The Steam Deck models itself much more after handhelds and consoles, anyway.
Sure, you're not getting The Most Detail And Power Available Right This Moment, but having a stable target for developers means getting a healthy library for players. It builds value for the customer, who won't want to swap out consoles super frequently to keep up with devs who'll stop targeting old hardware.
See this is why I love Valve. At least their hardware and the great support for open source software (Linux, Wine/Proton).
No, I don't agree with everything they do in regards to Steam. I know that it sucks, that you can't truly own your games nowadays, but at least Valve supports an OS that lets you truly own your hardware and have control over your software. And they do it, by providing open source software (Proton) with no strings attached (free software license) that lets you play games on this exact FOSS OS.
But you can truly own steam games. It's up to the developer whether to enable DRM. You can distribute a game through steam and it can still be launchable without steam running. Which means you can also save it to whatever backup medium you like.
I'm not talking about DRM, but about Steam's terms of service. Technically you only purchase a license to play the game, which can be taken away by Valve at any time. You don't really own your copy of the game, as you would with physical media.
I’d say updating the deck every year may hurt sales too, because why buy the deck now when you know a new, better one is only 6 months away?
It's this mentality that made me pause on buying one, now that this info has come out imma be looking to get one ASAP 😁 good on ya Valve!!!
And it's easier to certify that a game works as expected when there aren't too many hardware revisions.
I don't think it would hurt sales, exactly, but I doubt it would be cost-effective to keep redoing them. People would still buy, but like you said, some people might wait, and that means the old ones go unsold, meaning Valve can't recoup that investment.
I mean, Valve has more money than they know what to do with, but I imagine they'd like to keep it that way.
It is also taking on technical debt, as each revision can come with OS quirks, and you now have to support X numbet of versions of hardware/software troubleshooting.
Valve being based.
Name one console that is released yearly
iPhone.
Anything Anbernic makes. Oh wait, no, they're on a monthly schedule.
I don't think any console that did releases annually would be worth buying and I think you have a solid point.
That being said, it is slightly different insofar as console games are not implicitly available across generations. What I mean is PS4 games are playable on PS5 but WiiU aren't on Switch or what-have-you.
I think most people are crossing over PC/laptop updates with game consoles and the walls are being broken down a bit.
I think Steam doesn't want to muddy the waters with "Steam Verified" and everything just yet. They're eventually going to with an upcoming refresh of the system, but it's easier to get devs and consumers on the same page with Steam Deck verified and the software and such if they don't iterate every year.
What do I know though, I'm an idiot.
Every other company producing handhelds (except Nintendo).
Legion Go, released a year ago, follow-up announced, no release date
ROG Ally followed up by the Ally X a year later but still sold (just like Valve is still selling two hardware versions of the Deck)
Then you have no name brands that do flood the market
to be fair, the ally x is a revision of the same product. same chip. making some functional changes like that is similar to saying the steam deck oled is a new generation of devices.
That's my point, saying only Valve and Nintendo have a release schedule that's more than a year long is disingenuous
Handheld gaming devices? Which ones?
Ayaneo, MSI Claw, ROG Ally, GDP Win, Lenovo Legion Go
Common Valve W
"Steam does like everyone else but gets praised for it."
No console or handheld gaming system is giving out yearly refreshes.
Asus is doing it
I think it's more than just not doing yearly refreshes, it's that they don't want to do releases that are only incremental in nature, which is an extremely common behavior, especially among consoles.
It doesn't even make much sense in the PC sphere either. It's physically possible but in regards to cost and performance, there's not much to gain from a yearly upgrade cycle.
Good. It sucks when companies make you always have to get the latest and greatest hardware if you want the new features that, it turns out, run perfectly fine on the old hardware (once someone hacks it).
i know they suck monopolistic ass, but damn arent they good at doing the bare minimum with excellence and not making us feel fucked over.
Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.
For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.
Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.
Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.
Even for phones, it's a massive environmental problem.
old phones can be updated to the latest OS.
Yeah, that was my point.
Because so much of a (typical) mobile app’s behavior is delegated to first-party APIs, having a huge range of device models in the field doesn’t cause as much of a splintering problem as it would for software that defines more of its own behavior internally, like games tend to do.
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