I actually think that, while it’s maybe a fun topic for idle conversation…it doesn’t have a huge impact in the way traditional console pricing normally does.
With a traditional console, what the console vendor chooses to do on hardware is what you get. Maybe, as with Microsoft on the Xbox Series X/Series S, you get a high and low end model, but that’s as much choice as you get. All the games are made for that hardware, and whether the platform lives and dies depends on it.
But…that’s not really true of the Steam Machine. It’s just another PC, albeit preconfigured for Steam and HTPC-oriented. If you want to get a lower-end PC or a higher-end PC, you have the option of getting one and plugging it into a TV and running the same games on it and save some money or with a bit more visual bling. The games for PCs are already more or less written to scale up and down with hardware.
And it’s not like Valve’s platform is gonna live or die based on the Steam Machine the way a traditional console generation is, where success of a hardware console is high-stakes for the manufacturer and the players in successfully getting a game library going. I’d guess that it might help Valve make strategic inroads into gaming in the living room. But even if it completely bombs, Valve is gonna keep right on selling games to people to run on PCs (and the Deck) and their huge game library isn’t going anywhere.
depending on their sales expectations they could legit make this a loss leader.
I don’t think they will. The problem is that the hardware is open.
Closed-system console vendors can sell at a loss because if you’ve bought the console and don’t buy games from them for it, you’re going to have limited use of it. It’s maybe an expensive Blu-Ray player or something. Not a sensible purchase. You’re gonna buy games for it.
So they can just crank up the price of games and make their return over time from games.
But if the Steam Machine is sold at a loss, then people will also buy it to use it as a regular mini-PC, and Valve doesn’t make a return from them.
Thanks, but I don’t think that it’ll do it for me. I’ve tried similar packages before, and the problem is that I also want the ability to input a bunch of Unicode characters and use keys in terminal emulators and so forth. Even Anysoft Keyboard, which I’m presently using, is occasionally lacking, and it’s pretty comprehensive. I’ve considered doing a soft keyboard myself, even, but I just can’t work up the will to go develop for Android with Google slowly closing some stuff. I think that my long-run trajectory is to move what I can to a Linux laptop and hope that GNU/Linux phones eventually become a practical alternative to Android.
That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on thr Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.
I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.
The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.
Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.
I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?
I have it off on my phone at the moment because my soft keyboard is enaging in shennanigans, and I will say that I didn’t appreciate how many errors that I make on tiny phone keyboards that it fixes until now. I mean, damned if you do, damned if don’t.
The steam machine sounds intriguing but there is already a big market for mini PCs and I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box. I’m most skeptical about this one
You might not be the target audience. I’m comfortable building an HTPC and putting an OS and all on it and configuring it, but the benefit of a console is that someone just gets an all-in-one setup that works out-of-box. Well, and that game developers are specifically testing against.
Like, if it weren’t a barrier, you’d probably just have everyone using PCs instead of consoles in their living room. Might open the gates to let console-only folks do Steam.
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
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We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
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Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.