No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.
Dang. The new Steam Controller has a D-pad, buttons, thumbsticks, gyros, and trackpads.
And the thumbsticks are TMR (like Hall effect, but nicer).
As long as it’s comfortable to reach all that stuff, that’s gonna be a new bar for PC game controllers.
EDIT: and grip sensors.
EDIT2: and four haptic feedback motors, two in the trackpads.
Now if it just had a replaceable battery…
It does! Verge reports that battery pops out like old cellphone batteries
Only one company has apparently learned how to print money and not be ghouls.
Valve and therefore Steam is still privately owned, never went public. No share holders demanding things surely is a major factor.
To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscious, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.
conscious*
Thank you. Didn’t notice I screwed that up.
When I look at this announcement, the hardware is very exciting, for sure. But it is Valve’s dedication to Linux that really has me smiling. I don’t see three hardware devices to buy. I see two big proclamations for which the hardware is the message:
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SteamOS on desktop! It seemed inevitable but it’s still great to see.
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STEAM VR USING LINUX AS ITS TARGET PLATFORM?!?!?
I will grant that it’s very possible I buy all three pieces of the hardware, even though I like building my own PCs. I will also grant that Valve’s support for linux probably would not be what it is without the enshittification of Microsoft’s ecosystem. But in this world I’m gonna go ahead and accept the imperfect good news.
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NOled :(
Been waiting for a competitor to the meta quest. Looks like my patience has paid off. I hope it’s not too pricey/compromised
“The Frame headset won’t be priced higher than the Index”:
Yes but which index ? The headset alone is 540€, but the full VR Kit is 1080€
Dont get me wrong, I’m still going TK buy it if it costs 1080€, but I will be annoyed, and very sad for all the kids who will still have to sell their soul to Meta for a while…
I really hope it’s ~500€
Why did I buy a PSVR2 with the pc adapter three weeks ago …
I appreciate the assist lol
Would love to see Valve do a SteamOS Linux Phone next.
With it coming with an optional phone gaming accessory to use your phone as a controller (with same design/gaming usage as Steam Deck/Steam Controller)
For use with any Valve hardware/software through the connected accessory (Bluetooth/Dongle/Wired)
Don’t have an extra controller? Use your phone with the add-on.
Sidenote: Wonder if PostmarketOS will add support for Steam Frame overtime. Sadly it does not have call support I think but otherwise it would technically be a different kind of device that could function as a phone tok
Sometimes I think about how LOATHED Steam was when it launched. That was probably valid even. Still, it feels worth noting that Valve is maybe THE only company from my childhood that feels like it largely stayed true to its spirit, or whatever.
People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.
Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.
The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.
I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.
Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.
Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.
I was one of the haters when it first launched because I was on dialup at the time and physical discs I bought were forcing me to install steam AND THEN install a massive patch that did not work on dialup. My first day playthrough of Skyrim was ruined because of that. Took a week for that shit to download even though I went physically to a store.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
Did Valve just announce THREE of something?
Second steam machine (not deck!), Second VR headset, and second controller ( I actually don’t know if that’s totally true)
Valve remains committed to an open PC ecosystem
happy noises
I want them all, but mostly the Frame. Finally decent Linux VR? On a standalone device that can also stream from a PC? On ARM?! It seems too good to be true.
I posted this in the other thread, but wanna share here too:
Most interesting thing to me is the Frame apparently runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is using SteamOS, implying official ARM support for SteamOS, Steam and Proton! Could mean steam and proton coming to android too.
Steam/Proton on android would be quite something, I would finally be able to play something decent on my phone that wasn’t originally released for the PS2
Jeff Geerling is probably having a fit right now.
what does that homophobic ass have to do with it, is he not a fan of ARM or something?
…wat.
I think you must be thinking of some other Jeff Geerling. The one I’m talking about is probably the #1 guy on Youtube for content about ARM stuff, and AFAIK isn’t a homophobe.
Your comment doesn’t make any sense because, even if you were talking about the right person and your accusation were accurate, why would you know some obscure thing about him while being unaware of the thing he’s famous for?
Going back roughly a decade you can find blog posts and some bits on Twitter. I don’t see anything outright gay-bashing but his moral worldview, when he speaks on the matter, seems to be shaped by his Catholic faith. I don’t think he hates homosexuals, and I can’t guess at how his beliefs effect others (who for, or how, he votes and such), but he certainly seems to have a moral opposition and hasn’t since stated otherwise that I am aware.
If you need a smoking gun, here’s a quote from Twitter around 2017. Context is that this apparently stemmed from the removal of developer Larry “Crell” Garfield over “Gorean” (?) beliefs or participation in that subculture. Relating to some BDSM, male-domination, female slaves “Gor” novel series, that I cannot be assed to dig deeper into, and concerns he’d carry the “misogyny” into into the workplace. Anyway:
The Drupal community is treading perilous waters right now. Risk of excluding more members than just Crell. Careful with moral equivalence! It’s a heck of a lot more nuanced than that. But basically, if the criteria for being part of the Drupal community anymore is “Must both publicly and privately support Gay marriage, etc.” then… I think I might be excluded.
As an atheist looking in, I find Abrahamic faiths fundamentally incompatible with homosexuality. Having a gay Christian marriage, for example, is an absurdity to me. To be clear I’m not personally opposed to it. I find very much wrong with his faith but I don’t believe Jeff is wrong about his faith. But kudos and power to whoever wants to lie to themselves and retcon Christianity in order to believe (what I perceive to be) a bigger, more comforting lie. If we can keep eroding at it maybe we’ll finally get over the hatred and hangups it causes, or at least no longer be able to point to it as a justifying source.
Hmm this makes me wonder if the Steam Deck 2 will be ARM. If the Steam Frame works well, that could be a way for Valve to push more performance/battery life out of the deck
With Valve talking about open ecosystems so much, I have glimmer of hope that they’ll move to RISC-V.
Probably not gonna happen though… At least not yet
I’ve followed RISC-V development. It is so promising and so cool. But it is also under-cooked right now, I don’t think it is ready to carry such a product. It might get better in the future, but as it stands it takes way too much effort to release a hardware product using it, never mind a high performant one like a gaming console. My hope is that the EU and FOSS initiatives can take a stronghold on the standard up to the point that it becomes a feasible competitor to Qualcomm and it retains it’s openness. It is the only way stuff like a truly spyware free and privacy respecting smartphone can exist. Linux will never thrive with the hostile hellscape that is ARM hardware. Valve themselves have had to fight with the stubbornness of a myriad consortiums that want to gatekeep their modules and refuse to offer open source software. RISC-V just needs a lot of love and care for now to grow into a competitive standard. Many cool developers are working on it but it doesn’t have the same financial effort behind it that ARM has.
But then, isn’t that kinda where linux was at before steamOS kicked this revolution off?? Like, I had kinda dabbled in various linux distros here and there prior to steamOS and was always left feeling like it lacked complete polish - VR, gaming, easy app installs (outside the terminal, for normies)… All that has never seemed so well rounded – until steamOS blessed me with KDE, and since then I’ve mained Debian w/ KDE on all my machines (hopefully I can even main deb on my phone, one day!!)
Point is= maybe if a company like valve (or even valve themselves) pulls a similar approach with RISC-V that we’ve seen them do with steamOS, we aren’t wrong to hope for the same sort of outcome for it as well!
But, that’s just a dream I suppose 😅 here’s hoping!!! 🤞🤞
Yes, and that is why I’m hopeful for more RISC-V development. One day, maybe, there will be first party manufacturers making open devices that work easily with any software of choice instead of proprietary vendor lock-in.
So this is the “Extend” step of PC gaming control by Valve. We’ll see how open the Steam ecosystem will stay.
I’m not gonna argue, cause honestly we’ve seen way too many companies follow this same shitty pattern.
Still, I’m hopeful! Valve has been an absolute bro thus far - if the steam deck is anything to go by, I think we’ve got a lot to look forward to!
Im currently playing a game from Epic on my Steam Deck, I’ve recently played games from GOG, and of course Steam. The biggest drawbacks with non-Steam games are having to go to the desktop to install them, and not having my time in big picture mode tracked for those games. So, not seamless, but exceptionally playable. I’ve even customized button maps for non-Steam games, and also had to do nothing at all to have them work well.
If Steam keeps extending like this, people will stop buying Windows for gaming. I will acknowledge that my gaming requirements aren’t as extensive as some, and I’ve never installed Fortnite or Roblox for my own use.
With the fact there’s apparently surprisingly reasonable evidence of a new half life game, I wonder if that’s likely to get announced when they give these a release date. I could see them bundling it with the steam machines at least. Assuming the rumors turn out to be true.
Uhhhhhhh saywhanow?? Where you seein these rumors?! They reputable??!?
Dont play with my heart! 😭 I would DIE for a new Half Life VR - Alyx was FUCKING incredible!!!
I don’t know if it’ll be VR but the short version is there’s a lot of code in the source 2 updates that directly point to the development of a new half-life game.
Finally! I’ve been holding out for years waiting on steam to release a new VR set, time to finally get one!
