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I love the philosophy of steam deck: by default, it's an Switch-like device that hides all the non-fully compatible games in store, has good UI and makes sure e

• Forgeties79 4y ago
  The desktop/Steam OS split was particularly smart. You can have a wonderful, catered, safe experience and never leave Steam OS. Or you can go into the desktop and open up a world of emulators and more.
• Thev00d00 4y ago
  "it trusts you as a user" is really great way of putting it.
• tomatotomato37 4y ago
  Not to mention it's one of the few modern platforms that allows modding up to code injection, memory manipulation, and mod managers that'll gleefully pull code from the four corners of the internet. You know, the things that every other platform heavily locks down over the fears hackers will steal grandma's cookie recipe and not because it allows the selling of 14 different microtransactions for something your average modder could put together in a day.
  • ateng 4y ago
    Despite the negative dismissal (which gets rightly downvoted), I think there’s a good point here - your phone probably needs to have stronger security requirement than your gaming device?
    • izacus 4y ago
      I think that when we walk about security (and privacy!) the question that needs to be asked together is "against who?". Yes, phones have stronger security requirements, but why are they being secured against people using them? :)
      • Firmwarrior 4y ago
        I agree with the sentiment here, but it's worth pointing out that most AAA games now come with an incredibly invasive anti-cheat suite that violates your computer's security and thoroughly violates your privacy. That's precisely because they're allowed to by the OS If phones were more open, we'd be free to mod our own games and back up our own save files, but we'd have to live with every random crap app we download being able to take over the whole machine permanently any time.
        • jamespo 4y ago
          How does that work re: the Steamdeck which is running Linux or other game consoles?
          • izacus 4y ago
            Many games with those invasive rootkit DRMs simply don't work. Some publishers actually did remove the DRM just for the Deck version proving that DRM maybe isn't all that necessary when there's a will and manufacturer that doesn't bow down to ridiculous requirements :)
          • smileybarry 4y ago
            Anticheat-protected games just don’t work on Steam Deck (usually just refusing to connect). A few anticheat engines support specifically Steam Deck after working with Valve, but even then each individual game developer has to opt into it. (For example: Destiny 2 uses EasyAntiCheat which is Deck-compatible but Bungie still refuse to whitelist it on Deck/Steam OS, and warn you may get banned if you try to sidestep the block) Modern DRMs like Denuvo actually do tend to work in Proton/Wine (aka Steam OS’s compatibility layer) because they’re a wrapper around the game instead of a driver/debugger+game setup.
• phone8675309 4y ago
  > trusts you as a user Better - it treats you like an owner (which you are).
• worble 4y ago
  100% agree, it's so refreshing to finally get a device that does it's best to be both a great out of the box experience but also respectful the user, reminds me of the olden days of computing, despite what gnome and apple proclaiming such a goal is impossible. It's also kind of sad this only really exists because Valve are wholly independent and have "fuck you" levels of money.
  • guhidalg 4y ago
    Another view point: if you want to compete in the big leagues, you need to have "fuck you" levels of money. You can be happy building indie games for desktops as a career, but if you want to compete with Nintendo, Sony, and Meta then you need to take out your checkbook and write lots of zeros. So stop trying to compete with them if you don't have the capital! Build great games that aren't AAA-style FPS, BR, Minecraft/CoD/Halo clones.
    • dmonitor 4y ago
      This is about hardware, not games
    • sublinear 4y ago
      Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped. The dev(s) just chose not to go that route. It makes a lot of sense why not. They don't want to betray their audience and they want to keep having fun making games. Success is not necessarily "competing" with the big companies. There's always room for more types of games.
      • account42 4y ago
        > Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped. That is only true if you have't heard about most indies. The are plenty of great indie games that just didn't manage the marketing gamble and faded into obscurity without much financial success or even making a loss, especially when you consider the developer's opportunity cost. Then there are even more where the developers gave it their best for years but ultimately failed, either releasing a mediocre game or nothing at all. Indie game dev is absolutely not something that you should be getting into when your primary interest is financial return. The ones that make it big are a tiny minority.
• ramesh31 4y ago
  God bless Valve for making a viable linux mobile OS that isn't Android. What's to stop them from making a phone at this point? One can dream.
  • LeFantome 4y ago
    I imagine the biggest obstacle is that it has nothing to do with their business. If they are well run, it seems unlikely.
    • ramesh31 4y ago
      >I imagine the biggest obstacle is that it has nothing to do with their business. Mobile is far and away the most profitable, highest revenue segment of the gaming market by a huge margin. I can't imagine they don't want a piece of that.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        I can, because they really don't seem to. They aren't a publicly traded company beholden to corporate share holders who only value profit. They have a history of behavior which suggests they care about PC gaming and not a heck of a lot else. Arguably they don't even care about the money that much. Did you know you can sell Steam keys on other store fronts and Valve won't even take a cut?
      • tl 4y ago
        Want and ability are two different things. Valve released a phenomonal but imperfect update to the Nintendo Switch which has sold about 1% as well. If Sony released a PlayStation Phone tomorrow, and failed to update it for years despite massive interest, then you'd see a SteamPhone.
      • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
        Not to mention the fact that they might be able to tap into a market that practically doesn't exist anymore: paid mobile games. Like, actual, "I pay you $5-40, you give me a complete game". People are in the habit of buying games on Steam. Half of the top-20 most played games on Steam right now cost money. SteamDeckPhone's sales would probably be disproportionately people who already use Steam on the PC and/or the Steam Deck, so it would be a significantly different audience than the broader mobile gaming market.
• NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  I see where you are coming from here; but aren't the stakes a bit different here? A games console is for games. Although there are probably some tiny fraction of people who have installed other apps on there, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people are just going to use it for games. A smartphone is likely to have address books, email, your photos, maybe sync with your e-health devices, banking applications ... from my point of view, it's an entirely different risk profile.
  • flohofwoe 4y ago
    There must be a way by now to stash this critical stuff away safely in one half of the phone, while the other half runs all the untrusted stuff. If there would be a will (by Apple) there would be a way.
    • NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      Sure, you stick things into sandboxes and only allow specific permissions to access outside the sandbox. In which case, users habituate to allowing any permissions that anything they install requests (c.f. Android). So then maybe you say "no permissions are allowed for sideloaded applications", but then you're back here with people complaining that the platform owner is crippling the independent ecosystem because it doesn't allow access to the camera or the mic or the address book or whatever.
      • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
        Or, you take the more extreme step, and obfuscate from the application whether or not permissions have been granted. The reason why people default to granting excess permissions is that many applications simply will refuse to run without them. If instead of "overtly deny permission" there existed the option to "covertly deny permission (by opting to feed plausible random data instead)" and making that the easier to select "deny" then you have the best of both worlds: well-behaved applications start asking for fewer unnecessary permissions, because the data they're gathering is being poisoned, poorly-behaved applications have their harm reduced, and users who want to build programs that actually need high-level permissions can do so.
• canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
• acer589 4y ago
  To be fair, this is not an Apple level device. 2.5 hr battery life is hilariously bad.
  • ww-picard-do 4y ago
    What is the battery life of Apple's gaming device?
    • nostromo 4y ago
      I get what you're saying, but the iPhone is one of the world's most popular and most profitable gaming device by a long shot.
      • oneoff786 4y ago
        My iPhone definitely does not last more than 2.5 hours when doing an intensive game.
      • kibwen 4y ago
        Definitely not the most popular; there are many multiples more people gaming on Android devices than on Apple devices.
        • deafpolygon 4y ago
          More people on Android and far more Android market share, but much more profitable on iOS despite the smaller user-base. There are far more willing and paying customers on Apple products. https://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/apple-leads-android-with-84-in-mobile-gaming-revenue/ https://www.dotcominfoway.com/blog/apple-leads-android-with-...
      • scns 4y ago
        How many Windows games can you run on it?
  • five82 4y ago
    At least you have plenty of options to conserve battery. capping framerate at 30 or 40 fps, FSR, configurable TDP limits, underclocking the GPU.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  Honestly I hate to say it but I think the Switch was actually the big advance. It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) and the old Nvidia processor from the Shield. I guess what I am saying is it is sort of like the Steam Deck but based on a tablet instead - and can pretty easily be hacked into a tablet instead. The Steam Deck is much more locked down but they MUST have been hugely inspired by the success of the Switch when making the Steam Deck. Personally I think I am excited for when we might get something a bit more of a hybrid of the two - if ARM does indeed take off on Windows and Linux more then we may end up with a device that can sometimes take a full ARM stack with all of its power advantages and then also run standard older OS processes as well.
  • monocasa 4y ago
    > It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) No, it's a totally custom OS. Custom kernel, custom user space. They run the BSD network stack off on the side, but so did Windows up until Vista.
    • Melatonic 4y ago
      Got it. But the hardware is still tablet hardware so its perfectly hackable into Android mode. Not the same as the Steam Deck at all but I think my point still sort of works
      • ranger207 4y ago
        AIUI only old hardware where Nintendo forgot to burn some bootloader fuses are hackable. Newer ones are not
        • piperswe 4y ago
          Those are the only ones that are softmoddable, but there are modchips for newer ones.
• moralestapia 4y ago
  >It's something that Apple fans always told us it's impossible to build ... Yes, but we all know that's a 320B dollar (so far) lie.
• anaganisk 4y ago
  Apple fans, if Im being honest, apple fans do know that Android exists. No one who understands tech claims it's impossible. Its just not what they want. They dont want to deal with the baggage it comes with. Saying this as an Apple user in the past now switched to Android for more flexibility, but feeling not worth it and going back to Apple after USB-C integration.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Nah, Apple fans aren't explicitly against sideloading, by and large, they just accept its lack because they care more about the positive features Apple devices have.
• ok_dad 4y ago
  > It's something that Apple fans always told us it's impossible to build - a device that is joy to use by default while still respecting your wishes as a user. I never knew I wanted a Valve phone and tablet, but now I do.
• j1elo 4y ago
  > it trusts you as a user - you can install games that aren't verified. It goes much further than that! It allows you to install arbitrary software so one can even set the Heroic launcher up [0] and play your games that happened to be bought in other platforms! [0]: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
• dkonofalski 4y ago
  I was with you right up until the end... I have a Steam Deck and it's absolutely incredible. Support, though, even for the verified games and with nothing modified, is hardly at the level that it is for Apple products and actually using it is nothing like using an Apple product. As soon as someone has an issue with something that's not officially supported by the OS, Steam/Valve is not going to help them. There's a reason why it's impossible to build something like this for Apple. They don't want any devices that they can't support until they're past their life cycle.
• balls187 4y ago
  Steam Deck's UI is personal preference. There is an annoying bug that if you play a game using a bluetooth controller, put the steamdeck to sleep, then resume later, controller support is dropped in-game. This basically makes the sleep feature useless. My wish as a user is that it behaves at least as well as last-gen consoles do. I had no problem putting my PS4 / Switch games to sleep and pick them back up later. The true magic (imho) is the compatibility layer allowing the hardware to run a large swath of PC/Windows games.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    >There is an annoying bug that if you play a game using a bluetooth controller, put the steamdeck to sleep, then resume later, controller support is dropped in-game. This basically makes the sleep feature useless. Does this happen when the game is launched thru Steam? Or when the game is launched outside of Steam? Because I assumed the Steam controller/gamepad translation layer could handle that.
    • balls187 4y ago
      Through Steam, tested on three different verified for steamdeck games. When woken back up, steam will recognize the controller (so you can use it to navigate the UI), but the running game will revert back to keyboard and mouse. Using the controls on the steamdeck itself also does not work in game (only the touchpad that emulates the mouse). So you have to resort to quitting the game and re-launching it. It was pretty annoying finding this out in the middle of an epic Vampire Savior run.
• noam_compsci 4y ago
  Damn this is so true. Might get one just to experience it.
• Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  Is that not exactly how MacOS works?
• autoexec 4y ago
  It looks like a good device, but I wonder about how much data collection is going on. A look at their privacy policy by Mozilla was something of a mixed review. (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/steam-deck/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/steam-d...). They said the policy didn't raise any huge privacy concerns, but that the policy was vague, Valve was unresponsive to questions ("We emailed Valve three times with our privacy and security questions and haven’t heard back from them"), and that ultimately Valve reserves the right to collect and share (read sell) "anonymous" data, aggregated or not, with third parties. I expect them to track what games you play and when, but what about desktop mode? If you run applications or browse the web how much of that activity is collected by Valve? Anti-cheat software works with the steam deck and that too is often highly invasive recording files on your system or other running processes. The device also comes with two internal microphones, and I'd probably want to remove them (hopefully that's as easy as it is for PS5 controllers) and has bluetooth which is hopefully easily disabled while traveling.
  • Jhsto 4y ago
    Do notice that you can also install your own OS.
    • autoexec 4y ago
      That is a good sign! If it looks like I can disconnect the mics without too much trouble I'll likely be picking one up.
  • jolmg 4y ago
    The main concern raised by that review seems not to be from data collection by them: > Valve does say they can process anonymous data and they may share anonymous data, aggregated or not, with third parties. This is a fairly common practice and doesn’t worry us too much. But rather that they don't make sure they're providing an ecosystem that, to their standards, protects the user from data collection by others: > Here’s the bad news about the Steam Deck though. We can’t confirm it meets our Minimum Security Standards because we can’t confirm it uses encryption or if Valve has a way to manage security vulnerabilities. If that's a concern, it would likewise be on any computer, I would imagine. I mean isn't the Steam Deck basically a regular e.g. desktop computer turned handheld? It's not an issue specifically about the Steam Deck unless you compare it to more closed platforms like the Switch instead of other regular computers. And the user does have the option to harden the system, like they can any computer: > There is a lot written out there on the internet about how to set up encryption on the Linux-based SteamOS yourself. However, we don’t think that users should have to go through that to protect their data. Like they say, it's a matter of lacking convenience to not have that level of hardening by default. But again, why is this an issue here, when most people using Steam from their desktop computers probably don't use encryption either.
• nailer 4y ago
  > I love the philosophy of steam deck: by default, it's an Switch-like device that hides all the non-fully compatible games in store As a former Steam Controller user: thank fucking god. The Steam Controller was never supported properly by Valve - games would be featured on the Steam store without compatibility with the Steam Controller, and after 20 minutes of trying different community configs for a new game, you'd get something good but the on-screen prompts would always be wrong. > PRESS X NOW When you need to press right shoulder or whatever. Yes Steam Controller was revolutionary, but it took the simplicity of console gamepads and added the fun of debugging a broken windows install.
• musicale 4y ago
  > It's something that Apple fans always told us it's impossible to build - a device that is joy to use by default while still respecting your wishes as a user. I can't speak for Apple's fans, but as I understand it some of Apple's main user experience reasons for a walled garden were things like better power efficiency (encouraging native apps vs. battery-draining PWAs), better protection from malicious software and user error (e.g. apps can have their keys revoked, users can't mess with drivers or OS files, etc.), and the ability to enforce app privacy requirements (including non-technical requirements like privacy labeling.) And activation locks make Apple devices less attractive to thieves, and less likely to leak data. Apple also provides tech support directly to users. Presumably the locked-down iOS devices are easier to support, which saves time for users (and money for Apple.) You're right though that Apple's model for its gaming handhelds is basically the Switch model and not the Steam Deck model. But I doubt anyone at Nintendo or Apple would have argued that the Steam Deck was impossible to build.
  • wkat4242 4y ago
    > as I understand it some of Apple's main user experience reasons for a walled garden were things like better power efficiency (encouraging native apps vs. battery-draining PWAs) Ironically Apple wasn't even planning on offering apps, they thought web apps would be enough. Until Cydia came up and showed users how great native apps can be. And now it's their greatest money maker.
    • musicale 4y ago
      The original iPhone did support native apps - they just had to be written by Apple. ;-) Developers at WWDC 2007 hated Jobs' "sweet solution" of web apps and wanted to be able to write native apps. Jailbreakers had started probing Apple's apps almost immediately and figuring out how to create native apps, certainly before Cydia. I imagine dynamic aspects of Objective-C (and similarities between the iOS and macOS environments) may have facilitated such introspection and experimentation. Presumably they were able to generate mach-o ARM executables as well somehow before Xcode supported it. Fast forward a year to 2008 and Apple delivered something that was more than just a dev kit or an installer - an App Store that worked with the existing iTunes Store payment systems. It also happened to be a rather walled garden. The Cydia Store opened in 2009 and shut down in 2018. iOS web apps weren't a completely terrible idea - Apple added things like touchscreen support as well as native widgets. Even today they have some advantages, including sidestepping Apple's walled garden. Though with the success of said garden, Apple has less of an incentive to enable web apps to compete with it.
• dcow 4y ago
  "If you allow 3rd party app stores and other browsers it will ruin my walled garden device and the official app store and threaten the entire ecosystem Apple meticulously curates!!!" Oh? Really? Do go on...
• ngcc_hk 4y ago
  Why force apple to do that. That business model has android and that is fine. You need a choice. You want a choice. Apple model is a choice. Forced side load allowed close apple. It may not be good. At least some of us has a choice.
• stevefan1999 4y ago
  > switch like steam deck has the size of one and a half nintendo switch(es?).