this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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It would need to be priced aggressively and have competitive specs to get enough volume of sales to justify building. They'd also need a new controller.
But if you want that, wouldn't you just buy a pre built from literally anywhere and install Steam and enable big picture mode? That's really not that hard, I do it on my laptop for when my kids want to play on the big screen.
Their SOC makes sense in the Steam Deck because it's running at a lower resolution. If you try to run at 1080p, you'll get significantly worse performance, and that's kind of the bare minimum resolution for a console.
Valve would need a significantly stronger SOC to run on a home console, and it would likely need to be stronger than what's in existing consoles because they don't get the benefit of devs targeting that SOC.
I'm guessing they'd need to sell for ~$800 for it to make any sense. That's quite a bit more than existing consoles, but it's a competitive price for a gaming PC. And I'm guessing the market for a Steam console is a lot smaller than a handheld.
Would be nice, but I think it would cost Valve more than Microsoft and Sony because volumes would be a lot lower. I'm guessing a small percentage of existing PC gamers would want a console, because a lot of the point of PC gaming is either using what you have or customizing your rig. I'm also guessing the same is true for console gamers, because they already have a console and probably want to stick with the same ecosystem.
I could be wrong, but that's my take. I'm more interested in them refreshing the Steam Link and Steam Controller. I guess they could reuse the same SOC, but that would run really hot, so they'd probably want a check ARM SOC instead.
But who knows, maybe there's a big enough market for it.