Hints appear of Valve making a handheld Steam "SteamPal" Neptune console

Then again, it could end up just being a Steam Controller 2 and these optimized games are just setup for it ready.

Yes, please bring me a new Steam Controller. I have no interest in a handheld gaming thing.

Everyone has smartphones that can play games and the switch is everywhere. What kind of minuscule niche would this live in?

If I'm not interested in stupid smartphones and their buttonless controllers? And I don't like Nintendo and its ecosystem?

Then again, it could end up just being a Steam Controller 2 and these optimized games are just setup for it ready.

Yes, please bring me a new Steam Controller. I have no interest in a handheld gaming thing.

Everyone has smartphones that can play games and the switch is everywhere. What kind of minuscule niche would this live in?

If I'm not interested in stupid smartphones and their buttonless controllers? And I don't like Nintendo and its ecosystem?

Heard about the Razer Kishi? Makes your smartphone look like a Nintendo Switch. The real problem with smartphones is the screen size... Under 6 inches, it begins to feel quite small, in my experience.

https://www.razer.com/ca-en/mobile-controllers/Razer-Kishi/RZ06-02900100-R3U1

When using Steam Link, I personnally use my Steam Controller with a mobile phone clip for Xbox... It usually works, same form factor:

https://www.powera.com/moga/


Last edited by Mohandevir on 25 May 2021 at 7:26 pm UTC

UPDATE: the website Ars Technica has reportedly spoken to "sources familiar with the matter" who have confirmed it's real and will be Linux-powered.

Reached out to Valve Press but it's still unlikely they will say anything at all until they officially announce it. Either way, stayed tuned to GOL for all the news as usual ;)


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 25 May 2021 at 8:27 pm UTC

I hope that would be the Smach Z reincarnated.

If it's a decent AMD GPU/SoC running Linux with maybe the right thumbstick replaced by a Steam Controller style thumb touchpad (which is actually *really* decent for FPSes, I find!), potentially with the same kind of basic rotational motion control for 'fine tuning' your aim, and it runs your Steam library?

I... I might be sold on this.

UPDATE: the website Ars Technica has reportedly spoken to "sources familiar with the matter" who have confirmed it's real and will be Linux-powered.

Paint me hyped!

Given the old story that pc's need to have linux installed at point of sale for linux to grow, I would love to see valve have another go at steam machines.

If they could achieve a successful launch and enter a new console into the market, that *hopefully* would encourage games studios to directly target steam machines and linux natively.

</pipedream>

Well. If it's a success, that's huge for us. I think it's possible for it to be a success. But they'll have to get a bit more serious than they were for the Steam Machines. And, you know, not fuck up. I won't say I think it's a sure thing, or even that I think the chances are excellent. But they're not tiny either. I will definitely be watching this space with interest.

The only way shipping the device with ARM would make sense is if it came bundled with an Apple Rosetta-like emulator so that x86 games could still be played on the device. If it ships and any effort at all is required from game developers to make their games work then Valve will have thrown away the selling point of having the PC's enormous catalogue available.
Something similar to this already happened to the Steam Machines with the Windows vs Linux games situation but Valve have since remedied this with Proton. Going with ARM but not having backwards compatibility with x86 games would be reliving that situation all over again

Reading the Ars Technica article you linked, I just remembered the patents for a Steam Controller V2... I look forward to see if it will get incorporated into the SteamPal with switchable inputs like being able to replace the sticks with trackpads...

How many games do you own on steam right now?
Does a bell ring?

780 games. None of which I have any interest in playing on a mobile platform.

I think Valve is pretty adventurous, and I wish them luck, but the probability that this device will outlast Stadia is about 50/50 in my book.

I would say have to do something with cloud gaming. Having a console have the option to run low end games and being a cloud gaming mad house. Valve have not worked on steam OS for abit, so I don't know.

Thing is, Gabe Newell talked about the end of the year and consoles, related to VR... If this is what he had in mind, it should be minimally in the range of an XBox Series X and PS5 hardware specs.

Hopefully, same price range too...

If that's the case, I'm getting my budget ready.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 26 May 2021 at 12:26 am UTC

If this is the final Valve bet on Linux, what will happen to Linux gaming if this will not succeed7

They still need to support their existing Linux customers; it's easier to do that if you have future sales to fund it. The risk of Microsoft cutting them off from Windows customers is still there, and Linux support is something that their competitors don't offer.

So if their new project is a success it might have a virtuous cycle relationship with desktop Linux gaming, but if it's a flop I don't expect anything to get worse on that front.

So you don't think all the investments valve put on Linux gaming were finalized to this (still hypothetical) handheld console?
Microsoft store thing never convinced me too much.

Not really, no. A decade of investment predicated on things that didn't exist at the time, for a product that we don't really know anything about, isn't out yet, and might still be a flop, isn't a great plan.

Microsoft muscling them out of Windows would be an existential threat to them, even if the probability is low; having an escape plan, and visibly having an escape plan as leverage, is in Valve's interest. It doesn't cost much, and their work on it is probably sufficiently supported by Linux sales even with our small market share (if not, they're getting money elsewhere); open source development is incremental, so they can add bits as and when, so they don't have to go all in at once, and it lets them do things that they couldn't do otherwise (they can't change Windows' shader compiler, for example); and I expect that the work is interesting in itself for their engineers.

I'd imagine that they thought they'd come up with something, and success of a handheld console and success of desktop Linux would be mutually reinforcing if it happens, but I don't think they were driven by this as a Grand Plan, no.

Small improvements to help more people buy more games is entirely how they approach things. This could be one of them. Or it could be a massive hit, or it could be a massive flop. Whatever happens, Steam is trucking on with minimal risk. And they'd still need to support existing Linux customers, which is easier if Linux customers keep giving you money than if they don't.

If so, then

A) Valve needs to build them themselves.

B) They need to actually sell them to those who want to buy them. Even if they live outside the US!

If not, then DOA.

The Steam Controller and Link was teasing people on Steam for ever, with approximately zero ways of actually buying one most places in the word (e.g. in Norway), except buy if off Ebay. Which, incidentally, is where my Steam Controller comes from.

If so, then

A) Valve needs to build them themselves.

Yeah. Luckily, since the Steam Machine thing Valve have gotten a bit more experience with hardware, like the VR stuff. So they should have more capacity to make this themselves than they would have to try to make Steam Machines themselves.

Answering with some thoughts of my own :)

Well, Steam Machines failed for so many reasons. If this is a device built by Valve, and there's only one (or 1-2 configs?). I can see it doing a lot better with the state of Linux now.

the issue is, they dont have to work for us, they have to work for the "average joe", otherwise nothing will change in terms of market share and thirdy party support.
and i dont think the average joe would give a second chance to valve, imagine knowing the disaster it was the last time and beting your money at it?
we may be willing to do, but we dont count, there are a lot of fanboys on the linux comunity or people who just want to support the cause, but it will be worthless if the average dont purchase then.

sure, maybe we will be able to game on the go, but we already can do that with the likes of GFN and stadia, so its at the point of diminishing returns.

That does bring up a good point but if Valve only supported some form of Linux on it, more might keep it that way. Either way, it would be a boost to Linux gaming if the main way to use it is with let's say SteamOS 3.0.

on the other hand, if that fail they might give up...

As I mentioned in a prev comment, given the success of other devices, I wouldn't just count the idea out. As long as this time around, Valve market it correctly and properly.

after they did 0 market the last time i wont hold my breath for that thing, i'm tired of creating fake hopes to be burned right after.


i had hopes when my government and many others arround the world tried to push linux, but they failed.
i had hopes when google tried to push chromeOS, but it failed.
i had hopes when valve tried to push SteamOS and Steam Machines, but it failed.

why should i lie to my self again?

i had hopes for android, it is an sucess but we dont count that as linux for some reason and it proved that the comunity was wrong in a lot of things that they said that would happen if linux became mainstream (like not having virus)

i had hopes that i could do my part in convincing a lot of people to use linux, but i was not able to convince anyone and as the time pass i started to realize how many things i had to give up in order to use linux (i got to know more games that i wanted to play that i cant and some were online games that dont exist anymore so i lost the oportunity forever not to mention softwares that would make my life easier or open new possibilities of things to do.)
so nowadays i cant convince myself to keep using it, its at the point of diminishing returns and the only reason why i dont go back to windows is the work is because it would be a lot of trouble backuping/formating/reinstaling everything.

honestly i think the main issue of linux was never conving people to give it a chance, but to convince then to stick arround for enough time to see the marketshare grow, many people on my country used linux when it was not ready for the mass adoption, so the reason why they dont use linux is not because they dont know about it but because they do and had an bad impression on it (wich is even worse, first impresion=last impression)

now, an gaming console could be an game changer, bsd has 0 games but playstation that is based on bsd has all the most relevant games of an entire generation, they just dont share this sucess with the bsd desktop¹, if an linux console sell like an switch or playstation it could change forever the situation of linux in both in terms of support for both new games and old games and finally the desktop gain some marketshare as result of this sucess...
but i think its too litle to late, honestly i think the only chance that we had was if we had fought against microsoft before they had stabilished total dominance and had won the fight even if that meant writing proprietary code, its better to dominate the market with some proprietary solution then open soruce it, than let some one else dominate the market someone who dont plan to open source it ever.

its too late now, the windows ecosystem has become an monster we just arent aware of the extension of the problem.
we say things like "gimp can replace photoshop" but photoshop has an ecosystem of add'ons bigger that can be compared to the ecosystem of thirdy party apps that windows have, not to mention that windows has acess to both photoshop and gimp.
we are satisfied of just being able to play an game, while on windows people are moding then to make their own levels and stuff with thirdy party tools that might not work on linux.
we have "hackers" that make wine, but we ignore that windows have "hackers" that do revere enginering on this ecosystem to make those mod tools.
people look at protondb and think that 80% of steam games run on linux, but i saw some games rated as platinum (works perfectly) that were missing basic features like sound effects, so protondb isnt realiable at all, people need to know an game to do Q/A and that is not the case for the submissions on protondb (even the small white list from valve isnt perfect there were bug fixes for nier automata runing on proton after they withe lited it) not to mention that the comunity effort isnt enogu to even test all the steam games, let alone do an proper q/a of then to make sure they work.


¹(the same can be said about runing android apps on linux, sure you can use an emulator but you might as well emulate on windows at this point , with better emulators)

The developer program mentioned might be some kind of incentive for developers to specifically optimize for/support this device. This would be generally good for us.

As for the price of the device. They'd have to sell it for close to cost or at a loss to compete with the Switch.

I might actually be interested in this, depending on how it comes out (assuming it does, of course). I never had any sort of console growing up so I became a de facto PC gamer, and I've generally been fine with that…but then my buddy talks about how he's going to go play Pokemon on his Switch in bed, and I've been thinking recently that something like that but for my Steam library might be nice. Obviously I wouldn't be playing Age of Empires II or Paradox games on it or anything, but some of the more casual small games in my library might work: FTL, Into the Breach, that sort of thing. (And due to my tastes a pretty good portion of my library is these kinds of smaller, less-demanding games that might work well on a portable device.) I'm never going to give up on my desktop, but having a portable way to play (some) games, say, in bed, or on the train or when visiting family on vacation or something might be nice. Of course it'll depend very much on specifics, but I find myself surprisingly open to the possibility (as an otherwise "hardcore" PC gamer).


Last edited by Philadelphus on 7 Jun 2021 at 8:16 am UTC