deck. The performance envelope hasn't really moved.
Tariffs and part shortages are making these devices a lot more expensive, but they aren't noticeably better than they were 2 years ago. In fact, Valve's upcoming Steam Machine has very similar specs, and was designed to outperform 70% of the devices currently gaming on Steam.
If prices are going up and performance is stagnating, people who already have gaming devices are going to be reluctant to upgrade. I expect these market forces are going to extend the lifespan of current-gen devices.
Most games take years to make. I wonder how many games currently in the production pipeline were banking on players having more performance available by the time the games are released, and how that is going to impact their reception.
The Steam Deck has been a really useful performance-and-feature anchor for computer gaming. Until hardware improves enough to justify a Steam Deck 2, I expect it will continue to maintain that position, improving the playable lifespan of all the other gaming devices in the market too.
I am not seeing much SteamOS native games.
It is very much apparant I'm not Steam's ideal customer, but I'm happy I got it for about $249'ish? I hemmed and hawed alot thinking why am I buying a hand held pc for gaming but the switch 2 was sold out/to much work to reserve so I went for it and am really happy I did.
SteamOS is probably the most commercially well-supported consumer desktop Linux, but it's still primarily a games storefront. If you only want to do desktop stuff, you're probably better off either on the Chromebook/Android train, or putting a community-supported distro on whatever hardware you've got.
Yeah, this basically, and they have good hardware too.
> the Chromebook/Android train
I am not really interested in getting back into the google world. If I buy hardware it needs to support a real linux distro.
> putting a community-supported distro on whatever hardware you've got
With the Macbook, my only option is Asahi. If things keep going the way they are going, I may well end up there. But it is 13 inches and I don't love the keyboard.
I would rather something with an 11 inch screen (for travelling) that can drive a full-size monitor when at home. And use the keyboard I like regardless.
> I believe that the end of the LCD line is an entirely strategic move.
> With the discontinuation of the LCD and the introduction of the Machine and Frame, the OLED will suddenly occupy the "Pricing Anchor" slot for Valve's first-party lineup of gaming hardware.
> Crucially, I believe Valve sees the $399 price as too low.
May be it shouldn't be as frequent, but still more frequent than what it has now.
Does anyone want to buy a phone every few years? No, I don't think they do.
If I build a new PC myself - I don't have such problem. With laptops - it's a bit behind (usually one generation for AMD with their APUs approach). I don't think anyone complains that there is a choice.
And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target. So I don't really see why this has to dictate handhelds to have way slower refresh cycle.
Until the Steam Deck came out, I had no hope of playing a game like Sekiro. And even then, the machine I built to play Seikro would not then have also played the second Spiderman game, because those are different console generations.
Now, both are targeted in part at the Steam Deck, and it can run both of them. This actually is a huge boon for the industry, and like I said,
> Part of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on
In theory, sure. In practice... just look at pretty much all software out there and you will be proven wrong. Every. Single. Time.
There's a point that they could prioritize selling to new owners over existing owners looking to upgrade, and having a more capable device would help with that, but I think the marginal increase is probably not very big. The Steam Deck estimated sales were at 4 million units earlier this year, but that's still a relatively small portion of the whole PC gaming market (132m monthly active users on steam alone by 2021). It has been a big success for them, but it still exceeded their expectations, so I think they also would be skeptical of any large marginal improvement of new owner sales for what would likely be a minor improvement on the important specs. There's also competition from Windows handhelds whose sales don't suggest a large market just wishing Valve had a slightly more capable device that they'd pay more for.
I'd love that, but I would argue that the evidence shows they don't do it.
Which is a totally reasonable approach and has given my PC years of usefulness even though better equipment is out there.
The cutting edge of PCs is such a tiny minority of users, even amongst PC gamers it's still a fraction of users.
That was not always the case for PC gaming, on modest means in my teens I could at least keep up with graphics card releases. I don't bother with that now, because I don't have to and gain very little from doing so.
I would have said "even static websites don't care about older hardware". I am very happy that Valve doesn't refresh the SteamDeck every year exactly for that reason: developers can target "the SteamDeck" instead of "the latest 3 SteamDecks" and force me to buy one every 3 years.
You can easily skip a generation and upgrade say once in 4 years or even less frequently. But at the same I think it's good that there is an option to get newer hardware at that cadence.
If you look at sustainability, it is obviously not okay.
And for what? Websites and mobile apps that get bulkier and less efficient slightly faster than the refresh cycle. I recently replaced my smartphone - not because I wanted to, but because the main app I use (like banking, nothing that should require a big CPU) were lagging so much that they were unusable. A banking app is supposed to print a few numbers to the screen, and yet it doesn't work on a 5 years old smartphone.
Not saying that's why they don't, but that would be a side effect. I actually think it's more their business doesn't rely on selling Steam Decks, hardware business where you do a yearly refresh is a very different beast to one you do a new model every few years. Their organization doesn't seem set up for that.
Till then I'd think I'd do more good for Valve to focus on their steam app and store experience.