Quoting: sarmadWhen will Valve start selling the Steam Deck in China? It's strange to ignore such a big market.

I said in a comment on a different article

Quoting: CatKillerI think having an official third party releasing in Hong Kong is as close as Valve wants to get to an official release in China. They've had to make a Steam For China since Chinese customers were using VPNs and vanilla Steam to get round the restrictions on gaming in China; there are 30-something games released per day on Steam, but around that many are authorised for sale in China per year; if you're too young it's a legal requirement that you're only allowed to spend a specified number of hours per week gaming, and only at specified times. It's just way too many headaches all round to try to sell a vanilla-Steam-based gaming machine whose main attraction is that you can play on it whenever you want.

That's still pretty much what I think.

I would really like to see Valve work out how to ship the Deck to more countries - the fact that people that want one can't get one is the biggest flaw of the Deck. Whether that's with a logistics partner like they've got in those Asian territories, or doing it mostly themselves like they are in North America and the EU. But China, as big a market as it is, comes with its own special headaches.

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Quoting: GuestI'm somewhat a fan of this idea. I know that most games aren't horrible or inappropriate, but I like to know what I'm getting into and indie titles usually don't have an ESRB rating.

Me, too, actually.

What would be particularly good is if the ratings bodies made it quick and painless (and cheap!) to get the ratings so that indie titles would have an ESRB/PEGI/BBFC/whatever rating.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, these days they could just say "For anticheat reasons, we allow only the Steam Runtime Environment--any Linux that doesn't use that is out."

Oh yes, they definitely could do it if they really wanted. We have all sorts of containerisation solutions that are used for srs bsns that would probably be a good starting point. But... we have 2% of, like, 20% of the gaming market, and the srs bsns containers are predominately geared up to put iron-grip control in the hands of the system administrator rather than some third-party game publisher.

They could also implement actual anti-cheat where they control the playing field and players are only able to take actions in accordance with the rules. It doesn't matter at all what state the client is in then. But every decision made server-side introduces latency, and they would have to pay for running everything rather than offloading a lot of it onto their players. They don't like either of those things, either.

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Since I got my OLED, I've completed Mirror's Edge [External Link] and Ico [External Link], played a bit more Art of Rally [External Link], started Ori and the Blind Forest [External Link], and restarted Horizon Zero Dawn [External Link].

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Quoting: EhvisWhy would that be? I'm not a mac person, but I highly doubt that Apple would make it easy for software to run something at elevated permissions. So maybe the mac built is running with the same restricted "anti-cheat" as they did to support wine. If that is the case, some of these cheaters may just move over to try their luck on a mac. Maybe not as many since that would require a fairly significant investment.

The thing to remember is that "anti-cheat" isn't really anti-cheat at all; it's anti-tamper. They want to know that the software and environment that it's running in hasn't been modified to do anything unexpected. On Windows, you've got a fairly standardised environment, but the broad range of hardware means that you need the ability to load, for example, hardware drivers... so people can load a "driver" that's actually modifying the running environment of user software. So the software developers put their anti-tamper software at the kernel level to be able to check on all the drivers as well as the user software. Macs have a hugely reduced breadth of hardware, so drivers can just come from Apple, and there's a built-in attestation mechanism to say that software hasn't been tampered with. They just use that. On Linux, every OS install is a special snowflake, so you don't even have a baseline standard environment to look for deviations from.

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It's a shame because HDMI-CEC (when it works) is a really neat feature that AFAIK DisplayPort doesn't have. Proprietary standards are such a trainwreck.

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Quoting: denyasisIt makes no sense to send a desktop experience (complete with glyphs, resolution and interface) to a deck client.

Those are all entirely down to the game. If the game uses Steam Input, though, it does get appropriate controller glyphs automagically.

It does seem like In-Home Streaming is a really low priority for Valve, which is surprising when they've released their high-profile hardware where it's such a good fit. But then, you'd think that letting people give Valve money would also be high on the "do not break this" list, and yet the Deck launched without being able to buy things from the Store, and browsing one's wishlist to pick things to buy is still really janky.

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Quoting: LordDaveTheKindI rarely used it. Can it work as well as Sunshine does (i.e. with hardware encoding too)?

For a period it was really great.

For some time after the Deck was released, streaming was broken. As you played, audio would get distorted and then die completely.

Then the fix for that got released, and streaming was really good. Play with the performance of your desktop with the convenience of the Deck.

Then the OLED got released, and the update after that (which brought colour management in) made streaming super dark, so it was broken again.

And then this update has made it so streaming doesn't even really start.

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Quoting: WorMzyStill would prefer a move to Qt5/6. It'd be more inline with the Plasma desktop use for the Steam Deck. Hopefully they're not planning a move from Plasma to Gnome any time soon. :unsure:

Valve recommend that other developers use Qt in the "bullshit launchers are bullshit" section of their Deck documentation [External Link].

Our recommendation is to use standalone technologies like Qt for launchers instead of OS-dependent frameworks like .NET / WPF. For best results, skip separate launchers altogether and integrate their functionality into the game client UI instead, where controller support is likely better.

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Haven't checked (and I might not for a while because my desktop GPU is now weaker than the Deck's APU) but the thing I'm most interested in is whether streaming to the Deck is still far too dark unless you disable hardware decoding. That came in with the last big Deck update. Don't know if it's a Steam client bug or a SteamOS bug, though.

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