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It's called enshitification, we knew it was coming.
That title is cringe as fuck. There's nothing concerning about it at all. Market saw Steam Deck's success so they dove in. Whether they survive is dependent on if they provide good price points or justification for a higher price. Super simple.
they're also forgetting the touchpads. the touchpads are so fucking good, and they add so much usability and flexibility. so much, I think, that no amount of superior performance, resoution, or battery life can make up for the lack of them.
This is why I bought a deck oled even with the other more powerful handhelds already out.
I have the OLED too and it's such an exceptional device. Works very well as a media PC too, especially with KDE Connect for controlling remotely from a smartphone
It's so nice fr, it helps I had sorta "prepared" by learning Bazzite on my spare laptop prior, so got very familiar with the immutable aspects and flatpaks/appimages
Absolutely. They make mouse-based games playable with a controller. Gyro is nice too.
Not just playable but pleasant! Thing is perfect for Rimworld especially
I haven't played RimWorld on Deck yet... Sounds like a good way to lose entire days.
I just want something that I can play up to say Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 level emulation
I dunno what this article is on about, you can find thousands of those from the likes of Anbernic, Powkiddy, Miyoo, Retroid, etc.
This is nothing new. Before the steam deck came out, Handheld PCs have already been ~~overpriced~~ expensive. Other manufacturers haven't bothered about affordability before, during ot after the steam deck.
That said, Gabe Newell said the steam deck was priced "painfully", which means they probably had very low margins on the hardware and are making it back on sales on their store. Other manufacturers do not have that luxury.
Steam Deck hits a sweet spot. You can make it more powerful, but it'll cost significantly more. You can make it cheaper, but you'll cut out too many games people want to play.
Also, anything like this with a resolution higher than 720p is wasting pixels and GPU power, IMO.
- you couldn't make it more powerful, it had the best of the best.
- my eyes work, and I still I don't think clearer text and UI is a waste
There are several competitors that are more powerful, like the ROG Ally. They also need a bigger battery to support it, or they have worse battery life. And they're more expensive.
Clear text and UI is an issue because games don't scale their shit properly.
Those came after, Valve hasn’t a time machine (as far as I know)
You’re right about games not scaling shit properly, but that’s 99% of the time in gen 8 (console-first) games, where those games where designed solely for big screens with HD+ resolutions. Modern games have already started figuring out scaling for different resolutions and aspect ratios
Higher resolution will mean smaller text by default.
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"slowly"
Valve can easily sell Steam Decks with $0 profit. Can't say the same for other OEMs.
If only there was something to be done to slash the price while not losing anything important like using an OS that is FREE... But alas, there's no such thing, I guess we'll have to stick with windows, adding the license price to a hardware that is already expensive...
Technically the OS isn't free: Valve pays a team of developers to maintain the SteamOS and also donates money to Arch and Ubuntu foundations as well as to the Proton and Wine dev teams as well as contributes code to the linux kernel. All costing them money, that they eat but could easily find a way to charge the end user
Technically the OS isn't free
And practically, that doesn't matter. Valve isn't charging anyone a licensing fee for the software they've developed, so as far as the cost of the device goes SteamOS is free. Just because they could charge for it doesn't change that.
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I mean... bazzite? ChimeraOS? You don't need to go to steamOS to find a free linux distro that works well with games. Hell, you could even customize one based on any of those so you don't have to pay for a windows license for your products.
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The only part they could realistically charge for is the Steam store access. Everything else is open source and portable
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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