1. I would be surprised if a Valve-made console had a discrete GPU in this current GPU market. Part of what helped the Steam Deck succeed was that it was an integrated GPU. The Steam Deck was able to be sold at presumably a low margin (maybe even at a loss), and Valve expects to profit from the games purchased on Steam. If they were to sell a pre-buikt PC at close to cost, people would scalp the GPU’s for profit and Valve would probably lose out on that predicted Steam revenue.

That does not entirely dismiss this news though. Could be that the 7600 reported here is a temporary workaround for them to test the CPU while the GPU (or even just the drivers) are being worked on. Or maybe for them to do comparison testing easily. I’m just saying I would not expect to see a 7600 in the final product.

2. There is a huge gap in the market right now. The Switch 2 starts at $450, the PS5 slim is going up to $500. The Xbox Series S is woefully underpowered and holding the entire Xbox platform back while costing $380. There are no more $200-$300 console options, unless you want to go with something janky like a mini PC or a cheap Chinese handheld. And like, yes inflation is a thing, but it’s not THAT bad. I was able to buy a PS4 slim bundled with 3 AAA Sony games in 2019 for $199.99. Plug that into an inflation calculator and I get ~$250.

Imagine Valve releases a home console for $300. I think it would have to be slightly more powerful than the Deck, to be able to target AAA games releasing over the next 5 years with 1080p 30 FPS. (And for anyone complaint about how “unplayable” that is, go buy a $600 console or $2000 PC instead. This theoretical product is not for you). What I’m not sure if is whether that would be feasible. Can we shave $100 off the Deck by consolizing it? No screen, no battery, probably of design restrictions revolving around it being portable and dust/water resistant could go away and bring the costs down. Plus general performance gains AMD has made since 2022. If Valve could do something like that they could potentially push Microsoft out of the hardware market (they have been rumored to be considering that for a while anyways).

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in tough economic times, the ultimate answer is that most people just don’t have the disposable income for videogames, so it makes more sense to downsize and focus on the premium high-end market where the volune is lower and the margins are higher. But this rumor is giving me a little bit of hope.

I don’t think anyone mentioned early access here. Civ 7 “released” with version 1.0 back in February.

Honestly I can kind of appreciate the honesty of early access games, especially from smaller developers. It’s a bit of a risk, but at least on Steam everything seems to be labeled and disclosed well. Early access games are often cheaper. I had great times with games like Hades and Subnautica in early access. There will be some duds, some projects that get abandoned before they release, but that’s also why early access games tend to be cheaper: the discount should offset the risk if the market is working as it should.

I mean, the easy analysis is just to ask “what would be in Krafton’s best interest?”

Anyone who has paid attention to the videogames industry will tell you that games releasing in an unfinished state has been a problem throughout history, and one that has gotten much worse in recent decades as the budgets have increased and the ability to patch games post-launch over the Internet has granted an opportunity for redemption. Recent Mario Party entries, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk, Redfall, Concord. Some games get salvaged and some games get dropped. In all of these cases, the community consensus seems to be “wow these games should have been delayed, the publishers were greedy to sell an unfinished product without labeling it as pre-release or beta properly”. So my gut reaction when I hear that any publisher is delaying a game is not to think “wow that’s a greedy publisher”, but rather “wow it’s good to see a publisher actually caring about the quality of their product who is willing to incur more costs and delay their revenue in order to get it right”.

Delaying a game is expensive. This is going to incur another year’s worth of development time. Another year’s worth of salaries and associates payroll costs, licenses, office space, all sorts of ongoing costs. Krafton would have been expecting to see revenue from the game hit 2025, and the studio to begin work on their next game, which is now getting pushed back. If Krafton has any debt that means they have increased interest costs. Their equity will suffer from this.

Let’s say that Subnautica 2 WAS in a great, finished, release-ready state whenever they fired the founders. The costs of delaying the game by a year are going to far exceed the costs of bonuses. Afaik the actual structure of the bonus has not been released, but typically these sorts of things would be structured in a way where the bonus would not have been paid if the game didn’t meet it’s sales targets

There are two pieces of information the public does not have which I think are necessary to make a judgement here. What was the structure of this promised bonus, and what was the state of the game at the time that Krafton decided to delay it? While I don’t have those answers, both Krafton and the founders do. Looking at their motivations, I just have a hard time seeing why Krafton would look at a fantastic, complete game ready for release and say “nah, we would rather sit on this thing for a year”.

The only alternative explanation I can come up with is that Krafton wants to stuff the game full of micro transactions or other live service elements. But that’s just pure speculation on my part: even the listed founders have not mentioned anything about that.

I am generally inclined to side with individual artists over these giant corporations, but what the founders are claiming just doesn’t add up. And what Krafton is claiming - that the founders basically abandoned the game to work on other things and did a pretty terrible job- seems like something that would be easily either proven or disproven in court. So either Krafton is lying just to try to get good PR for a few months until the discovery happens, or Krafton expects to be vindicated in court.

It only takes 1 badly made mod to make Skyrim unstable. I’m not sure what information you would be looking to gain from that.

I find gyro on handhelds is tricky. When I’m lying on the couch or in bed in some weird way it’s more hindrance than help, and even when I’m sitting upright it’s kinda weird. I prefer to only use gyro if I have a separate screen, like with the PS5 or a docked switch.

The back buttons are great for their own things though.

Interestingly - I have 4 (two Pro 2’s, an SN30 Pro, and one of the Ultimate C variants) and have used them all on my Steam Deck before. The past couple of years at family gatherings I’ve hooked up my Deck to a big screen and allowed the kids to play Mario Party and such.

So I’m kind of confused about what is being added now. Their post says more details to come so I guess I’ll see?

The unnecessary Photoshop to add the fire is kind of annoying. The picture is already hilarious without it.

1. WTF is going on with this website? I had to turn my phone to read it in landscape lol.

2. I am 100% sure that Microsoft was asked about the impact to their staffing by various government regulators and media for each of their recent acquisitions. Zenimax and King are the most relevant ones here, but I would argue the rest of them like Activision-Blizzaed would still be relevant too. Disappointing to not see anything in this article.

I can’t think of a single game or emulator I own that didn’t have resolution options. Just… Turn it down to your own preference? Technically it won’t be quite as efficient as using a lower resolution exchange (at least not at the same brightness), but I would not expect the difference to be noticeable.

Similar with the refresh rate too. The Deck has its own options to limit the refresh rate, plus most games and emulators have those options too.

That’s what a higher resolution gives you: options. If I’m running a PS1 game that I’m upscaling? Heck, give me 4k 60FPA and it would probably still be a good 4 hours of battery life, which is longer than if want to hold a handheld for anyways. A more modern, but narrative-driven AAA game? Maybe I’d want a high resolution and settings, but be willing to settle for 30FPS.

Or if I want to stream from my desktop, or PS5, or play plugged in then battery life isn’t a concern anymore. Which happens a lot. Back in 1998 it was important that my GBC didn’t use much power because AA batteries were expensive, and the AC adapter was an awkward and janky 3rd party accessory with a huge wall wart that made me replace the battery cover with one that would directly connect to the battery contacts. In 2025, I’m never more than a few feet away from a USB charger and USB-C cable.

I really like my Deck a lot. It’s the single-best videogame-related purchase I have ever made, and one of the best purchases I’ve ever made in general. But one of my few criticisms is that a 1080p screen would be nice, just to have the option.

This has:

• hall effect joysticks and triggers
• a slightly smaller screen, but the equivalent of 1080p instead of the Deck’s 720p(technically it’s 1200 vs 800 since they are both 16:10) -the screen is 120hz, compared to 60hz for the base Deck or 90hz for the OLED -Options for 16 or 32GB of RAM, while the Deck only has 16 -storage options range from 512GB-2TB, while the Deck goes 64GB-1TB
• this has an extra USB-C port, which is nice

And that’s before we get to the APU side of things, where other commenters here are expecting the Neo to outperform the Deck. Hard to say for sure until we have benchmarks, but it seems reasonable that this will be more powerful in general.

And what is the Neo missing compared to be Deck? The back buttons, which are nice on the Deck but I would not say are deal breakers. The ambient light sensor, which I didn’t even remember my Deck had until I looked at the specs just now. And apparently the Deck has 2 microphones while the Neo just has 1… Honestly I have had mine for 2 years and I wasn’t even sure it has a microphone at all. I don’t see that the Neo has capacitive sensors on the sticks, but I never find a good use for those on my Deck anyways.

Now, this thing is not close to making me want to upgrade from my Deck. Just looking at it- the control layout is wrong. The track pads look like you will have to awkwardly stretch your thumb to reach them- similar to where the Deck has the Steam and Quick Access buttons. While I can play a ton of mouse-based games on the Deck for hours with no problem, the Neo looks like it will only be good for games where you use the mouse occasionally. Should be fine for navigating menus, launch screens, and setting up emulators, but not for playing games.

The other question is build quality. This looks like cheaper plastic. The buttons look cheap. The grips look top shallow. I don’t know how easy this will be to upgrade or repair.

Imo this is a reasonable product at a reasonable price. Not perfect. But it has reasonable trade-offs compared to the Deck. If it can manage to be significantly more powerful than the Deck with similar battery life, I think we have a real competition.

the regulation solution here is to fine or break up Steam so that other players can compete with them

I think that’s our fundamental misunderstanding here, because that’s not the regulatory solution I had in mind. I would look to other heavily regulated (or even nationalized) monopolies. Forcing Valve to split Steam up into either competing horizontal segments or disparate vertical segments would only make the service worse for the consumer AND the publishers (maybe you could make stronger arguments for some segments than others maybe hardware and game development could be split off from the store with little impact, but I don’t see the benefit there).

If you break the store up into competing units… Then what? Eventually one beats out the others and we are right back to where we started. Or worse, an equilibrium is reached between a small handful creating an oligopoly, like we see in so many other industries today.

Instead, I would leave Steam mostly as a single entity, subject to regulation about how it conducts business. From pricing to what it does with user data, to making sure that quasi competitors like Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all able to have fair access to distribute their games on the platform too. Create a regulatory board in charge of effectively managing the monopoly.

This whole “just add more competition” has led to a dystopian capitalist hellscape. It doesn’t work for more than a couple decades before the government needs to step in anyways.

Competition has failed. Repeatedly. The history of the post-industrial world is full of examples. There used to be a ton of competitive general stores in America before the Walton family destroyed them all. Competition is the most common way monopolies are created.

The problems the regulatory capture and the government’s lack of teeth. Which are issues for sure, but not ones solved by increasing competition.

I’ll say it: competition can be bad sometimes. If Valve ever starts to conduct business unethically, the solution will be government regulation, not competition.

I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that’s why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.

What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That’s why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.

So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there’s no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.

If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.

Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as “In GabeN we trust” or “I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term”. But the solution is regulation, not competition.

The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The “handheld” PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don’t really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.

I can’t say for sure, but it looks like it includes the controls based on this mock-up from IGN:

The Switch 2 is supposedly going to be 206mm L x 115mm W x 14mm D.

The Deck is 298mm x 117mm x 49mm. So still 1.5x the length of the S2 and 3x the width.

I can’t find any reports of the Switch 2’s weight, but I expect it to be significantly less than the 640g of the Deck. The Switch 2 will have a slightly larger screen, but is a smaller device overall.

But all that aside I still expect Nintendo to offer another, smaller version of the Switch 2 within a couple years. They had the Switch Lite, 2DS, DS Lite, DSi, GBA Micro, GBA SP, Gameboy Pocket, and probably more I’m not thinking of. So they will probably do a Switch 2 Lite or something.

I would also add other handhelds like the Legion Go that are starting to use Steam OS.

Even outside of being kid “safe”, the Deck is too big and heavy for kids. Heck, I know a lot of adults who have that issue.

It’s also fairly expensive and while I would not call it “fragile”, I don’t the Deck would survive being owned by your average 10 year old as well as a Switch Lite does.

I rewatched the first one a couple years ago and thought it had aged pretty well. I don’t remember any of the jokes being mean or really punching down on anyone.

I could be forgetting something and I haven’t watched the sequels since they first came out though. My guess would be that Fat Bastard is probably the part of the franchise that aged the worst. Even when he was introduced the whole joke was “hey it’s a fat guy!”, which was one of the weaker jokes.

I also watched The Pentaverate when it came out and thought that was great. It’s a Netflix miniseries sith very similar humor where Mike Meyers plays like half the characters. It’s a parody of conspiracy theories like the Da Vinci Code, not spy movies, but still pretty good.

I agree. Throughout the whole years if I want something, I buy it. If I don’t want something, I don’t.

But all of a sudden around November or December I need to hold off for a bit because someone else wants to buy it for me instead. And it’s usually not quite the same thing that I wanted- I don’t want to be rude, but I would have rather just done the research on my own and made my own purchase.

Or worse, I get gifted stuff I have absolutely no interest in. So I need to make space in my house for it and remember to pretend like I use it on occasions when I see that person for a couple of years until we are past the statue of limitations on getting rid of it.

Just more plastic and emissions. More money going to big corporations. It’s an inefficient purchasing process propped up for the sake of the emotions of irrational people. And corporations like Hallmark seem to exist specifically to amplify these traditions for the benefit of modern shareholders.