t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
Their contributions to Linux alone prove you’re full of shit on that take. Buy from GOG or Itch if you don’t like Steam though.
The aren’t contributing to Linux to be nice. The entire reason they started it was because Microsoft started selling games in the Microsoft store and they were afraid of competition from the OS vendor.
It’s why they rushed the first generation of Steam Machines to market way before they were ready.
The only thing that keeps Steam from being as awful as other services is that they’re not a public company, meaning they take a longer-term view instead of the quarterly pump and dump. But their singular goal with Steam is and always has been to make unholy amounts of money.