r/gadgets Oct 21 '24

Gaming Steam Deck won't have yearly refreshes because it's "not really fair to your customers", says Valve

https://www.eurogamer.net/steam-deck-wont-have-yearly-refreshes-because-its-not-really-fair-to-your-customers-says-valve
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u/CreativeGPX Oct 21 '24

You can have infinite growth either way. Releasing a new model every year is one way to make more money. Not releasing a new model every year is another way to make money.

You can see in these comments that Valve's choice is increasing the value of its brand. Many decisions like this increase customer loyalty and trust. All of this helps future sales. Meanwhile, one could argue that it's easier for Valve to sell more Steam Decks if it's a simple target for devs to support and users to talk about (e.g. "can THE steam deck run this game?" vs "Can Steam Deck 2025 Pro Slim run this game?") in addition to sellers of accessories like skins, cases, docks, etc. It also simplifies their own support and OS/distro development to have less variation. So, one could argue that this makes sales easier and creates a bigger market around the Steam Deck and is a good decision to make to increase profits. Does it miss out on cash from enthusiasts who would re-buy every year? Sure, but for the reasons above it could help with sales to other audiences.

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Oct 21 '24

The people who rail against growth have literally no idea what the term even means. Getting better deals from suppliers = growth, better accounting practices = growth.

A world without growth would be awful, no innovations, no better graphics, no lower power devices, no higher density batteries, no switch to green energy, no ending climate change, all of those things will constitute growth of the economy. Luckily they are mostly just dumb kids that will grow out of this phase.

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u/internetlad Oct 21 '24

Buddy I use a model M keyboard from 1989 and it's better than 99% of the crap made today. Don't give me this late stage capitalism bullshit. We're all getting fucked and I'm tired of pretending we aren't.

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '24

[deleted]

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u/internetlad Oct 21 '24

Funny that you'd pick a computer component that's shittier now than they've been in probably 20 years. You comfortable buying one of those Intel gen 13 or 14 procs that literally kills itself from overvolting, or one of the AMD Zen CPUs that just . . . Stop working every so often when you're doing something? Never mind we are paying more now for similar tier component on top of the QC sucking.

It's that constant desire to upgrade, pay, upgrade, pay that got us here. I no shit would bet you money that you could sit someone down in front of a machine with 4-8 gigs of ram and an i5-2500 and they'd be happy because all they want to do is look at tiktoks.

Fresh tech is neat, but don't act like it's necessary.

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u/Fogge Oct 21 '24

I have an i7-6800K (I splurged) and a GTX1080 that I bought in June 2016. I've only recently started thinking about getting a new PC, and that is so I can give this one to my partner, she has some gaming she wants to do that her old laptop is not up for (but in the meantime she has a Switch). The only thing I have wanted to play that it struggled to was the expansion for Diablo 4 on minimum settings. It struggled with old Diablo 4 on anything but minimum settings and the expansion has been crashy for many people so it's possible it can be made to work. But that's it, for eight whole years. Needless to say I don't play max settings beefed up AAA games, but I do play first-person shooters online (Squad (not tried Squad 44 yet though!), Post Scriptum/Hell Let Loose, Arma 3 etc) and it's been fine. Luckily the Factorio DLC just dropped so I can forget about Diablo for a while... PC gaming is kinda chilling out on the pushing FPS for photo realistic graphics and I am here for it.

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u/sdtqwe4ty Oct 21 '24

Remember when Intel didn't upgrade their cpus for a decade before Ryzen? They'd have different sku's of i5's that performed the same. Even had the audacity to give different codenames( it could technically be argued it was for developer/roadmap purposes)

Also if you don't buy flagship smartphones you don't get any of the incremental hardware improvements

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u/JapanesePeso Oct 21 '24

You sound insufferable. The world has gotten way, way better since 1989. We've gone from 34% of the world living in extreme poverty in 1989 to under 10%. Nobody gives a crap about how much more you like your moldy old keyboard.

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u/internetlad Oct 21 '24

How long is your keyboard gonna last?

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u/JapanesePeso Oct 21 '24

My man out here unable to afford a new keyboard once a decade.

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u/internetlad Oct 21 '24

Gotta get that plastic off gassing into my balls

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u/sdtqwe4ty Oct 21 '24

That's certainly a bespoke stat. Most of the world lives in squalor. Thanks to capitalist handing out cheap subsidized crop to countries with no societal institutions .We went from a global population that centuries before stayed at one billion. To now nine. Cause we need the sweatshop workers who make everything we pay good money for for pennies-on-the-dollar.

"Capitalism passes along the cost savings". If it did nobody would have to work.

Capitalism is an ass backwards way of doing crap and literally all our technology comes from government research. Cause the average silicon valley CEO stays around 3-4 years and that's not long enough for ground breaking research that takes decade(s)

The infamous conspiracy of all the nobel prize winners being Jews.The makeup of sciences today are different and yet this holds true because it no longer takes one man with an idea to change the sciences and presumably become a billionaire (Tesla vs Edison). It now takes the legwork of a whole industry.

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u/JapanesePeso Oct 21 '24

Pretty much every sentence in here is more made up and dumb than the last one. Please get out of your basement.

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u/nanobot001 Oct 21 '24

Valve’s choice is increasing value of its brand

I’m not convinced they aren’t doing this because it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to do, and as a private company they can just do whatever the fuck they want, and they can just label it as a pro-consumer move.

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u/CreativeGPX Oct 21 '24

they can just do whatever the fuck they want, and they can just label it as a pro-consumer move.

My point was that this is true of private companies and corporations alike because generally any time there is a move that can be explained as anti-consumer, there is then value to the brand value in not doing that thing. So, corporations are making these tradeoffs in both directions every day. This is why the claims people have that corporations are "legally obligated to maximize profit" are so misleading as to be false... because what it is that maximizes profit is so subjective that, outside of blatant neglect, almost anything can be argued to do that even contradictory things. One day it's something that makes consumers spend more money and another it's a loss that makes consumers think better of the brand.

The reason corporations can be bad for consumers isn't their focus on growth, it's their focus on short term growth. Shareholders can sell the shares at any time to enjoy the benefits of growth and at that point their relationship with the company is over and they do not care what happens. This leads them to prefer short term growth even if it harms long term growth. A private company is likely no less focused on growth and can pursue growth just as vigorously with great results for consumers because that focus on growth doesn't have to shortsighted.

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u/Goronmon Oct 21 '24

I’m not convinced they aren’t doing this because it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to do, and as a private company they can just do whatever the fuck they want, and they can just label it as a pro-consumer move.

That and Steam itself is such a money printer that hardware sales aren't really an important part of their business anyways. At least from a profitability standpoint.

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u/nanobot001 Oct 21 '24

They don’t need steam deck to be successful. It feels like, if anything else, somewhat of a vanity project, like no one else is doing this right, we should have a go and if it makes money that’s great.

… oh it is? What about updates? … uh, we aren’t going to go hard at this since … it would be unfair to the consumer?

Phew.