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The NVIDIA Shield already fit a product category: it was tablet. They sold it as a "gaming tablet". Except it didn't have joysticks, and it was on Android, which was one of its greatest problems, because that platform didn't really have any games for which you'd need joysticks, and so any other tablet or phone could already do that stuff. That's why it didn't change anything, and their "TegraZone" fizzled (later rebranded "GeForce Play" which also fizzled). They created a product that didn't have content to sell, so the product didn't sell, and so the content wasn't created. Classic capitalist catch-22.How many qualifiers need to be checkboxed for two products to be in the same product category?
For this discussion (not argument), lets classify all mobile PC gaming products to be in the same category, regardless of IOS.
They've all failed to achieve mass-market success because they were over-priced and half-assed.
Otherwise, it was hardly half-assed or poorly priced. The Tegra K1 was more impressive as an APU in 2015 than this R5-5300Uish APU is today in 2021. It also retailed at $299 MSRP, and was later slashed to $199, so pricing wasn't the issue, because it had a superior pricing floor to this Steam Deck.
I am not calling 'decks' not made by Valve 'Steam Decks' and I highly doubt Gabe Newell is giving other multi-billion dollar corporations permission to infringe on his copyright, despite how literal the title of this PC Gamer article title is.
How do you know that? He let all these companies market their products as "Steam boxes" back in 2015, and he is such an open-source ideologue, there's no reason to believe he will change SteamOS from what it's always been, and restrict the v3.0 as a proprietary OS for his own product.
Apple spearheaded the home PC market. The Apple II is often credited for popularizing this market. They didn't let other companies sell their product under that brand. If you go back and watch old interviews the media struggled at first to coin a term for the rubric. Finally "PC" stuck because it was the simplest abbreviation of many tried, and easily remembered: "personal computer". But naming and defining the larger product category wasn't Apple's preoccupation. Their preoccupation was creating and maintaining a product that filled a need, and generated a demand.*Sigh*
Ok, I think you're misinterpreting me.
We agreed on more mobile PC platforms being good, right? I don't mean several different companies making Steam Decks, I mean several different companies making several different mobile PC platforms with the product category called 'deck.'
Hell, how was the name 'desktop' or 'laptop' agreed to across the industry? Did someone try to copyright it?
For now, for the lack of a proper name for the product category, lets just call them 'decks.'
You're already calling these other products "decks". You're borrowing the term from Steam. See how the confusion is ingrained in this approach? That's why I believe Steam needs to protect this branding, and resist other decks purporting to represent the user experience they intended to offer.
As I just showed in the Services thread there is already a Cloud gaming service (NVIDIA GeForce Now) which streams games with a lower input latency than the PS4 and Xbox One averaged in testing in 2015. That's with a hardwired connection, though. The WiFi adds another layer, and it is problematic.So, that being said, I am very skeptical about cloud-gaming being legit because of internet speeds, connectivity, and latency issues still being a large issue across the world.
Stadia was a failure on its release day because basically no one believed Google would fix these issues, and they were right.
So, if you're right about this and I'm wrong, again, I'll paypal you enough to buy a six-pack of your favorite craft beers, ok Mads?
This is the great hope. Everything rests on this. The Steam Deck actually does something other products don't already do better for a lower price. If this product succeeds it will be due to this. The Switch has shown a massive appetite for portable gaming. The other thing it has going for it is that in 2021 PC gaming is probably finally ready for this. All games are made to work out-of-the-box with dual-analog controllers. Driver support is already there (at least on Windows...not sure about SteamOS). So there is already a ton of games that can be played. It isn't a platform without a product. It actually has something to sell.Steambox had its issues, obviously, and its biggest issue was that practically everyone that wanted to play PC games on their flat screen TVs already were doing that with the desktops or laptops with HDMI cables.
I just think it is far better in the short term if Gabe controls the branding to build a reputation.