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

Quoting: MalFunny thing. Everyone is 100% sure consoles are sold at loss, nobody challenge this accepted fact. Yet in EpicVSApple Epic couldn't provide any piece of evidence or even some clue that this is a fact, despite this being a fundamental piece of its theory and despite having both Sony and M$ support. This at least should suggest something on consoles real manufacturing costs.

Well we know the Xbox Series X (IIRC) at the very least is being sold at costs from Xbox's divisions VP saying as much in testimony and I wouldn't be surprised if at cost has been the case for the other two console manufacturers most the time. The only clear case of taking a loss I can really recall is the original 3DS model post price cut as it was definitely taking a loss just from some basic BOM costs even accounting for scale as a few people with electrical engineering experience figured it up on a few of the console centric gaming forums. But at costs makes sense as selling at a lose even when you factor in games sales couldn't be that large of a loss, as from many outside data firms many sold consoles only see about 10 game sales each on average with the people that buy a lot of new games helping balancing out the people that generally buy used or simply don't end up buying many games.

Wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the hundreds of project in development right now. Would not mean that it will be released though..

Quoting: rustybroomhandleProcessing Vulkan Shaders

zzz

Can easily be done on Valves servers. The target is exactly known, so nothing has to be done on the device itself.

I'm gonna bet it's just a steam controller, steam link and a screen smooched together, so you can stream from your desktop to a handheld thing.

Quoting: ExidanI'm gonna bet it's just a steam controller, steam link and a screen smooched together, so you can stream from your desktop to a handheld thing.

I mean I could already do that from my GPD Win... but it's too loud for normal Windows operations, let alone actual gaming / streaming...

Just heard of this thing being planned.

If they manage to make a device that looks attractive as alternative to or even over preferable over the Switch then it may well work out. Obvious pros are the large selection of games available and the presumably small effort to get games to work on it. The obvious problem is that the Switch is very well established as _the_ handheld gaming device.

If it does succeed it will massively increase the Linux player base, in a sense. Keep in mind though that developers will not target Linux, they will target the SteamPal, which happens to run Linux. So whether that would improve general Linux support is an open question. For example, we do not know whether developers will port more games to Linux or rely on Proton.

Quoting: Sir_DiealotJust heard of this thing being planned.

If they manage to make a device that looks attractive as alternative to or even over preferable over the Switch then it may well work out. Obvious pros are the large selection of games available and the presumably small effort to get games to work on it. The obvious problem is that the Switch is very well established as _the_ handheld gaming device.

If it does succeed it will massively increase the Linux player base, in a sense. Keep in mind though that developers will not target Linux, they will target the SteamPal, which happens to run Linux. So whether that would improve general Linux support is an open question. For example, we do not know whether developers will port more games to Linux or rely on Proton.

Well targeting the SteamPal would be targeting Linux, seeing as how what it would come down to is coding for Steam API (the input, the other benefits of Steam, etc) and since it's just Steam under the hood and Linux, they'll get more performance out of straight up targeting Linux. The games will work on Desktop or SteamPal. So yeah, it'll at least allow more people to switch to Linux in the long run.

SteamPal with an optionnal eGPU docking station... Mmmmmm...


Last edited by Mohandevir on 7 June 2021 at 6:48 pm UTC

Quoting: MohandevirSteamPal with an optionnal eGPU docking station... Mmmmmm...

Yeah, I'm not sure how the Switch does this, I think the Dock basically just allows for more overall power to the system when Docked, so as not to eat the battery when undocked.

This brings up a question, has anyone been able to get eGPUs to work in Linux? Last time I tried with mine, it didn't work all that well.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThis brings up a question, has anyone been able to get eGPUs to work in Linux? Last time I tried with mine, it didn't work all that well.

Same here. Tried with a thunderbolt egpu and it was meh... Unstable, worked, reboot, doesn't work anymore, wash & repeat... Annoying!

Who knows, since it's a dedicated hardware, Valve might find some SteamPal specific means (custom port layout/controller/firmware) of achieving this without all the troubles that we, desktop users, have. Just a guess.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 8 June 2021 at 4:12 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulAnyone trust valve to make an game console again after the steam machines flop?

Can not be compared.
The Steam Machine(s) were a train wreck of a launch partly due to it being announced way, waaaay too early (Valve may not have expected the instant response by the hardware manufacturers), but primarily because Valve did not make this game console. They just provided the (premature) OS. It was up to whoever out there to make whatever PC-in-a-console-hood they wanted to and put SteamOS on it. No directions, no restrictions, no plan whatsoever.

That was a horrible idea. Horrible!

So while I do share your pessimism it's for entirely different reasons.


Last edited by Beamboom on 13 June 2021 at 7:34 pm UTC

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: elmapulAnyone trust valve to make an game console again after the steam machines flop?

Can not be compared.
The Steam Machine(s) were a train wreck of a launch partly due to it being announced way, waaaay too early (Valve may not have expected the instant response by the hardware manufacturers), but primarily because Valve did not make this game console. They just provided the (premature) OS. It was up to whoever out there to make whatever PC-in-a-console-hood they wanted to and put SteamOS on it. No directions, no restrictions, no plan whatsoever.

That was a horrible idea. Horrible!

So while I do share your pessimism it's for entirely different reasons.

even worse, they cant control what happens with their own brand

hey liam i remembered something...
google recently said that they made something to help developers port games to stadia...
so they dont have to rewrite the code to vulkan, it should work for any directx 9/10/11 game, aparently almost all apis were covered by their project...
maybe that explain why valve is so confident on runing all games at the relase of the device, stadia might not be the only device who will get the benefits from the efforts from google.

i'm not sure if google is working on something akin to what fna is to xna, where you recompile the code and it works... maybe with a few tweaks...
or something akin to proton

Quoting: elmapulhey liam i remembered something...
google recently said that they made something to help developers port games to stadia...
so they dont have to rewrite the code to vulkan, it should work for any directx 9/10/11 game, aparently almost all apis were covered by their project...
maybe that explain why valve is so confident on runing all games at the relase of the device, stadia might not be the only device who will get the benefits from the efforts from google.

i'm not sure if google is working on something akin to what fna is to xna, where you recompile the code and it works... maybe with a few tweaks...
or something akin to proton

I don't think google has released any of their stuff, have they? At least as far as allowing other people to be able to use it.

From the videos I saw last night, Proton has some builds within Valve that they haven't released yet that are experimental above experimental, but are very much making it so more and more games just work out of the box, and are hoping to get the anti-cheat stuff working in time for the release in December.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: elmapulhey liam i remembered something...
google recently said that they made something to help developers port games to stadia...
so they dont have to rewrite the code to vulkan, it should work for any directx 9/10/11 game, aparently almost all apis were covered by their project...
maybe that explain why valve is so confident on runing all games at the relase of the device, stadia might not be the only device who will get the benefits from the efforts from google.

i'm not sure if google is working on something akin to what fna is to xna, where you recompile the code and it works... maybe with a few tweaks...
or something akin to proton

I don't think google has released any of their stuff, have they? At least as far as allowing other people to be able to use it.

From the videos I saw last night, Proton has some builds within Valve that they haven't released yet that are experimental above experimental, but are very much making it so more and more games just work out of the box, and are hoping to get the anti-cheat stuff working in time for the release in December.

afaik most of the tech behind stadia is opensource, its not like they have anything to lose considering most cloud services are runing on top of windows and if more people start using linux instead, that only means that more game engines will support linux and more game companies will support wich should make the deals cheaper for everyone involved.

speaking of that...
Atari has an linux console, google stadia is based on linux, now steampal

Quoting: elmapulhey liam i remembered something...
google recently said that they made something to help developers port games to stadia...
so they dont have to rewrite the code to vulkan, it should work for any directx 9/10/11 game, aparently almost all apis were covered by their project...
maybe that explain why valve is so confident on runing all games at the relase of the device, stadia might not be the only device who will get the benefits from the efforts from google.

i'm not sure if google is working on something akin to what fna is to xna, where you recompile the code and it works... maybe with a few tweaks...
or something akin to proton

I don't think google has released any of their stuff, have they? At least as far as allowing other people to be able to use it.

From the videos I saw last night, Proton has some builds within Valve that they haven't released yet that are experimental above experimental, but are very much making it so more and more games just work out of the box, and are hoping to get the anti-cheat stuff working in time for the release in December.

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: elmapulhey liam i remembered something...
google recently said that they made something to help developers port games to stadia...
so they dont have to rewrite the code to vulkan, it should work for any directx 9/10/11 game, aparently almost all apis were covered by their project...
maybe that explain why valve is so confident on runing all games at the relase of the device, stadia might not be the only device who will get the benefits from the efforts from google.

i'm not sure if google is working on something akin to what fna is to xna, where you recompile the code and it works... maybe with a few tweaks...
or something akin to proton

I don't think google has released any of their stuff, have they? At least as far as allowing other people to be able to use it.

From the videos I saw last night, Proton has some builds within Valve that they haven't released yet that are experimental above experimental, but are very much making it so more and more games just work out of the box, and are hoping to get the anti-cheat stuff working in time for the release in December.

afaik most of the tech behind stadia is opensource, its not like they have anything to lose considering most cloud services are runing on top of windows and if more people start using linux instead, that only means that more game engines will support linux and more game companies will support wich should make the deals cheaper for everyone involved.

speaking of that...
Atari has an linux console, google stadia is based on linux, now steampal

Steam Deck. Ha, so glad they didn't go with steampal, terrible name...
But yeah, finally more Linux based consoles instead of BSD or others.