Quoting: mylkayes. and where do they get their survey? on the go WITHOUT internet, or maybe at home on their windows PC?

They don't get "their" survey at all. The hardware is what's being sampled. All the hardware.

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Quoting: MohandevirHad the surey on mine, this week. It was just a notification? I tried clicking on it and nothing happened.

You get the notification and then you can go into Notifications to confirm that you're OK with being included in the survey.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAnd yet the point stands--in a random sampling of machines, a machine used full time has twice the chance of being polled as a machine used half of the time.

The machine just needs to be logged into Steam during the month that's at least a year since the last time it was surveyed.

The Deck does come with a (random?) delay "SurveyDateSteamDeckDelay" before it gets included in the survey - I had my Deck nine or ten months before it got the survey popup. I expect that Valve don't want everyone's unboxing experience to be full of "would you like to fill out this survey?" spam.

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Quoting: mylkajust because someone has a steam deck, does not mean, that they are not playing on WINDOWS PC anymore
so a lot of deck owners count as windows PC

It's a hardware survey, not a user survey. The Deck counts as a Deck, a Windows PC counts as a Windows PC and a Linux PC counts as a Linux PC.

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Quoting: RC2225

Quoting: TheRiddickAt this point it's obvious Valve is deliberately avoiding the AU/NZ market.

Or it's for tax reason. As an example, it's not available in Switzerland.

I bought one in the store in Osaka recently, and got of course a defect one. Unfortunately, my holiday was too short to get a replacement and since it was tax-free, I could not get a refund.

It's neither of those things; it's just a tiny market and Valve can't be arsed.

The US has loads of money, and it's where Valve are based, so they've got to sell it there. Canada is just a few miles away from Valve HQ, and they can reuse the US distribution, so that's easy enough. The EU is a 450 million person single market, so it would be silly not to sell it there. The UK has 70 million people, is a hugely influential gaming market, had harmonised all its laws with the EU so that part's easy, and you can reuse your EU distribution if you remember to put a different plug in the box, so you might as well. And... that's it: that's everywhere that Valve can be bothered to sell it. The Asian countries it's being sold in are because a logistics partner is doing all the actual work of selling there. Australia (and Switzerland, and Norway) are too tiny to be worth taking it all on just for them, so you're waiting on having a logistics partner. Good luck!

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Quoting: SeegrasBasically, Dolphin shared a 16byte secret key, which Nintendo dislikes. Nothing that DeCSS hasn't done also.

In the end, it's a quarrel over some DMCA provisions, and you can argue either way whether this is legal or not in the US. In most of the world there is no DMCA, and what they're doing is legal anyway.

Emulation isn't copyright infringement in the US. Including specific names, numbers, or incantations in your software that are the same as those in other software to allow interoperability isn't copyright infringement in the US. The particular quirk of the DMCA is that it prohibits "circumventing a technical measure" to bypass DRM even if the use isn't copyright infringement (and no matter how trivial the "technical measure" is); the Library of Congress has to regularly issue short-term (two or three years, IIRC) exemptions for particular applications.

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Hopefully Nvidia & Intel won't drag their feet so we can have a vendor-neutral solution.

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Quoting: F.Ultraedit: ok so reading up on it a bit more I think maybe possibly that just asking for a injunction is temporary while they would have asked for a "permanent injunction" if it was to ban them outright from selling the product again.

Yep. And they probably won't get it; if Valve ultimately prevail time off market would be unfixable, but if Immersion ultimately prevail then "infringement" can be fixed by more money. But they've gotta ask, to keep the pressure on.

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Quoting: kokoko3kWell, I suppose that an IPS screen still means good color reproducion in the range of the reproducible while still very low gamut.
This ensures good reproduction at low brightness levels, but still, at low brightness having more gamut helps, because saturation is clamped "by design".
Btw, it is not just skin tones. At least for me, the inability to show saturated and vivid colors is a serious issue.
I repeat, my personal and biased opinion, don't shoot me.

You should endeavour to see one in person, playing games. It's fine, but not great; but you definitely wouldn't want to sacrifice the other aspects of the display I mentioned for a better gamut. Constrained technology like this is all about compromises.

(As a point of comparison, my desktop monitor has very good colour reproduction (Dell UP3017), but I do almost all my gaming on the Deck)

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Quoting: kokoko3kIt seems the deck has an ips screen, not tn, right?

The Deck has an IPS screen, yes. Which means that off-axis viewing is fine, which wouldn't be the case with a TN screen. But the colour gamut isn't great as far as IPS screens go - less than 100% sRGB. It seems to be one of the "painful" choices Valve made to hit the price point. In actual use, though, it's not that much of an issue: you aren't using it to see skin tones - games make up their own custom colours. If you hold it side-by-side with a good IPS screen you'll see the reds being slightly orange, but solo you'll only notice the high DPI, fast response, and ability to show a good image even at very low brightness, which are admirable traits for a battery-powered gaming appliance. There is space for a Deck with a better screen but the process of replacing it is not a lot of fun. And replacing the screen with one that can't run at an arbitrary refresh rate between 40 & 60 Hz (which the Deck's display can) would be a functional downgrade.

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