I told you security guards lined the halls during my Valve visit. CNET’s Scott Stein can back me up. But I’ve never seen guards during previous Valve trips — and maybe they were only there that day. Steve Burke (Gamers Nexus) told me he didn’t see any when he visited.
According to Valve, games are already Steam Deck Verified, they’ll “automatically be verified on Steam Machine.” There will be a Steam Frame Verified program, too.
[steamcommunity.com]
Valve showed The Verge versions of its Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Controller with clear plastic shells, and we put together a photo gallery so you can look at them, too. Perhaps Valve will release something like them as limited editions, like it did with the Steam Deck OLED.
I’m not ready to call time on the “everything is an Xbox” strategy just yet, but you have to admit: Valve launching a home console that plays PC games does feel like a potential problem for Microsoft.
MrCraggle:
RIP to whatever Xbox was turning into.
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IGN’s Wesley Yin-Poole has an excellent interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, including one reason why they have no news about Steam Deck 2. It’s because yet again, the promised “generational leap” in performance is not yet possible. They haven’t found the right chip.
Griffais says:
“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
In another good tidbit about Valve’s new hardware from Gamers Nexus, the channel says that the controller has LED markers that can be detected by the Frame. Pretty cool!
Just for Verge subscribers, Sean Hollister and I will be replying to comments and questions regarding Valve’s new Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller. Ask your questions here, and we’ll be jumping in at about 3PM ET.
The company confirmed it to Gamers Nexus in a statement:
APKs can also be side-loadable just like any non-Steam applications on Steam Deck. We expect that VR APKs that don’t leverage proprietary APls to just work.
