A 4K Steam Link should have been an obvious iteration, and a controller with actual buttons and sticks (I half-joke about the controller, I know some love its touch nature, I just hated it, could never keep my thumbs in the right spot).
The controller is amazing and enables non controller games to be played with one. This doesn't stop me from using another controller for emulators.
I'm not sure why you saw my want for 4k visuals in the single player, visual, story based games I prefer to play, as an opportunity to attack me personally. Perhaps read the rules or go back to Reddit or wherever that attitude is welcome.
Though they could have done 4K UI / other apps like an Android TV device I suppose.
From a consumer perspective, people have been rocking 4K TVs and 4K PCs for a few years, and even consoles have been outputting 4K (even if they're rendering less) for a while, so one would hope to have seen some sort of 4K offering.
I can see discussions on the Steam forums as far back as 2016 of people streaming 4K in-home from PC to HTPC or similar, so it's certainly _possible_, even 4-5 years ago.
I've done some 4K streaming from my gaming PC to laptop hooked up to TV in living room in the past without any (more) issues than I usually have being a purely Linux gamer.
According to a topic near the top of the Raspberry Pi / Steam Link, Steam Forum, 4K is _possible_ (no indication of what it looks/feels like) with a Pi 4B these days.
Every Valve hardware device has had a longer maintenance and support lifecycle than any Google Nexus/Pixel device ever sold. Valve has consistently been better than Google about their hardware + software lifecycles.
It's totally fair to compare the two, but that doesn't necessarily make them equivalent. Valve's track record isn't good, but it's not bad either -- it's not like Google's.
1st gen Chromecast stopped getting feature updates after 6 years, but as far as I can tell is still in scope for security fixes. 2nd gen Chromecast seems to still be fully supported 5.5 years after release with no EOL announced yet.
These all seem like very reasonable amounts of time. How long do you think support should actually last?
If you want to be petty, don't add new quality of life features to devices past the sell by date, like say no Android apps on older Chromebooks, even if they've got the hardware virtualization support needed. But when you kill the existing printer service, it's kind of rude to not push the replacement local printer daemon, or leave a half-ass version that doesn't really work either.
Nintendo has discontinued the GameBoy / DS line. Because they now sell the Switch Lite, which is their new way to solve that problem. You can argue "Nintendo sucks, they discontinued their handhelds, we can't trust them on hardware", and they sort-of have. But they gave that product line 10 years of support, and they haven't abandoned those folks, the Switch Lite exists for them now to bridge over to the new mobile gaming market. Not all "discontinuings" are of equivilant weight as Google's product-killings.
Steam doesn't sell a Steam Controller, true. Because much of the Steam Controller stuff now supports nearly any controller (Switch Pro / DualShock 4 / Xbox One XINPUT, including the full accessibility controller / etc). Yeah, it's not quite the same as the Steam Controller (no touchpad joysticks), but they didn't abandon that market. And every Steam Controller ever sold is still fully supported in software, even in new games made this year (6 years after launch).
Steam doesn't sell a Steam Link. But they didn't abandon it, they upgraded it. Steam Link now works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android TV + Android Phones, Samsung Smart TVs, and such. They don't sell you their own box anymore, because that would be super redundant, most of the TV boxes people already own can run Steam Link already, and they continue to support Steam Link on many different clients to this day. Last time I checked, even original v1 Steam Links are still fully supported in all software + service (6+ years after launch).
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In comparison, Google often just hard up kills stuff. Google Reader died, replaced by nothing. Android Things died, replaced by nothing. Google Cloud Print died, replaced by nothing. There's an entire website dedicated to just listing random stuff Google's killed - https://killedbygoogle.com/ . At least half of those products or services have no graceful fallover or upgrade path to anything else.
I get that it's a fair comparison. But I strongly believe it's not an equivalent one. As someone who has bought plenty of Google and Valve hardware over the years, I'd be a lot happier with Google as a company if they put even just half the effort on the support and maintenance lifecycle for their products, that Valve already does for nearly everything they touch.
Here, you can see five for sale in 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160225105722/https://store.ste...
I don't know that Valve were ever going to make physical devices themselves (other than the 100 they made for beta testers.) From pretty early on, and definitely by Steam Dev Days 2014, it seemed to me like they were trying to make a platform for hardware manufacturers to build linux computers made for gaming, rather than manufacturing their own computers.
As for the Steam Controller, and Steam link, I completely agree. Steam Link was a poor showing, and the Steam Controller, while neat, really could have used a V2 upgrade.
More generally, I don't know that Valve has made a truly successful product or game other than maybe Halflife Alex in well over a decade. And even with Alex, the player base is so limited due to being a VR exclusive.
It's pretty sad.
Dota 2 is atleast barely in a decade from 2013. But ye, it is underwelming.
Alyx. Sounds the same, but this spelling has the right gender.
> And even with [Alyx], the player base is so limited due to being a VR exclusive.
I have played it, and am currently replaying it with developer comments on. There's a reason it's a VR exclusive. There is no way this could transfer over a flat screen.
VR interactions are fundamentally different. Motion sickness severely constrain how many players may move about (it gets better with practice, but Alyx is aimed at beginners). The ability to pick up objects and throw them about is crucial to immersion. The kind of weapons that work in VR are different (1 handed mostly). Pacing is different we move slower in VR than we do in a flat screen FPS, often by a factor of 5. This modify level design and how to manage tension. Even combat must be paced slower, especially at the beginning where players have yet to reload their guns seamlessly (requiring gestures is more immersive, but there's a learning curve, and doing it under duress requires serious training).
A flat screen port of Half Life: Alyx would not be a good game. Most rooms would feel cramped. Some parts of the game would be cumbersome. Others like the Jeff chapter (Jeff is an unkillable monster with very good hearing) would swing between being overly punishing or way too easy. Many puzzles would have to be cut or replaced by something else. Some weapon features like an aiming laser would not even make sense (unless you remove the aiming dot at the centre of the screen, making aiming way too punishing). An inventory of 2 items (plus ammo) would feel limited for no good reason the player can see (one item per wrist is an obvious good reason in VR).
Some games, like vehicle simulators (car, plane, spaceship…) can indeed have good flat screen and VR version. Standing first person games however cannot. The difference between a keyboard/mouse/gamepad and a pair of knuckles/Vive/touch is too great to compensate for, in either direction.
Our female friend Alexandra introduces herself as Alex.
I missed an opportunity to shut up, there.
I'm not surprised Valve has trouble continuing to produce hardware with low sales volumes. That said, they have certainly proven themselves to me with the quality of their devices so this one naturally has my attention. I don't buy products until reviews are out, but this one sounds pretty good on paper. The GPD Win 3, Aya Neo, and One Xplayer have all already proved the concept is viable and I'm excited to see Valve's take on it.
Also, to be fair the whole reason they stopped making Steam Links is because there are many other products out there now which can run the Steam Link software. Their hardware offering simply became redundant. There's no shame in discontinuing a product which no longer makes sense for the overwhelming majority of potential buyers.
After all, Microsoft could pull an iOS and insist on a cut of all sales on Windows - or make the microsoft store the only way to distribute software.
Like a pilot with a parachute, they'll dutifully maintain it - but they hope not to need it.
Steam Link became obsolete, and the controller just didn't sell (despite being excellent IMO!)
This could see a similar fate, or it could be the breakout hit made possible by their learning from past hardware
From my perspective, the controller was never sold. I could not buy it anywhere, I am assuming they were only made in a relatively small batch and sold mostly in mainland US.
I had been looking since it was released for a place to buy it at a reasonable price, but could only find exorbitantly priced resellers that would ship from USA.
[1] I can't link it directly, so look for "Steam Controllers are played with a diverse set of games" https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/353370/Steam_Controller/
As far as I know, that's correct, but it was region locked. You could not officially buy it where I live.
Valve created Steam Machines as a hedge against the Windows Store becoming like the App Store (walled garden) but neither took off. Whether VR will become a major part of gaming is yet to be seen, although Facebook has invested heavily in their Oculus Quest ecosystem which does not require Steam or Windows.
Everybody stops building things that don't sell well. Very few continue supporting them.
I would not hesitate to buy hardware from Valve.
Seven years after launching the Steam machine (2014) initiative, there are no Steam machines available for sale. [1]
Both the Steam Controller (2015-2019) and Steam Link (2015-2018) are discontinued and cannot be purchased, despite consistently positive reviews from users. [2]
As other commenters have noted there are already numerous "Switch-like, but x86" products that exist, and it's unclear to me what innovation Valve can bring to the space.
IMHO if Valve wants to be taken seriously in the hardware market, they need to stop pulling a Google and actually support/iterate/not discontinue their existing hardware products (before someone adds that they did support these through firmware updates, I mean updating the hardware to keep up with the times, Steam Link with apps or 4K, etc).
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_machines
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=993