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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1943 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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To date, Valve has never meaningfully iterated on their hardware.

First the Steam Link and Steam Machines, until they lost interest in that.
Then the Index, until they (mostly) lost interest in that.
Now the Steam Deck. It's only been out for a year and a bit and they replaced the screen- sure, faster than Nintendo did, but that's a really low bar.

Sure, the Switch 2 has absolutely sold a lot of units- far more than any other Valve hardware product has- but I can understand why a manufacturer wouldn't be interested in seriously developing the Gabe Gear with a track record of no repeat business- especially if they're now saying "there won't be a new one for a while", and when Valve says "a while"...

At least never releasing a second version of a thing prevents people from asking them when the third one's coming.

At least never releasing a second version of a thing prevents people from asking them when the third one's coming.

The most wounding comment I've ever read on the Motte.

Yeah, especially given Valve's competence in the designs it does create, it's weird how much they don't like building new stuff. Even places that look like past iterations aren't, officially: the Lighthouse V1s were HTC builds and V2s were the first genuine Valve production design, and the Knuckles controllers were 'updated' a few different times but never had an official release.

Optimistically, maybe that's just Valve Being Valve, and when they get bored other people can go into the market that they've formalized (and done a lot of the annoying software work for). Pessimistically, if you only expected to have one shot at this design and picked those joysticks, it doesn't say a lot about what you're planning around. Worse, other companies seem equally cautious about the field: Asus looks like it's using off-the-shelf panel-controller combos on their display as well, even if a little higher-quality, and hasn't committed to long-term support or replacement parts.

((And Asus isn't as competent when it comes to software.))

I think that whole "playground" structure they have there (they call it "flat office", but "office" suggests it's a place where work happens) does kind of kneecap them when it's time to do things long-term or that are "uninteresting". I think Valve gets to be Valve because Steam literally prints money, so as long as they're not drawing the budget down too hard they (as a business) can piss high-six-figures-per-employee time into a hole indefinitely.

I think the hardware strategy might have been intended as some internal group's hack around this, because hardware designs have a half shelf life. If they want a game to push the hardware- and as everyone rushing to adopt the Alyx way of grabbing things showed that was the right decision- they need to make harder decisions and actually sit down together and make the thing rather than sit around and Episode 3 it up until Mark Laidlaw leaves an obscene yearly income behind for lack of work (also semi-retirement, but y'know).

I don't think it worked as well with the Steam Deck- yeah, we got Desk Job, but I think the "become really exclusive Nintendo" (one game per franchise per hardware release, and those games are tech demos that encourage full use of the hardware) thing might have a chance if they had a success rate greater than 1 in 2 (only counting post-Index). And the only unique thing with the Deck, other than the form factor, is the gyros (done already with the Switch, but in fairness Nintendo didn't do it right) and the touchpads (which not even Valve gets right on the first time- the ones on the Knuckles are just awful- and the PS4 console ports most people are playing on the Gabe Boy Advance probably don't implement touch controls, good riddance).

That said, however, I think console manufacturers have absolutely been put on notice. Nintendo has it worst because the Deck is literally just a better Switch that they got soundly beat to market releasing and the fact the Deck implements all Switch hardware (and then some) is fantastic for pirates customers who want a better refresh rate or maybe just to do this, and this thing kind of boxes Sony and MS (to a lesser extent, since Microsoft's game pass doesn't really work on Linux to my knowledge) into a place they really do not want to go, since the Gabe Boy Advance is also a better PS4/XBone than those consoles are and GPU improvements in the sub-400-dollar range over what those consoles currently use literally do not exist.

Also, doesn't ASUS clone-and-one-better a computer in basically every form factor anyway?

Also, doesn't ASUS clone-and-one-better a computer in basically every form factor anyway?

Weirdly, no. For the bigger markets, they're willing to make weird one- and two-offs (though not always well, contrast FriendlyElec).

But there is no Asus GPD-clone, for example, probably because it's just too small of a market. While the 5-inch tablets in general have just dissolved since around 2010 for everybody but the weird Aliexpress vendors, for 7-inch tablets you're looking at the MeMoPads running android 4.4 on an atom processor from 2014 (wut), despite a lot of sales at the high and low ends. They don't do nano itx as a form factor, period, even as they've become a major player for NUCs.

Which isn't an awful decision as a business -- spread too far and you lose yourself -- but it's a weird one.

Don't forget the steam controller.

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