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.
Last I heard it didn’t work, but I would be shocked if Valve didn’t fix it at some point (assuming they haven’t already). I’m still looking for the article I read that mentioned it, so far it’s just an X post from a few weeks ago.
Edit: This is not the article, but I found another post talking about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706428 and it references Linux Tech Tips
LTT couldn’t be much further from that :)
I hope for anyone who buys it that it does work at least by launch. Finding this out when trying it would suck.