Valve's Steam Deck Is Launching February 25th | MMORPG.com

System · January 2022

Valve's Steam Deck Is Launching February 25th | MMORPG.com

Valve's handheld Steam Deck finally has a release date after being delayed late last year. The Steam Deck will be launching on February 25th with units finally shipping on the 28th.

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KingLlama · January 2022

Oh yes. This is exciting.

Scott_Jeslis · January 2022

Awesome I was just checking today for updates since I'm being sent X-Box X bundle and Playstation PS5 event opportunities.

Be interesting to see how long it takes to drain their queue in calendar time. If this goes well maybe MS and PS can take note ;-)

Margrave · January 2022

Trying to wait on the reviews

Zanzara · January 2022

Too bad its hardware is already outdated.

Scot · January 2022

Wheres the screen?

Angrakhan · January 2022

The handheld Steam Di...? OH Deck! Got it. Deck.

Slapshot1188 · January 2022

I threw $5 to reserve one last year. I think reviews are supposed to start coming out in a week or two. We will see.

Quizzical · January 2022

Zanzara said:

Too bad its hardware is already outdated.

Game consoles generally don't use cutting edge hardware. You wouldn't like the price tag if they did.

Quizzical · January 2022

Torval said:

This will be a real proof moment for Linux gaming. Hey, at least a lot of people will be able to say, "I run Arch."

For many years, Linux just wasn't good enough for most servers to use it. And then it was, and most servers ended up running Linux. Today, because so many servers run Linux, being able to run it well (e.g., having Linux drivers for everything relevant) is important when designing servers to sell.

I'm hoping that the same thing happens to desktops (and laptops) at some point. It's something of a chicken and egg problem, where vendors don't prioritize Linux support because hardly anyone uses it on a desktop or laptop, and then hardly anyone (at least other than computer programmers) uses Linux on a desktop or laptop because a lot of things don't have Linux support.

Valve has been pushing hard to fix this, and I hope that they succeed. If they can get many millions of gamers running Linux on a gaming system such as the Steam deck, then that could make it into more of a priority for game developers. If we reach the point that it's standard that software developers say, everything has to work on both Windows and Linux, then it could become the case that pretty much all the software people want works just fine on Linux.

Linux doesn't need majority market share for this to happen. If it had 20% of gamers, then most game developers wouldn't want to systematically exclude that 20% from playing their game. I'm not sure how much market share it would take for most game developers to specifically support Linux, but 10% or so might be enough. 1% isn't.

And at that point, as happened to servers years ago, most people may choose to save some money and some risk of Microsoft imposing something stupid and switch to Linux. It could be that the logical successor to Windows 11 is not Windows 12, but some common distribution of Linux. Or even the successor to Windows 10, though I don't think it will happen that soon.

Quizzical · January 2022

tzervo said:

Torval said:

This will be a real proof moment for Linux gaming. Hey, at least a lot of people will be able to say, "I run Arch."

Psh. If you do not install everything from the vterm it's not Arch. /s

Arch

Btw, for MMORPG'ers Linux is not bad. I have played lots of WoW, GW2, EVE, Albion and a couple MUD's on it and it did fantastic. Now with Proton, even better.

The problem is, if half of the games that you want to play work on Linux and all of them work on Windows, most gamers are going to prefer Windows. That doesn't mean that gaming on Linux doesn't work, but it does mean that you want to play the other half of the games that you want to play. If most games can be made to work on Linux but it often takes some tinkering, or some things are broken but the game is still more or less playable, and everything just works right out of the box on Windows, then most gamers will prefer Windows.

If 95% of the games that you want to play just work right on Linux without any tinkering and without any problems, then that's a far more interesting situation for most gamers.

milaysky · January 2022

I game on Manjaro KDE for few years now, cause I got fed up with Doors crap. Can run all mmorpgs which has no EAC or BattlEye. You can run it, but those anticheats wont let you connect to servers properly. No natives singles is no probs. Got even better fps. Happy with Vulkan too.
Also no mad tinkering skills are necessary, just simply use Lutris or Proton via Steam.
As Steam deck launches we should see the support on EAC and BE outside the deck. There is support already, but only for native linux games. Which solves nothing. We need that cross support which is the deck getting now.
So my POV M$ can burn in hell with "if we buy them all, people would have to use some of the software eventually, and then we can Gamepass them" attitude.
Is I write this, running ESO on 144FPS on my crappy old i7-2600k and RX580 on kernel 5.10.93-1

Slapshot1188 · January 2022

I just expect the SteamDeck to play my games. With no knowledge of Linux or anything more complicated than using a Switch or other console.

If it does that... then I do not care what OS is underlying it.
If it doesn't do that... then I will be pissed if I bought it.

lahnmir · January 2022

Torval said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I just expect the SteamDeck to play my games. With no knowledge of Linux or anything more complicated than using a Switch or other console.

If it does that... then I do not care what OS is underlying it.
If it doesn't do that... then I will be pissed if I bought it.

Not all games sold on Steam are going to run on it. Many, maybe even most, games will though. Valve is creating a rating system. Some games are verified while some aren't but will have a rating and some will explicitly not work on the platform.

The Deck is also supposed to run a lot of emulators so if you have games (ROMs) from other platforms it may run those. There is a lot of potential for a flexible handheld PC that can be docked.

We'll see shortly what it is capable of. I'm probably not getting one though. I don't travel for work much anymore. I don't really need a portable and my Switch usage has really dropped off. I like the power and flexibility of a full desktop.

The deck can handle Cyberpunk 2077 on medium/high at a mostly stable 30fps. That is the most expensive version though and its 720p. Still reasonably impressive.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Slapshot1188 · January 2022

I’m just saying that I want it to work like a console as opposed to a laptop. Turn it on, click an icon, play a game. Not going to find some program to DL to tweak some file, etc…

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