No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.
I can’t wait to get the controller
Sometimes I think about how LOATHED Steam was when it launched. That was probably valid even. Still, it feels worth noting that Valve is maybe THE only company from my childhood that feels like it largely stayed true to its spirit, or whatever.
People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.
Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.
The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.
friends/chat was offline for literally months
Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.
What if he really wanted to make it up to you? Is there anything he could do to apologize?
I was one of the haters when it first launched because I was on dialup at the time and physical discs I bought were forcing me to install steam AND THEN install a massive patch that did not work on dialup. My first day playthrough of Skyrim was ruined because of that. Took a week for that shit to download even though I went physically to a store.
But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.
It happened to me (with blizzard)…and it will happen to you!
I just paid $20 for a physical copy Counter Strike, and I find out I need to install an additional launcher and make an account to play the game I just installed. It’s the principle of the thing!
It basically didn’t add any value to the experience. We just wanted to play CS, and steam just got in the way.
As someone still using Steam Controller 1 on the daily, I am stoked to see that they have not abandoned the trackpads. Civ from the couch ftw.
The timing is great as I learn my healthcare premiums are likely to go up by over a thousand dollars a month.
I want them all, but mostly the Frame. Finally decent Linux VR? On a standalone device that can also stream from a PC? On ARM?! It seems too good to be true.
I posted this in the other thread, but wanna share here too:
Most interesting thing to me is the Frame apparently runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is using SteamOS, implying official ARM support for SteamOS, Steam and Proton! Could mean steam and proton coming to android too.
Jeff Geerling is probably having a fit right now.
And the base would be Arch Linux ARM, right? So that should see an uptick in development too.
Arch Linux has been implementing a build system for other architectures. Perhaps they’ll make ARM official by the time Frame comes out.
I’m still a little curious how that will work for games. Are they going to somehow emulate Win32 amd64 games? Do devs have to recompile them in some new way? Will engines support it beyond Unity and Unreal?
Yup, FEX to translate x86 to ARM.
The Frame isn’t playing the games on its ARM chip. It’s just streaming audio/visual data from the PC and relaying the controller inputs back to the PC.
It is fascinating and a huge step, but I want to keep expectations low. It will work, but it will not be as compatible as x86 Proton, not at all. It is first and primarily an OS for streaming games and running VR. That is the VR rendering from the streaming computer, not the VR game itself. In other words, they only had to get exactly one app to run well enough for public use. According to the developer, it is working with a surprising amount of games. I agree, one game is surprising, but trust me when I say you will not be running Windows x86 games in ARM Linux for a long time.
Only one company has apparently learned how to print money and not be ghouls.
To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscience, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.
I’d say it’s priceless.
Been waiting for a competitor to the meta quest. Looks like my patience has paid off. I hope it’s not too pricey/compromised
“The Frame headset won’t be priced higher than the Index”:
Why did I buy a PSVR2 with the pc adapter three weeks ago …
I appreciate the assist lol
The controller is exactly what I wanted. Take a Steam Deck, cut out the middle, glue the grips back together. Take my money.
Steam Dk
These were the prices of the first generation: (Wikipedia Steam Machine US$400–$600; Steam Controller $49.99
Lets fucking go! This lineup looks sick.
Hell yeah! I have an upgrade path for my original Steam Controllers!
One under the radar feature of the Frame’s controllers is being able to use them without the headset as essentially a normal controller split in two.
I just like that they have the complete compliment of normal controller buttons. It seems the world has agreed on twin sticks, a d-pad, ABXY (or triangle square cirlce et cetera, you know what I mean), and two shoulder buttons… Except for VR controllers. Every brand has their own dinky layout and they’re all sparse on buttons, I guess not to “intimidate” newbies, but it requires making weird compromises or binding actions to directions on one of the analog sticks or something, and that always feels lacking.
I hope they also stole the idea from the OG Oculus controllers where it can sense when your fingers are on the buttons but not pressing them, to so they can show your fingers in VR space and help people work the things by sight as well as feel.
Edit: I watched the LTT video. Yes, the buttons have capacitive finger tracking as well. Rejoyce.
The Index controllers have touch-sensitive sticks and actual finger tracking so they measure how far your fingers are from the body of the controller. They put touch-sensitive sticks on the Deck as well.
Glad to have sold my Index this past summer. Prices are gonna plummet once V.2 comes out
I’m disappointed in the screens they used but it unfortunately makes sense that 4k microOLED isn’t feasible. I wish the new controllers supported Lighthouse tracking too. If the new controllers really are proprietary to just this single HMD that’s a big failure in my opinion.
Given their history with input devices and the fact that it runs an ARM version of SteamOS I would bet that controller support will be good
The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.
The new controller and headset have
stressedaddressed every issue I had with each directly.It killed me that the original Controller didn’t have a second analog stick. A lot of people tried to claim that the trackpad was a viable replacement, but I just could never get used to it. Loved all the other features.
On top of that, no more light towers! I’ll finally be able to bring it friends’ places to demo! Plus the fact that the headset supports native gaming means no tower needed for some titles. I’d imagine the vast majority of VR-focused titles will run just fine since they almost all target low-spec anyway.
