The Steam Deck was 10% off just two weeks ago to celebrate its first year of being out, at every performance tier I believe. I also think they discounted the Deck Dock.

Crazy how it's only been a year since the Deck came out, given the impact it's had on the gaming market.

I have a steam deck. I can't say I understand it's impact on the gaming market though.

From what I understand, it gives games a good lower end hardware target to hit with optimal visuals. It also pushes games to add solid controller support on PC and be Linux/proton friendly. Some anti-cheat supports Linux now as a result of steam deck.

do you not like it?

I do like it, but I like a lot of things I would consider niche and that dont have impacts on large markets. I was wondering what they meant about impact on the gaming market. It's not clear to me how many steam decks have been sold in comparison to say, the nintendo switch. Which is why when they talk about impact I'm just not sure what the impact is.

The title of the thread is the impact. If 75% of the most played Steam games are playable on the Steam Deck, that means they are also playable on Linux. The Steam Deck is the Trojan Horse that decouples PC Gaming from Windows. It doesn't mean that everyone is going to start installing Ubuntu or that this is the Year Of The Linux Desktop, but it does mean that Valve as a business, and thus a huge segment of the gaming population, is no longer beholden to Microsoft.

That is fair I just think the actual impact on the industry is fairly small - the steam decks themselves are likely the largest collection of linux gaming computers to have ever existed.

I think the biggest obstacles are going to be getting companies to implement anti cheats that run on linux and not in kernel mode. Apparently Apex does this, but also apparently lots of cheats now target the linux implementation. Maybe valve can figure out an effective anti cheat system for linux and license/sell its use.

The real trojan horse will be bringing gaming to Mac, since Asahi linux now targets M1 Macs, and Proton open gaming on Linux.

If Mac and Apple TVs become on par with Windows gaming, Mac and Apple TV will be the default choice for gaming.

mac cant run many games with proton because its arm cpu is 64 bits only and steam needs 32 bits support

I highly doubt that. Macs come with high resolution screens and relatively underpowered GPUs. They also come with their own graphics API (Metal) to deal with, as well as Rosetta2.

There are already forks out there that make playing games on macOS possible by porting the many Linux wrappers. I haven't seen any of them take off, really.

I expect that most people who own a Mac simply buy a console for gaming.

There was a Steam Deck sale. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/valves-year-old-steam...

Steam Deck was on sale 10% off mid-march

I bought the 64 GB model and then picked up a 1 TB Sabrent Gen 4 SSD to install into it.

Pretty straight forward! The Steam Deck is repairable and there are a ton of iFixit guides.

The only things I didn't really like were:

- Unhooking plastic clips on the case - I dislike this generally since I'm always afraid of breaking a clip

- Disconnecting the battery was a PAIN. Everything is pretty compact - it took a long time to get it out.

- Flashing the OS requires you to have a good internet connection - it won't tell you if it can't connect, it'll just say it's trying to connect. Just press B, re-select a network, and move into a better spot.

- During the flashing OS process the buttons won't work. They work after everything is done installing.