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.
I have heard that they haven’t quite nailed down the foveated streaming from Linux pc’s yet, which is what they may be referring to.
Can you cite a source for this? I would be streaming from my Linux PC and I haven’t seen anything from Valve saying that streaming VR (or even that foveated streaming specifically) is Windows exclusive, and if it was that would really surprise me.
The Gamers Nexus review mentions it, I can’t give you an exact timestamp though. https://youtu.be/vcerOYY_K1g
I can’t cite a good source, apologies.
From what I heard, it was just referencing LTT’s experience with the Steam Link software (which was recorded before a round of linux-specific updates to improve it, afaik). Although, the reddit post cited in this github discussion says that Linus is just straight up wrong, so hopefully it just works!