I’m sure they’re waiting for the price tag of a device with the features you describe to be more in line with current steam deck prices before doing that. They probably don’t want to annoy early adopters either.
Thats the main goal imo. Theyre not teying to compete with the high end devices, all of them will likely download steam and give Valve money anyways. Valve always targets on expanding the market, with vr and such. The Steam Deck exists to expand the market to budget pc console like gaming, and it would not make sense to replace it now.
Valve I dont believe sees it like a cellphone where theyre trying to make more money by doing yearly releases. They arent a hardware company fundamentally. They only develop hardware as a means to expand market, not to make profit directly off of.
Its why virtually none of their hardware projects are bog standard, be it steam machine/deck(Linux market), index/vive (VR), Controller (touchpad, HD Rumble), Link(local streaming) as each project was designed to introduce pc gaming to a new market, or expand pc gaming by adding new features
I love my Steamdeck AND the fact that it is a massive attack on Microsoft.
Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.
It is about time for them to start producing some GPUs and break the monopoly of AMD and NVIDIA.
Nah, Intel is already doing that. Valve getting into graphics cards would be a colossal mistake. That’s not in their wheelhouse at all.
Yeah. Doing software is hard, doing household hardware is harder, but doing GPU-class chips? No fucking way at all.
Yup, Intel is struggling to enter the market, and they’ve been building similar chips for years. This just isn’t an area for someone like Valve to break into.
Maybe they could make a good cooler design or something, but they’re going to be using off the shelf chips, or maybe slightly altered custom chips like they did with the Steam Deck.
