Honestly, it feels like if this was Steam Machines, valve would have waited and released them bundled with the controller. I’m assuming them launching the controller by itself was because they didn’t have Steam Machines ready to go yet.

So I’m assuming this means this is more likely to be the Steam Frame or Steam Deck, but we’ll see.

I play docked occasionally, but there are a lot of games I don’t feel like I can play docked without backbuttons/trackpads/gyro/etc. I’m assuming a lot of the people who really wanted to buy one of these were in the same camp as me, where they constantly felt inconvenienced by the lack of deck controls when using regular controllers.

RIP, there really should be a less shitty way to buy stuff like this

I tired buying on PC but couldn’t get it to go through. Started trying on mobile, and that was where I finally got my order in.

Apparently they’re toggling it back and forth between in stock and out of stock, so there’s still hope

It’s apparently going in and out of stock in waves, so there’s still hope

I got one, took about 11 min of trying before the card would process. During that time I would try 2x every 30 sec to 1 min.

Store was seemingly working fine, just payment processors being overloaded as far as I could tell.

The apparent issue is the payment processor (visa/etc) getting overloaded. To avoid it in the future it sounds like you can preload your steam account with the funds (~$108usd where I live due to 8% tax), which will let you bypass the worst of the checkout errors.

Mine just went through suddenly.

Store had been working fine for me, but the processing card step of the checkout has been broken for me.

I suspect Valve will limit initial sales. Based on what they did with the Steam Deck, I expect:

• You’ll probably have to have a Steam account with a purchased game on the account. Possibly the game will have to have been purchased before a specific date

• There will be a limit on how many purchases per account, probably 1-2

• Account in good standing (no VAC bans, not flagged for abusing game refunds, etc)

Have you heard of Cini Cross? It’s supposed to be kinda a spire-like nongram game

My friends and I were discussing maybe picking it up for game night. We had a lot of fun with sledding shenanigans in RV there yet, so should be fun.

I’m currently getting close to the end of Pragmata. It’s been a really fun game, the combat is new, the world has been interesting, and Diana is adorable. I think it’s hilarious how some of the best loot you can find is just stuff like crayons for her to play with.

What I was trying to say about TDP is that if the effective power efficiency is about the same for both, then the higher TDP will be a direct improvement in how much performance the device is able to put out.

It’s kinda the opposite of the relationship between the Deck and other more powerful handhelds. A lot of them are more powerful mostly because they have a max TDP of 25w. We’ve also seen this with new graphics cards, where the GPU power usage gets higher each year.

Now that Moore’s law is dead, one of the easiest way to have a more powerful device is to make it where it can utilize more power. If two devices are comparable in power efficiency, usually the device the uses the most electricity will be the most powerful.

ARM is specifically better at switching to a low power state. This makes it much more power efficient for low power states like web browsing or video playback, but has a much smaller impact on things like playing games. Add in the CPU overhead from fex, and you probably won’t see any lower power usage from ARM hardware vs x86 to run the same games.

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A couple things, Hades isn’t a good comparison since it has a pretty good optimized android port. You won’t get nearly as favorable a comparison on other games if one’s running on the Deck and the other is running through GameNative. The FEX compatibility layer will have a performance hit vs running on x86 hardware, although I don’t know if anyone has found a good way to measure it yet.

For RAM, the S23 has a slower memory bus than the deck, and Android + background processes will typically use 4-6GB of the system RAM. So you’re generally left 6-8GB for your combined RAM/VRAM, accessed at a slower speed, which will severely hamper a lot of more modern games.

For TFLOPS, phones are usually rated at a peak rating, rather than something that can be consistently sustained. A big part of this is thermals, which an external cooler will help with a lot. But you’re still going to probably have pretty significant decrease in performance outside of those peaks, typically only 50-60% of the peak power. There’s also practical TDP limits, even high end phones have a max TDP of 5-7w vs the Deck’s 15w limit, which will limit how much it can run.

It’s also just kinda nice to have a separate, low fuss gaming device. I can grab up the deck and immediately continue playing where I left off in seconds. I used to play more games on my phone before the deck, but I had constant issues with calls and other interruptions making it hard to get proper play sessions in. I typically gave up on playing any game that didn’t have save on exit, because of all the lost progress. And your setup sounds like it takes longer to setup, needing a cooler and controller setup each time you go to play.

Game Boy Advanced SD

You can try GameNative, it’s an attempt to bring FEX (the x86 > ARM compatibility layer) to android devices. There are some other projects trying the same thing, I think they’re called GameHub and Winlator.

Yeah, I can feel my palms hurting looking at those corners. Still is a cool idea though, growing up with the GBA and DS left me with a nostalgia for clamshell handhelds.