Steam Deck
Wen 丨 Game Pizza, Author 丨 Dante's Ark, Editor 丨 Zhou Yabo
What is the experience if you pre-ordered a latest Xiaomi mobile phone, survived a long waiting period for express delivery, and finally found that it was Lei Jun himself who knocked on the door to deliver the goods?
Last week, some U.S. gamers received Steam Deck, a handheld game developed and produced by Valve (hereinafter referred to as V Society) in this form. Gabe Newell, the founder of the company, who has always been affectionately known as "G Fat", made a personal delivery as a courier, and the video recording the move was also clipped and uploaded to social media as part of the Steam Deck promotional material.
According to the official slogan, the Steam Deck not only emphasizes the liberating sitting posture in form like the Nintendo Switch, but further emphasizes performance, launching with the gimmick of "the world's most powerful and full-featured handheld gaming pc". In an earlier interview, G Fat said the idea of players wanting to play PC games on the go or on the go has been around for decades, "Just like Apple released the iPhone 15 years ago, I hope that steam Deck will bring a major turning point in this field." ”
Stacking is an important way to realize this vision. Steam Deck is equipped with AMD custom APU, 16GB of RAM, a 7-inch (1280×800) LCD screen, can smoothly run "Devil May Cry 5", "Control", "Death Stranding" and other AAA games, according to the default settings of this device, the recently released "Eldon Law Ring" can also maintain more than 45 frames most of the time.
Another advantage is the massive library of games that Steam owns, which currently has more than 60,000 games in the Steam store, and on March 6, V announced that more than 1,000 works have been "verified" or reached the "playable" standard and are growing.
On the contrary, the above two advantages are also the embarrassment of Steam Deck. Due to the pursuit of performance, to run a game with high configuration requirements on a small screen, you can only compromise on weight and battery life, the Steam Deck weighs 669 grams, and the weight of the Switch Lite as a reference is only 275 grams. The official battery life time is vaguely 2-8 hours, but when many evaluation agencies test play games such as "Devil May Cry 5" and "Control", the device will lose power after 1.5 hours.
The lack of the "first escort" masterpiece that the traditional host will have means that Steam is difficult to build its own content barriers with this device, and it will not have too much impact on the "Royal Three" pattern that has been stable in the host market for many years. The most suitable use scenario for it may still be to play some indie games with low power consumption anytime and anywhere.
V Society, from content provider to hardware vendor?
V Society was once a great game development company, its famous IP includes "Counter-Strike", "Half-Life", "Portal", "Road to Survival", etc., each series is thunderous in the history of games, taking "Half-Life" as an example, the two generations of works MTC scores are as high as 96, Game Informer once ranked "Half-Life 2" in the history of the 200 top 200 games 5th.
If you consider the pioneering significance of these games in terms of gameplay and genre, their reputation and sales are not so important, such as "Half-Life" and "Portal" for 3D FPS games, "Counter-Strike" for e-sports, "Road to Survival" for "online zombie" mode and so on. If you have to pick a fault for this company, there is only "G fat will not count 3" that has made global fans complain for many years, no matter how successful they are in business, they are not out of the 3rd generation.
The glory of the past, coupled with the gorgeous turn from "making games" to "making platforms", V Society has won the reputation of "Vacation Club", which refers to the company's extremely "Buddhist system" in developing works, and employees work like vacations. In the past 10 years, V Society has only produced 2 more influential new games, namely "Dota 2" - the typical representative of "opening and eating for 10 years, not opening for 10 years", and "Half-life: Alex", which is recognized as the pearl of TGA's "game of the year" in a certain year, and single-handedly boosted the game experience of VR hardware devices.
Half-Life: Alex
With a "cold attitude" towards game development, V Society is quite obsessed with hardware devices.
As early as 2012, V Society unveiled the Steam Machine plan, which is a series of game matching hardware, including the gamepad Steam Controller launched in 2015 and the streaming device Steam Link. Steam Controller looks "outrageous" in appearance, and the joystick in the upper right corner of the controller has been replaced with a large clickable touchpad to adapt to the game designed for keyboard and mouse, but the new operation logic has not been bought by users, and the production was officially announced in 2019. Steam Link's fate is similar, from 2018 it will no longer be sold as hardware, but as a software service.
Steam Machine plan the most painful failure, is the host product (V society called "living room PC") SteamBox, the birth of this machine road is very bumpy, shortly after the announcement in 2013, V society announced that it will focus on the operating system SteamOS, the hardware part to the partners, lasted more than two years of running-in, postponement, Steam Box ushered in "see the light death", sales of less than 500,000 sets in half a year, and two years later, Steam removed the hosting section from the home page.
In May 2021, G Fat's student question session at a high school in New Zealand first hinted at Steam's upcoming new console, followed by a former V Society's product manager replying to netizens on the forum RestEra: "They've been developing a properly made Steam Machine." "This device is the Steam Deck that just came out.
Putting aside the emotional factors such as exploring cutting-edge technology, the reasons for the repeated defeats in game hardware are not difficult to understand, first of all, relying on the virtuous circle between hardware and content to build its own commercial moat is a successful model that has been repeatedly verified in the game industry in the past few decades.
For example, Nintendo's current status originated from the "royalty system" in the 1980s, because it has the most popular family game console FC, Nintendo can ask other developers to submit the game for review and share the copyright with itself, so as to harvest the player's wallet under the premise of ensuring quality. Apple's App Store model is similar, providing a platform, which also obtains the right to review, distribute and take profit rights for all the games on the shelves.
Second, the pattern of the PC game market is not stable. In the past, the V Society was able to sit back and relax because Steam played a similar platform role to Nintendo in the past and Apple today, and 30% of the sales revenue of each Steam game on the shelves had to be handed over to the V Society. But over the years, several powerful developers have been dissatisfied with this and have set up their own online game stores, such as EA's Origin and Ubisoft's Upplay. Epic's addition has muddyed the waters even more, relying on 12% drawdowns and frequent discount campaigns, free gifts, and its market share will exceed 15% in 2020.
This is also why G Fat will compare the meaning of Steam Deck to the original iPhone - a complete content ecology, which must be based on hardware terminals.
Can the new console impact the "Imperial Three Houses"?
According to a study by analyst firm Ampere Analysis, the global console game market share reached a record $60 billion in 2021, with Sony remaining the market leader, accounting for 46% of all revenue, Nintendo for 29%, and Microsoft for 25%. Today, the "royal three" pattern of the host market has been maintained for about 20 years.
Looking back at the first time a new console breaks into the market, there is at least one high-quality exclusive game to "escort" it. The original PlayStation had Final Fantasy 7 and the original Xbox had Halo, and Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with switch after experiencing the failure of the Wii U console. To some extent, it is the popularity and reputation of these games that lay the basic sales plate for the console, after all, manufacturers want to sell hardware, but players buy hardware to play games.
Steam Deck breaks this tradition, and the only game developed specifically for Steam Deck is Aperture Technology Jobs, which is released for free by V Society, which is only to help players understand the control and functions of Steam Deck, which does not meet the standards of exclusive games.
"Aperture Science and Technology Part-time Work"
In contrast, the "synonym" Switch of today's handheld, Nintendo has the most exclusive IP in the "Royal Three Houses", and a series of games such as Mario, Pokémon, and Zelda can only be played on switch. Animal Friends and Fitness Ring Adventure are also blockbusters, even if they don't take the performance route, these games give players a reason to "have to buy Switch".
In the V news agency's announcement, it was also specifically mentioned that there was no interest in launching exclusive works: "It doesn't make sense for us to do this, Steam Deck is a PC, so it should be played like on a PC." ”
But whether it is subjectively "unreasonable" or objectively "unconditional" is another way of saying it. At the hardware level, SteamDeck is a host based on the X86 architecture, its hardware unit, power consumption calculations are not as independent as the game console has a relatively independent architecture; the software level is more illustrative, Steam Deck is completely open source, if the player does not like Steam OS, you can also install the Windows system.
This positioning of "HOLDING a PC in hand" makes "the best picture quality and performance performance" have to add the qualifications of the handheld field, and it naturally cannot be compared with the TV host or PC in the entire field of game hardware. However, from the perspective of "being able to play PC games anytime, anywhere", weight and battery life have become unavoidable problems for Steam Deck. Even at the expense of grip comfort, the Steam Deck can't hold it for long.
The comfort level advertised on the official website
The conditions for endurance realization in the propaganda are quite harsh. The Verge has conducted detailed power tests on the device, and under the premise of locking 30 frames, Ghost Walker can play for 3 hours and 20 minutes, Forza Horizon 5 can play for 4 hours, and Portal 2 more than 10 years ago can support 5 hours and 40 minutes. In simple terms, the older the game, the smaller the volume, the longer the battery life, but it is positioned as a "handheld PC", and the performance of the lock 30 frames is far from expectations. Action and racing games are difficult to call smooth at 30 frames, and the maximum 8 hours officially stated seem to appear only in some extreme situations.
Without differentiated competition, it is impossible to create a unique play scene.
Even if you don't compare Nintendo with the game ecology as the killer, Microsoft and Sony, the two giants in the field of game consoles, have gradually weakened the "exclusive" weight in market competition in recent years. Microsoft is in a weak position in the host war, relying on the implementation of XGP subscriptions to connect the computer desk and the living room, Sony's iconic first-party IP "Uncharted Sea" and "God of War" have also delayed landing on the PC, and the significance of hardware for the game industry itself is weakening. The situation of relying on equipment to impact the market pattern seems to be the idea of the last and even the last cycle. Moreover, Steam Deck seems to have not had any scarcity since its birth.
Therefore, the focus of Steam Deck at this stage is really not as good as first focusing on Steam's own third-party ecology, and the massive indie games gathered in its platform are still ahead of the home console field with a higher threshold. There are also a large number of independent games in China that have entered the player's sight from Steam, from the early years of "Taiwu Painted Scroll" and "Invisible Guardian", to last year's "Fireworks" and "Dyson Ball Project".
Indie games usually don't have high requirements for hardware performance, and there is less to worry about steam Deck's slightly weak battery life. Compared with Switch, the openness of the Steam Deck software makes this batch of games without any porting threshold, and players can enjoy it at a relatively low price for the first time.
Perhaps Steam Deck cannot completely rewrite the industry ecology like the iPhone in the future, but to be a "high-end millet" that allows players to choose more and create relatively unique use scenarios can be its practical desire at this stage.