They have any hardware that took off?

The index. The have a few other pieces of hardware they have made over the years. Currently they are making the Steam Deck, time will tell how that does.

I have an index. I like it. It definitely hasn’t taken off.

It's not the Index fault, just modern VR tech hasn't taken off. The Index is a great piece of hardware. And my prediction is that the Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes.

I think modern VR sucks. Beat Saber is cool but frankly beat saber would be just as cool on the wii or the kinect or on a normal screen with vr wands. It doesn’t actually utilize VR when you think about it.

Half Life Alyx was impressive but it also kind of sucked. Teleport movement breaks immersion hard. And the enemy design was clearly incredibly gentle to accommodate the fact that people are not in fact very competent in VR.

Natural moving (rather than frequent warp) is what I want to be solved on VR games.

It's a chicken and egg problem. VR tech isn't taking off cause there isn't enough market share to justify having great games for it.

To get that level of market share a company basically needs to subsidize the initial hardware/consoles. I don't think Valve has ever learned that concept and as such they are still selling the hardware at full price. This in contrast to say FB/Microsoft/Sony who actively subsidize their offerings because they understand the benefit of getting people locked in their ecosystem.

I predict a repeat of Steam Machines. (as a Linux user)

I'm pretty sure idealogically valve are opposed to locking people into their ecosystem. They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam, and they allow you to add non-steam games to your library. They're a weird comapny in general, they have a pretty hardcore horizontal management system going on in their company which as I understand as an outsider is a big reason why they've struggled to bring stuff to market of late.

Their (leaked) employee handbook is literally subtitled "A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do"

>They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam

? You can't play DOTA2 or CS:GO or any of their real moneymakers anywhere but Steam.

I mean that even if steam closed tomorrow, you would be able to play all your games. They're literally just installed in a folder on your computer and steam clicks the exe for you. They also released server code for most of their own games so you can run your own. Most companies would have gated access to their servers so you could only run the game when you could connect to their database

> Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes

Pretty sure it won’t. Too chunky for playing indie games on the go, not enough battery to play AAA. And if you plan having it plugged in as a desktop replacement, there’re batter gaming laptops.