Damn. Thought they launched something new.
Shit, sorry. I was thinking about the OG steam deck preorders.
Edit: To be fair, this is in the shitposting community and I didn’t intend to fool anyone. I just loved this ancient meme and wanted to have somewhat recent relevance.
Little late to the party, aren’t we?
I have not once seen you leave a positive comment on anything, ever.
I’m definitely guilty of the heinous crime of sarcasm.
Matching pfp
Fixed.
I remember when that was the valve servers on any day of the week ending in “Y”.
Good old green design. I miss the Counter Strike 1.6 days.
The deck has the oldschool green design as a keyboard overlay style, and you can use Decky and CSS Loader to mod the rest of steam to look like that, and you can even find KDE themes that look like that.
I am actually using the keyboard skin. Not sure if I am going to mod the rest, because its prone to break each update. But thanks for letting me know 🙂
Haha yeah, god help you with applying custom KDE themes system wide, the standards have changed so many times over the years lol, shit breaks all the time.
If you don’t want everything resetting on update, you could always switch over to Bazzite, its got a GNOME and KDE flavor for the Deck/Handhelds’ desktop modes, helps you setup Decky and other stuff in a pretty automated way.
=D
Thanks for all the helpful tips :)
Thanks for the silly gif, stealing that lol
I mean…
Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what? Three weeks? I’m not even saying it’s better, but I think people should get a sense of the scope of PC handhelds in general compared to consoles and the Switch specifically. And I say that as the owner of multiple handhelds, the Deck included.
Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what?
I’m pretty sure they’re doing OK with regards to percentage of units sold/manufactured, especially given they are not doing a worldwide release, and are selling direct to consumer instead of to stores.
Weirdly so is Nintendo these days.
In any case I’m not sure what “percentage of units sold/manufactured” implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn’t much of a metric unless you’re doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they’d manufacture them faster.
I don’t think they can manufacture them fast enough to keep up with demand, that’s my point.
I wouldn’t know if they are available to buy now, since they aren’t sold in my region, wheras the switch is. Lemme check for switch 2…
It’s not on LATAM Amazon, but it is available for pre-order off “gamestop”. Steam deck is available off LATAM Amazon, but it is a weird on demand import kinda dealie, which is fairly common for some goods down here.
🤷♂️
The point is that their sales methods are apples and oranges, and trying to paint one as successful with the metrics of the other is unproductive. You can say that the switch/switch 2 sold more units than the steam deck, but then you can also say the steam deck sold more games in that time period, since steam probably sells more games in any given time period over the switch digital store, or that the steam deck can run more games.
Both are moot points when comparing them to each other.
I don’t think I can agree. I mean, I’m sure being in Latin America and being at the tail end of support for less global products skews this a bit, but ultimately these are two big global publishers selling globally.
For what it’s worth, Steam is willing to sell me any currently available Steam Deck in my region with 3-5 day delivery. There currently isn’t any Switch 2 stock on Amazon or the local top specialty game retailer. Checking a couple other major retailers it sure seems to be sold out everywhere for now. You’d probably have a better shot at a physical retailer.
So I’m saying that Valve has stock of the Deck and has for ages, at least in the territories it supports through direct sales. Which is expected, the thing is not new anymore, but it suggests that if it needed to ramp up production it could, it just doesn’t have to.
You could argue that this is not apples to apples, and it may not be, but the difference is so large it may not matter. The Switch 1 by itself was about as large as all of Steam combined, let alone the Deck by itself. The Switch 2 did in weeks what took the Deck years to do, crucially at the same price point (the Switch 2 is cheaper than the OLED but more expensive than the LCD). Considering how much of the marketing and the community focused on the Deck being a Switch killer based on the performance advantage it had, I’m going to say they are close enough competitors and the gulf between them is large enough that whatever differences you want to account for are accounted for.
Which, again, doesn’t speak to the quality of either piece of hardware, but it does to the notion that the Deck has been a runaway success or that it has overwhelmed Valve’s expectations.
I don’t even think I can put into words how much I would not buy a system that can be bricked remotely by the company I bought it from.
Cool. But that’s not the conversation we’re having an five-ish million people clearly don’t share that concern.
I mean… Yes. It’s a niche market but I’m still glad that niche market exists 🤷♂️
I don’t think they’re really competitors to the extent that their form factor similarity would suggest
It’s very possible I don’t really understand the point you’re making (which doesn’t make it invalid or anything, I just don’t know that I follow)
I am very glad it exists. I may have a problem with owning handhelds. I am the perfect mark for this stuff. I have multiple upcoming boutique handheld PCs I’m actively trying not to overspend on.
But they are competitors. If anything, they are about as similar as they’ve ever been, honestly.
I’m only reacting to they weird Valve mythmaking that presents them as being extremely successful in the meme up top. Yes, the Deck is a very popular PC handheld, it is supposed to account for half-ish of the entire segment and it’s been very well priced for what it is, but it isn’t a runaway hit in the large scheme of the game industry and game hardware manufacturing.
For consoles in general Sony and Nintendo are the top dogs, no question, but I remember refreshing the pre order page over and over, got my order in about 10 minutes and was still placed in wave 3. I think scalpers are also largely responsible for both the Steam Deck and Switch sales, as I know no one IRL who has either and most of my friends are nerds.
Are you from the US ? I procrastinated my preorder and did it a week after they opened them, and I think I got in wave 2 (western Europe).
On the OG Steam Deck or the OLED one? I am from Germany. I think you may have been in wave 2 of the next year block. There is no way you’d have received it in the same year, unless there was an error.
OG one. I think you’re right, I forgot because that year went by fast but I received it the next year
I forget what wave I was on. I know I wasn’t there day one, but it also wasn’t that long of a wait.
My best guess is Valve was making very few of these. It’s pretty impressive that Nintendo has been able to move this many consoles while keeping stock up, but Valve was clearly not operating at that volume for both cost reasons and to create some hype.
For the record, I do own both a Switch 2 and a Deck. It wasn’t that hard to get either, but the Switch 2 was available on day one in a way the Deck was not.
you gotta pay somehow for the customer service death squad
