Valve don't exactly like to give out sales numbers, so we often have to make educated guesses but sometimes with huge hits like Black Myth: Wukong, it gives us a slightly clearer idea on how the Steam Deck is actually selling.

A particularly fun bit:

So then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits “tens of millions of users” that it “would actually make sense to support it”. We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that’s sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
    127·
    3 months ago

    The article says “no need for steam deck 2”. Valve is on record saying they wouldn’t do an incremental upgrade, they want to wait until there’s a major advance in the available technology.

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        232·
        3 months ago

        Or it being 5 years in the future with significantly more efficient SOC’s and batteries

        That being said, the Nintendo DS’s last US patents should expire in November. Maybe they could do a dual screen?

      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
        101·
        3 months ago

        That would be absolutely wonderful. If they could somehow future-proof their board design even if you had to have tech skills to replace it, enthusiasts could do it on their own and people who don’t want to could take it to the local tech repair shop.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      46·
      3 months ago

      Even if they were working on it, they wouldn’t tell, otherwise a bunch of people would be waiting on the steam deck 2 instead of buying the current one.

      • callouscomic@lemm.eeEnglish
        78·
        3 months ago

        They’re gonna make a Black Myth 2? We’ll shit, I can skip the first one.

        Alternatively…

        What if they might make a Steam Deck 3? Better skip the 2nd one as well.

        • TechieDamien@lemmy.ml
          15·
          3 months ago

          We all know there isn’t going to be a steam deck 3. Best we can offer is a steam deck 2 episode 2.

        • ekZepp@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          3 months ago

          The Deck is a beauty, but let’s face it, people would “run” to buy a deck 2. We had thousands selling their old handheald when the new oled model came out and it was barely a (very good) mid-gen upgrade.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          3 months ago

          That’s a poor comparison, as Black Myth has just come out and games take a long time to develop. And the Steam Deck 2 literally doesn’t exist yet.

          If Nintendo announced a Switch 2 tomorrow, saying it’s compatible with existing Switch games, do you think sales of the Switch would go up, or down?

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      31·
      3 months ago

      Valve can be lethargic but they generally know when not to fuck with something that works.

      That on its own is quite grand.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
      26·
      3 months ago

      because itd be a pain for devs to optimize for a platform if said platform changes too often. one of the benefits of a console is that the platforms life is about 7-9 years so both audience and devs dont have to worry much about having to go through the decision of deciding which generation to support.

      it would do a LOT of gen 1 steam deck buyers a disservice if a gen 2 one came out faster and a dev arbitrary targets the newer device as the baseline.

        • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
          6·
          3 months ago

          devs on pc have to decide which set of hardware to optimize for. it’s a step that they choose based on harwdare adoption trends. There is always a point where something is too hardware demanding that it would greatly hinder sales when making a decision. With a fixed hardware platform, devs have a concentrated point in hardware adoption to target.

          For instance, say you developed a game where the minimum hardware requirement was slightly higher than a steam deck. If enough steam deck sales exist, the dev might have an incentive to optimize the game more just to get access to said market.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
      19·
      3 months ago

      Wasn’t the steam deck OLED the incremental upgrade? I thought they did a sight spec bump along with the screen upgrade.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
        11·
        3 months ago

        Specs are the same, the APU is just now 6nm instead of 7nm which is more efficient and lets it run a few degrees cooler and therefore boost a bit higher without overheating, and the RAM bandwidth went from 88Gb/s to 102Gb/s.

        Consensus seems to be somewhere between 5-10% better fps, which means a game that ran at 50 fps might go up to 55, or one that ran at 28 might finally hit 30.

    • Defaced@lemmy.world
      11·
      3 months ago

      Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.

    • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      3 months ago

      If a vendor strangely insist on not working on a new product, it’s lying.

      In this case it’s obvious, considering we already got 2 minor revisions of steamdeck HW.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
      1·
      3 months ago

      These new Snapdragon CPUs seem like a “major advance”, if they can get SteamOS working on them…

      Also the new Ryzen AI chips are crazy efficient.

      So I’d say we’re there already, but also hardware targets for devs are important.