Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
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Glad Valve is making a console but that’s an ugly fucking controller
Try using Steam link with a regular controller, and put it in mouse mode. You’ll be wishing for those touch pads.
Why would I ever do that? Ever?
Am I the only one who preferred the “skinnier” style of controller like the old GameCube or even N64 controllers? I loved that grip control, now it feels like we’ve been either trending towards bloated controllers like this one that suck for people with smaller hands or those tiny little joycons that hurt to use long term.
Wii classic controller was very nice.
I give 0% of shit how it looks, all I care about it ease of use and performance. Track pads at your finger tips takes getting used to, but it’s a game changer for any game that isn’t classically easy to play with a controller.
FEX is the most exciting thing for me!
Right? It’s a huge bridge between x86 and ARM, it just opened up a potentially huge market for lower power consumption gaming devices. You could have like a Gameboy that runs silksong or something.
I hope this somehow manages to convince fortnite / ea to support it or support linux. I want to get rid of my xbox so bad.
also i am excited for the headset, i am wondering how open source it is going to be and depending on that i definilty get one (Since it runs steam os, linux is possible atleast definitly)
Removed by mod
This is an LLM bot.
Fuck you Microsoft!
Less concurrent is never a good thing. Steam already got too much power. https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-steam-monopoly-real-gamers-chose/
Luckily unlike monopolies in other sectors, Steam doesn’t involve itself in evil oractices that more or less stops others from competing.
Someone just needs to make a better store, but they can’t because no company big enough to compete is willing to be as user friendly.
Epic, probably the second biggest store people thing about, can’t even make a good platform. They try underhanded practices like bribing developers and customers… maybe they should make their store work properly first.
Yet
Yet, unlike other sectors yet.
High chances that this changes. Monopolies are built friendly and get enshitificated later, one baby step at a time.
Market will get harder and harder to join as studios optimise their processes for releases on steam and users get even more trained Games -> Steam.
Especially when Steam manages to kill PS and Xbox, where I see big potential that this happens.
That’s always a possibility, but if it was going to happen, it would have already by now.
It’s very obvious to me that Valves leadership cares about the end goal of making gaming accessible and as easy as possible for everyone.
If they ever become evil, I feel it’s guaranteed to be because of leadership change to someone who is secretly corrupt, we just have to hope the reigns are handed down to someone good.
And if they do become evil and their product suffert as a result, they are going to create an opening for the others to fill.
The market gets harder to join as Steam makes their platform better and better. This is very very good compared to other companies that get to the top and then add physical and legal barries to others to stop them becoming competition.
Xbox has killed itself and I can’t see Playstation going anywhere anytime soon. Steam machines could take some tiny % of Playstation users, but if they do, the users stolen might have been people who wanted to swap to PC anyway. + you can access other stores on a steam machine
I’m rabidly pro-consumer about most things but I struggle with how we define a market when we talk about steam. In order for steam to be a monopoly you have to drill down through super categories of software sales and then video game sales, to the platform level.
If you look at all digital delivery video game sales they still don’t have a monopoly. You don’t have to deal with steam to play a video game. It’s only PC video game sales where they are close to a controlling market share.
But Steam has far less power over PC gaming than Apple, Sony, or Nintendo do over their respective platforms. Gamers and Devs basically HAVE to deal with those companies to have access to their markets.
Yeah, and if Microsoft suddenly decides they want to shut Steam out then there’s not much Steam can do other than take them to court. And even if Steam exited Windows there’s still lot of popular publishers putting out Windows only games like Valorant, Battlefield 6, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and popular software like Adobe that would lead to losing a significant chunk of the userbase that would not move to Linux due to games and software they use not being on Windows.
Another launcher whether it is Microsoft or Epic or whatever would just fill the void for third party titles and probably be glad that the main competition is banished.
So this market share situation is not quite like Sony, Nintendo, iOS, or Google who not only run a locked down OS but also are the monopoly and sometimes only storefront.
Google recently shifted to wanting to gatekeep what can be installed and wanting verification from even devs that don’t want to release on the play store, which threatens viability of alternative app repositories like F-droid. Which is what could happen to Steam if Windows suddenly decided to change their minds about how open they’ve been in allowing program installations.
So Steam situation despite their popularity is still reliant on Microsoft not turning into a bad actor. They are more Netflix. The go to choice in their segment, but can be replaced.
And even then, most games are available on multiple platforms, for similar prices. So you can get the same game from Steam, GOG, or EGS in many cases, plus all of the stores that sell Steam keys (and Steam probably doesn’t get a cut of those sales).
Also, public companies can’t make good products because they don’t have long term vision. They don’t have long term vision because they need to have good short term profits and profit margins. Look at Xbox eating itself just because they need to have a 30% profit margin right now!
this only applies to capitalists
That’s good because it is.
Im hyped for a new vr headset.
Yeah, I’m debating getting this one as my first headset. It looks dope.
Dooo it! If you can afford it, it will probably be a little pricey.
They said it will be a direct competitor for the Meta Quest 3, so I’m guessing around $400. I’ve been waiting for Valve to drop exactly this!
Me too. I bought the first quest before Facebook acquired it. Now that Facebook/Meta own quest and stuff … I’ve been staying away from VR for now.
I’ll definitely be doing my best to get one as soon as it’s available. Everything about it sounds hype.
FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.
I’m curious about the “it’s a PC” aspect of the Steam Box. Because a device that plays all Steam games but isn’t a Windows computer is extremely appealing, but I admit if I can’t install a few non-Steam games on it, that’s a spoiler for me. But if the whole “it’s a PC” provides some avenue to that, I’m definitely ready to stop building a gaming PC every 5 years.
If you are looking to get it or try linux gaming in general then I would recommend looking at heroic games launcher which supports games from epic, gog, and Amazon. Past that there is always a huge list of other games (and applications) available for install from lutris’ website. And bottles for specific things, but that is a bit more advanced/nuanced to setup.
Allow me to be pedantic here. What you were referring to here, “PC”, stands for “personal computer”. It’s a device on where you can perform computation. Sometimes that computation is to render video streams encoded in H.264 onto the screen, and sometimes it happens to take in your control signal to alter that video stream, like video games. You are free to perform any kind of computation on it.
“PC” has no implications of Microsoft or Windows.
Insufficient pedantry detected.
The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.
Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.
It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.
The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.
A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)
Allow me to match your pedantry.
A “denotation” is an exact, codified definition of a word, commonly thought of as a “dictionary definition.”
A “connotation” is a less official but culturally understood meaning of a word, often dependent on context or setting.
“PC” connotes Windows in the gaming world. But thanks for taking time out of your day to tell me what it stands for, etc 🙄
it’s an arch linux machine. with proton and some tweaks to steamos you can run any game without a kernel level anticheat.
Steam Box
Ahem, it’s a GabeCube.
I’m sure it will be like the Steam Deck, meaning you can absolutely install non Steam games on it, but they still have to work under Proton (meaning the vast majority of games work, except ones requiring kernel anti cheat).
It’s going to be like the steam deck, I’ve yet to find a old Non-steam game that I couldn’t run on the steam deck.
I’ve found some, but they’re mostly obscure and older out-of-support stuff. But anecdotally something like less than 5% of my library didn’t work with it.
Do the kernel level anti-cheat windows only dev guys support steam deck running official steamOS?
Some games anticheat supports Linux. VAC, EAC, GameGuard, and BattlEye either run under Linux by default or can be configured to do so, by the game dev, with a toggle. A number: Destiny 2, Fortnight, etc. break it intentionally even though the client could run without modification. Battlefield 6 breaks because it checks the Windows measured boot API.
Short of explicit developer lockout
Why does the controller look very uncomfortable to use? I hope it’s not.
Still looks better than the first Steam Controller. It was atrocious.
I was about to say the opposite. They somehow made it uglier.
Because it’s so bottom-heavy. But if you look where your hands will be it’s essentially a Dualshock with touchpads stuck to the bottom.
I guess it depends on how long your thumb is
Valve really listened to Saejima’s advice:
Steam Synapse when?
The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!
It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.
It feels like just yesterday that VR was the big hype tech.
VR has actual staying power though. It genuinely adds a lot to a game or a simulation. VRchat especially is like a deeply emotional thing to folks who don’t feel like they belong in their real bodies and can exist in VR a more true representation of themself
That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.
Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.
don’t forget google. that applies to all paid apps, in app purchases and donations on the play store, not only for games. google also forbids you from showing any other donation option on your website if you link to it from your app.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.
Can confirm; my app was removed from the Play Store due to a donation link to my PayPal. Absolutely insane.
Fwiw, GOG has no DRM for their titles (its own niche space, not competition). Not sure if they charge 30% too, but even in such case they’re giving you more because of the lack of DRM.
Steam is quite virtuous, they gave us Proton. But is far from being based.
GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.
Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.
“Over 5,000 games released on Steam this year didn’t make enough money to recover the $100 fee to put a game on Valve’s store, research estimates”
It’s fucking wild. Like, I love Steam, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit just suck less (edit: than other stores do) and charge less (edit: of devs) and you could gobble up a lot of that market share. But none of them do.
Notably Epic charges less than 30% (something like 12% IIRC) to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.
Because Epic doesn’t care about end users and won’t add necessary end user features like reviews.
It’s cool that Epic wants to pay developers more, but the way they disregard the consumer makes the platform non-viable
company: “I want what steam is making and more” shareholders: “brilliant”
“I want what steam is making but I’m not willing to improve service OR charge less!”
Most other competitors charge less than steam, but steam has a clause which prevents devs from putting their games cheaper elsewhere. This is the real big shitty move made by valve, otherwise they do mostly everything right. I hope someone challenges this clause in a court of law someday, it looks very monopolistic to me
Except that is a thing only for selling steam keys outside steam. There are no price parity clauses.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Also here is a gamedev saying that they’ll sell their game for a cheaper price on EGS: https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/
If what you saying was actually the case I am 120% sure Tim Sweeney would be all over it lol.
Lastly, there was ALREADY a case like that (Valve vs. Wolfire). The courts couldn’t find anything regarding Wolfire’s claims and then dismissed the case.
Ho ok, my bad, I completely misunderstood the issue then. It seems reasonable to impose a price equivalence on steam key
No worries! And indeed!
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Word that stands out is comparable. Which provides a lot of flexibility on discounts outside the steam store. And isthereanydeals data that tracks all the prices over the years shows steam keys going on sale for cheaper than the steam store. Steam also takes 0% of Steam keys.
Recent example is ARC Raiders. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
Current best price is 15% off for $34.16 versus $39.99 on Steam. And all time low was $31.92.
I do wonder how many people assume Steam store price is the best price, and end up paying more than they’d have to if they checked isthereanydeals. Since I’ve come across some comments that believed Steam did not allow cheaper prices as though it were fact despite reality not being the case.
Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.
that’s a bullshit metric only useful to incite hatred. why the fuck do you want to say that valve is “this many times worse than facebook!”? it is obviously false.
only thing this proves is that they have relatively few employees. which also probably means that most of them do real work instead of being overloaded with managers
The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.
I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.
You‘re getting downvotes for no reason. Also anyone who ever had to contact Steam support felt how criminally understaffed they are so it makes sense they make tons of money per employee I guess.
As if normal for companies to say you know what we are getting enough profits lets not monetize things even more.
They need their products to be as clean as possible to hook people into microtransactions and their proprietary platform. Valve is a for profit company and the ceo owns a fleet of mega yachts
Finally, another worthwhile controller with symmetrical sticks. Now to find out how to get my hands on one…
I typically just have one hand on each side
That usb port being off center though…
There’s plenty of videos of it on YouTube and the port is not off centre.
I did notice that in this picture, but I don’t think it actually is. Pretty sure this is from the “animation” where the puck with the USB cable is put under the controller to charge, and not with the USB cable connected to the controller. From what I see though it should all be centered, even the puck and charging pins, so not sure why they made it off-center here
That controller looks ugly and bulky as fuck.
Do you remember the old Xbox controllers that had the attachable keyboard? It’s essentially just that kind of shape. So you would use the controller and kind of ignore the touchpads on the bottom unless you actually need them, then you just move your hand down and use the touchpads for something like mouse control. I doubt the intention is for you to use all of the inputs at once like you would an Xbox or PlayStation controller.
Well thank God I don’t give a shit how my controller looks as long as it is well designed.
I mean you will care if it doesn’t fit well in your hand and is too bulky. I mean that was the issue with the Xbox controller and still is issue with the Xbox controller for anybody with smaller hands I know the Japanese market had quite a stir regarding that. And this thing looks like it’s twice as thick as the Xbox controller. It reminds me of some of the old third party PC controllers that I used to have back in the 90s and early 2000s. In fact I had one that if you were to round off the top of this thing looked almost exactly like it.
As someone with hands on the larger side, small controllers suck for us too.
The point you should be focused on is having a diversity in controller options, not that any one controller is good/bad.
It is entirely subjective to say the controller is good. Your definition of good won’t be my definition of good. Your taste and opinion is just as valid as mine, and I don’t impose my preferences on you.
I don’t know how big that controller is, since no banana was provided for scale. It could be huge and unwieldy, or it could be very tiny. One size never fits all.
At the end of the day, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it, and/or don’t use it. This is +1 option in the controller space, and that kind of competition is good no matter what opinion you have.
As someone also with large hands, I still love well designed controllers that fit well for smaller hands - like the classic Dualshock 2 controller. I used one again pretty recently. Had to stop because the analogs were virtually useless, but the smallness of the controller stood out to me because after enough time playing a game I noticed I could more easily forget the controller itself and focus on the game (except those damn broken sticks).
When I went back to the DualSense, it felt clunky and unwieldy by comparison. I feel bad for gamers with small hands, because all the standard controllers must be monstrous for a lot of people. No wonder mobile gaming gained so much traction - game companies forgot that kids play games too.
Exactly right. And this is driving my point. There are options. If you don’t like one option, try something else.
Pretty much every controller design has positives and negatives that change depending on who is using the controller. I enjoy the xbox one/series controllers for the most part, and they’re fairly reliable and my usual go to. I also have a dual shock somewhere that I don’t really use, and a stadia controller that was patched to work with anything, which gets more action than the dual shock, but not nearly as much as the Xbox controllers.
I usually play with kb/mouse, so controllers are already pretty rare in my gaming experience, but they make an appearance from time to time.
With these new steam controllers, I might see a good reason to use a controller more frequently… Especially if I can afford the $900+ that the steam machine will probably cost… They said it would be “competitively” priced in relation to PCs, not consoles. So I’m expecting $900+ right now. Time to start saving.
I’m not sure what the standard for large vs small hands is, but I haven’t had issues with pretty much any controller except the OG Xbox controller:
My kids have no issues with either the Xbox 360 controller or DS4 controller that I have.
I would call it less of an issue (at least in my case), and more of something that became apparent only after going back and experiencing the smaller controller to compare others to.
I really wish there were a modernized controller in the exact form factor of the classic ds2. Like if it had tmr sticks and a better dpad, but was still a wired controller and had 4 shoulder buttons instead of two triggers. Don’t get me wrong, triggers have their place, but there are some games that work better with all buttons, which probably partly explains the popularity of hair trigger mods.
I mean honestly the real thing to worry about here is how long is valve going to actually support this and support their hardware. They’re notorious for releasing things and then forgetting about it within a year or two. I mean they announce the steam 2 controller years and years ago and then decided one day no we’re not going to make it. That disappointed so many people and people still are trying to get to their hands on the first steam controller that is what like 15 years old or something like that at this point.
They still support the original steam controller and the steam link though.
I would argue that, as long as valve gets it out the door, they support it. Index owners are still supported and that’s from a headset released in 2019. The oculus rift CV1 released in 2016 and it was killed around 2020 when oculus was purchased by Meta. Four years, and the headset is basically a paperweight for anyone who still owns one. A $600 USD paperweight.
Considering that the connection cable was the first thing to die and in 2020 meta stopped selling those cables, anyone I know who had one, including myself, either stopped using it, or was forced to stop when their cable inevitably broke.
There’s a dozen examples. The og steam controller, the steam link, and more recently the steam deck, which is still going strong.
Yes, they have issues getting ideas out the door, but when they get out the door, they’re supported for a good long while.
These don’t look like “we have an idea to build a thing” that will never make it to market… This looks like “we finally got a delivery date for these finished units and we’re excited about it”
I’m looking forward to it, no matter what. Valve has time and time again proven itself to be more consumer focused than other tech companies. More from them is good IMO.
That is the complete opposite of what they are. They are notorious for supporting all the hardware they have released indefinitely. They still keep releasing updates for the steam link and steam controller to this day and both of those have long been out of sale.
I mean officially the steam controller updates were discontinued in 2023 for the internal configurator and everything like that any current updates or anything like that is either the third party or being hacked together by people using it.
It looks ass on this picture. However, it kinda looks like a steamdeck without a screen which is no surprise. And I quite like the steamdeck controls…
Yup, I love my Steam Deck and usually prefer asymmetric joysticks, so as long as it feels like the SD, it’ll be fine.
I mean, sure it looks a bit odd, but if you remove the trackpads and reshape the controller based on not having those then it’s a pretty standard controller, no? It’s not like the added part for the trackpads does anything to change how you would hold the controller or anything, so I doubt it’d make much of a difference in use even if you never use the trackpads.
Yup, looks just like a DualSense controller from the PS5 without the trackpads.
2026 Year of the Linux desktop?
Surely this will bring over a lot of people to Linux
Year of the Linux living room
Not gonna lie the controller looks ass but maybe it feels fantastic so I‘ll wait with my final judgement. I‘m interested to see how they will try to push VR since most users are still incredibly uninterested in it.
I’ve wanted to get into VR for the longest time but they all seemed like extremely walled gardens. This sounds awesome to me.
For most of my life VR has been, ‘VR is a great way to experience shitty games and you just have to pay a grand or more for this interactive tummy ache, and your unit may not be supported next year! Buy!’
I’m going to hold out until I can pick up one of these at the pawn shop for a bill.
I got an Index for cheap last year and was very excited to play a number of my favorite games with optional VR mode. Turns out:
- the Index ecosystem is more accessible than expected. 2) the games I was looking forward to all played like ass and made VR seem like a stupid gimmick. 3) In a desperate move that felt like sunk cost fallacy, I tried several VR-only games, and got TOTALLY hooked on modded Beatsaber. This itself made the buy-in worth it.
VR-only games
For the most part VR “ports” of traditional games are not worth buying. The developers usually put 0 effort into them. There are exceptions like sim racing titles, but for the most part games developed specifically for VR will be way better designed
‘VR is a great way to experience shitty games
Have you tried Half-life: Alyx?
I recommend you give that, or something equivalent, a go without even buying any hardware. Either ask a friend or go to an arcade. You don’t need to shell out a grand to try.
If you hate it, move on.
Edit! I’m a 90s kid, and I’m really disappointed that VR hasn’t taken off the way scifi suggested it would. Back then, being absorbed in pure information sounded awesome, but now it is just going the way of 24/7 misinformation advertisements and micro transactions.
I’ll hold off on VR until there is a decent open source unit that isnt $800.
I remember trying the first VR headset game 1990 that ran on a Commodore Amiga in like 7 fps and was terrible in every way.
Yegods. My first foray into VR was at a high end arcade at North Pier in Chicago. I think the game was Dactyl. The headset was super heavy and none of the goals of the game were explained to me. I basically wandered around for five minutes, shooting green polygons in the sky, then time was up.
Dad was pissed that he’d blown $20 on it.
Edit: For historical reference, in the mid 90s $5 could keep your kids occupied at a regular arcade for a couple hours. $20 could have gotten us a couple of movie tickets and some Twizzlers.
I’d of been angry too.
I think that’s the same game I queued up for like 90 mins at a computer fair to have a few minutes of very confused playtime and that was it.
I remember seeing the Virtuality kits on TV in the 90s.
Clearly absolutely unplayable nonsense, and yet I still wanted to play on one.
It took so long for hardware to catch up.
The problem is to really make an informed decision you have to try it first-hand. The sensory experience unlike any other device, so descriptions aren’t super helpful, video doesn’t convey what it’s actually like, so you really have to experience it to understand it.
Also given how common it seems to be anecdotally to get sick from it, no one wants to jump in just to have to jump back out.
And unless you know someone that already jumped in and can try theirs, a lot of people like me just don’t want to commit sight unseen. (I mean I’m also broke, but this would be true anyway)
I don’t have a way to try it out, so until I do it’s not on my radar to care. I’m very curious about it. Even if I don’t like it I do really want to see what it’s like at least once. But I’m not gonna pay for that chance. It’s gotta impress me without effort on my part (more than driving to it anyway).
Also given how common it seems to be anecdotally to get sick from it, no one wants to jump in just to have to jump back out.
you can build a resistance to it. It takes time, and it was the case for me
Maybe so, but you probably need to enjoy your first exposure to want to drop money on an entire setup for it.
It’s already crazy enough to drop that money just hoping you like it, but if you drop it hoping it stops making you nauseous, that’s a much bigger ask.
I’m still hoping I won’t have that problem. I do get car sick on meandering drives, but not even close to as bad as I did 10-15 years ago, but the worse the drive gets, the more I have to stay staring out the car windows.
I assume the VR effect would be similar, given it’s a similar symptom, but backwards. (In VR you don’t feel motion, but you see it, whereas in a car, you feel it, but either don’t see it from not looking, or if you have wide visibility it looks like you’re not moving as much compared to the background)
As someone who used to get sick in cars and boats, I got it, so you might as well
If the technology interests you, then sick or not, you’ll probably like it. Won’t play every day, but it’ll be a nice experience.
Start with games with not a lot of motion (beat saber for example), then move to more intensive games. You’ll get sick after 15mins, then 20mins, then 25… until you last for a couple hours, and at this point you’ve built your resistance.
Just stop playing when you feel sick and try again an hour later when you feel better or a few days later
But yea, VR isn’t straightforward or an obvious purchase. It requires time and will, and money, obviously
It’s clearly a luxury and you need to have too much money or be really motivated to purchase it
Personally that’s what I’d like to do anyway. I’m saying that to discuss the growth of the technology among the masses.
Assuming it doesn’t make me violently ill, i like tech and gaming enough to keep it around otherwise. But the potential for the issue and the committal involved off the bat are difficulties for any new, different-enough tech.
I’m someone who has gotten sick in cars before (rarely) but I have done a lot of crazy stuff on VR and never felt remotely sick. I’m an outlier though
I mean, you can certainly pick up a used Quest 2 if you wanted to try it out. There’s a handful of exclusive stuff in the Quest store you’d be able to use, but not much of value. Resident Evil 4 VR is about it for the Q2. I think there was a Batman game for the Q3. You’d have access to anything the Steam Frame has access to if you’re streaming from a PC.
I think the PSVR2 works as well, but it’s wired only.
Half Life Alyx is certainly worth a blast through.
Stories like Ftumch’s reply, and the fact that it’s owned by Meta 🤮 have deterred me from wanting to try that one.
I really want to love VR, but it’s just not for me. And i don’t think i’m alone with that. To me, VR is something you try in a mall for 20min and think it’s cool and not something you want to play around with home.
There’s a reason we don’t see any big Let’s Players do more than a couple episodes of VR games.
That doesn’t mean they’re not having fun, but it’s quite physically demanding and the experience just doesn’t translate to 2D.
I love Half life alyx. I played maybe half an hour, and i don’t think i’ll ever play more. Just the thought of putting the vr headset back on puts me off. I thought VR would be great for me, because i do a lot of sports anyway and i like to move around. But sweating while playing video games isn’t as fun as it seems. Especially when you sweat a lot in and around the goggles. Like i said, it’s an experience, not really more. On a side note, i also learned i’m a huuuge pussy when it comes to VR games. I really don’t know what it is, i was never scared of a movie or video game or anything really. In vr looking into a dark hole where something might jump scare me, really isn’t for me at all.
Looks can be deceiving. Coming from someone who uses the steamdeck, that layout looks exactly how I hoped and imagined it would be. The steamdeck is incredibly comfortable to hold and this looks like it would be the same!
It definitely reminds me of that Steam controller someone on Youtube built by sawing a Steamdeck in two and gluing the ends together so to speak. They said it‘s their dream controller so I‘m sure this controller already has some fans. I just can‘t tell by looking at it.
It’s basically steam deck minus the screen. If you are used to the steam deck it’ll be fine.
The first controller looked the same, but was very good to use once you got used to it. The build quality, though, was…fucking terrible.
I had to fix my controllers so many times that in the end I was swapping them out almost weekly. Still, felt great in the hand.
I have the first controller, just dug it out the other day because I thought I was going to be able to use it on my new tablet, it still sucks. I never could get used to it, but it’s a far sight better looking then this thing.
It might be you just got unlucky. Mine is still going strong all this years, and I use it often.
Definitely will be grabbing the Steam Machine when it releases.
8gb of vram seems… disappointing
They say it can run games at 4k60 “with FSR”, so it seems like it’s targeting 1080p native rendering, which is totally fine for me. I’ll be connecting it to the living room TV and sitting 6-8 feet away so I’ll probably keep it set to 1080p anyway just to keep the framerate high.
Eh, for the number of CUs, it looks fine. It looks like a slightly smaller RX 7600.
