u/JohnEdwa — JohnEdwa

Inflation adjusted the index was $1300 at launch, so, they kinda did it. But if the Deck and Machine price hikes (45%) are anything to go by, the Frame was supposed to be something like $750.

From employee count they both would easily fit the legal US definition of a small business, as that's usually 500 or fewer, but can be as high as 1500 in some industries, depends what they'd be classified as.

Some are just directly about revenue too, so you could in theory be too big to be a small business even if it's just a single person - and by that standard, Valve is obviously not fit to be a small business.

Because Valve manufactures hardware for profit, Meta subsidizes the hell out of it and sells it at a loss to get you into their walled garden.

Frame was originally intended to be cheaper than the Index kit, Quest 3 was $499-$650, so maybe $700-850 depending on storage. Steam Deck got a $300 price hike just recently, so there's a possibility it could still be closer to a grand than one and a half.

>gabebox

It's the Gabecube.

Yes, that video is 14 years old.

Hardware usually first reduces in price because manufacturers start with a need to quickly recover the large R&D costs using a high profit margin, and at some point they break even and can start bringing the price down. And often manufacturing just does get cheaper as time goes on too.

Game consoles are kinda special, as they are often sold at a loss from the start because they expect sales in games to eventuslly cover it all, so their pricing usually slowly trends down in hopes it attracts new owners that will then buy a bunch of games.

Valve doesn't do that with the Deck (they want the hardware division to be entirely self-sufficient), but they also set the margim to be really low right from the start to be competitive, so they had to increase the price to match current manufacturing costs or each Deck would lose the hardware division a lot of money.

Though the Index did use an intricate OLED screen and it had the lighthouses and finger tracking controllers (they have *87* different sensors per controller). Without the AIpocalypse, the Frame was originally supposed to be the cheaper of the two.

2026 prices though, who knows. Painful, like any tech hardware, that's for sure.

They got the first shipment of manufactured controllers - one estimate is around 40k based on some import data - and sold them out in minutes, then started taking backorders.

Interesting. Here in Finland you are spoiled for choices, and half of those support direct bank transfers from basically every Finnish bank too.


The Frame is an embedded mobile device with space constraints, it's going to have soldered ram and storage. At least it has a Micro SD card slot so you don't have to necessarily pay for the biggest SSD.

My guess is between four days and shortly. .

It is if you compare it to a regular controller, but from what it offers - touchpads, back buttons, hall effect sticks, gyro, full remappability etc - it's more comparable to something like the PS5 Edge and those are almost twice the cost.

The unofficial one was leaked a month ago :p

Agreed :)

And no matter how they do it, it's clear they need to make changes; "everything is an Xbox controller and now just works" actually was pretty nice solution 20 years ago to fix the complicated mess that was PC gamepads with DirectInput, but it is very much outdated idea today.

Thankfully it appears changes are happening that might solve the issue in the near future, and all we can really do is wait and see.

>They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow

No, they couldn't. There's over 20 years of legacy hardware and software that expects Xinput data to be returned *exactly* in this format:

typedef struct _XINPUT_GAMEPAD {
  WORD  wButtons;
  BYTE  bLeftTrigger;
  BYTE  bRightTrigger;
  SHORT sThumbLX;
  SHORT sThumbLY;
  SHORT sThumbRX;
  SHORT sThumbRY;
} XINPUT_GAMEPAD, *PXINPUT_GAMEPAD;

Changing any of that would break every single xinput controller and game made in the last 20 years. Modifications require a new API, which is exactly what GameInput is.

Researching this a bit more, there is an answer in the making already - GameInput. How long that will take to take over from every game using xinput is left to be seen.

It's not possible as xinput doesn't support gyroscopes, the controller simply doesn't report that data. The "Switch" mode is setting it to be a mostly standard HID/DirectInput device so that all of those inputs can be accessed, but that requires something (Steam Input) to sit between the controller and the game to map the inputs together, and the game has to also support non-xinput controllers - otherwise you are just mapping them back to xbox inputs.

The exception is a game that support directinput... well, directly. Like sim racers etc.

There is now the option of going "hardware" Steam Input as well, as is done by the HORIPAD for Steam, but it is something the controller has to do.

I'm willing to bet that without the Deck, most AAA games would have already jumped to requiring roughly PS5-level PC hardware now that last gen consoles are effectively dead.

UE5 on the Deck might not be pretty, but making it run at all on it lowers the minimum requirements of a game tremendously.

It *should* be an IRC clone. Having the voice and screen sharing is also kinda nice.

Instead it's IRC + MSN messenger + Ventrilo + Skype + TeamViewer + MegaShare + Wiki + Game server hosting + Forum and probably a few more I'm forgetting, and adding more half-working bloat all the time.

It's all about the battery temperature.

Even if you are running the deck with the APU cooking at 80C and fans blasting at full tilt, the battery stays relatively cool. But stuff it in an insulated box and start charging it at 45 watts, and the battery will quickly start heating from the inside over the recommended 30-45C maximum.