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’m usually pretty quick to criticize Gabe and Valve. People often give them a pass because their products are good, but Valve taking a 30% cut of software sales for a storefront and a game launcher is ludicrous. Tons of game devs are having to budget more to pay Valve than they are for the entirety of the staff developing the game. At least Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft make 100% of the hardware for theor console storefronts and Gamestop has actual physical retail stores for their 30% cut.
However, the cost of the Steam Frame I’ll defend, even if I absolutely won’t buy an LED headset at that price. Hardware got expensive. I can’t justify spending the money on it, but Steam can justify the cost.
What saddens me more is the Steam Machine. I thought it had real potential to be a disruptor, but it just costs too damn much to get people to replace their Xbox with it. It’s not Valve’s fault - the timing just sucks.
Valve is objectively better to consumers compared to the god damn console companies, it’s not even close.
Valve invented the bullshit we deal with now. Until Half-Life 2, you could just buy a game and install it.
A bunch of friends didn’t even have internet connected to their gaming PCs until Valve made it a requirement.
Steam was the beginning of so much of the problems plaguing games today. We bitch about game launchers, but are somehow fine with an always-running storefront that’s also a launcher that tracks everything we do in games and its billionaire king who individually makes more money on almost every PC game than any of the people who made the game itself.
Gabe is a parasite, and I’m sick of people sucking his dick because he used to make games. What has he done in the last 20 years but leech money from others?
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.