Gabe Newell and his team don’t want to quickly abandon the Steam Deck portable PC, as they did with Steam Machines (which were desktop computers)…
„If we’re doing this right, we’re going to be selling [the Steam Deck] in millions of units, and it’s going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in. And that’s going to have long-term benefits for us. We think that this makes sense, and we think this makes sense going forward at this price point. We don’t have this tying ratio — we have to sell eight games for each one of these — our calculus is more, is this the right product?
Nobody has ever said, “Oh we have a huge success, where there’s a big demand for this, but our margins are too thin.” A lot of people have overpriced things and killed the opportunity and convinced people it’s an uninteresting category from the get-go. Our view is, we’re doing this for the long haul and there’s a lot of opportunities,” Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, told IGN in an interview.
The competition with the Nintendo Switch could be decided by the openness of the ecosystem, which in the Switch’ case, it’s not possible: „Our view is that the openness of the PC ecosystem is the superpower that we all collectively benefit from. So if you want to install the Epic Games Store on here, if you want to, run an Oculus Quest on it, those things are, those are all great. Those are features, right?
That’s what I want to hear as a gamer. I don’t want to hear that somebody’s got some Trojan Horse that’s going to try to lock me down. I want to hear whatever I want to do. If there’s hardware, I want to attach to it. If there’s software, I want to install. I can just go and do it. And you know, we think that’s great,” Newell added. Notice how even he said gamer (making Electronic Arts look bad in the process). Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, praised the Steam Deck exactly for the openness!
Steam Deck has got so much attention that it has been back-ordered well into 2022… but if you were one of the early adopters, you might receive your unit in December.
Source: WCCFTech
