What do you think to Valve's stance on this?

It's a very Valve solution. Limit their own liability while "providing value to customers" in their habitual phrasing - customers that want AI can have it and customers that don't can avoid it. Developers get to do what they want as long as they provide sufficient data to Valve.

One thing that could provide a wrinkle is language support. If the data sets the AI is trained on are majority English then the output will be majority English, and Valve have recently been tightening up on half-arsed localisation - promo artwork has to be available in all the store page languages, for example.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusOut of curiosity, would they actually show up? And not just appear as part of "Windows 11"?

Yes. They all have APUs. "AMD Custom GPU 0405," the APU used in the Deck (although, according to a Discord comment, potentially not the Deck OLED) is used by 0.78% of hardware survey respondents; I've not seen any of the chips used by any of the other handhelds in the list. 0.15% is the share that gets you out of the Other bucket.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWhy are these vendors afraid to embrace SteamOS? Windows is an objectively terrible operating system for a handheld device.

Microsoft will give them a big bag of money; Valve will not give them a big bag of money.

(plus they already have a business relationship with Microsoft and they don't with Valve, and they have experience slapping Windows on their hardware and they don't with Linux)

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Quoting: MohandevirDo we have any sales figures for these Windows handheld? Judging by the Steam hardware survey, they may be cannibilizing one another for a small fraction of the handheld market, leaving the Steam Deck untouched with the vast majority of that market. Not sure it would make sense to Microsoft to invest in a custom handheld os, if that's the case.

The estimates I've seen are that the Deck has sold its "multiple millions" and the Ally has sold ~500k - but they might have had 499,999 returns. None of these other devices have enough users to show up in the Steam Hardware Survey, but the Deck does.

The value to Microsoft isn't in hardware sales (just like it isn't for Valve); it's to say "Windows is a gaming OS, honest!" Same as for the DirectX-box.

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Quoting: lejimsterWith all these Windows handhelds being released I wonder how long it will be before Windows introduced a custom OS that competes with SteamOS.

I think that if it happens - if the Windows also-rans that Microsoft have paid for don't do the trick of blunting the Deck's effectiveness as a Linux gaming demonstration device - then it will be Xbox-branded rather than Windows-branded and will only play games from the Microsoft Store. No Steam, no EGS, no GOG, no Itch, but you will get Game Pass, Activision, Blizzard, id, Bethesda, Arkane, and all the other games studios they've bought. Whether the market would go for that - especially if getting your games from the Microsoft Store also let you use them on iOS and Android - I couldn't say.

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we aim to address market pain points and dedicate efforts to the handheld space

They haven't, though. It's still got an awful layout and no trackpads. Even in the saddled with an OS that's absolutely awful for a handheld PC sector of the handheld PC market they haven't fixed anything. Maybe this one can avoid destroying its own SD cards, but that's not a given.

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Quoting: PenglingI'd guess that it's Steam being too strict with its criteria for the Fest. I noticed it with the upcoming Dinos vs. Robots Fest, for example - just having robots or dinosaurs isn't good enough for inclusion, a game has to go in-depth into the societal implications and so on, so I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on here, too.

They've got plenty of similar games in there. I'd expect Sega just didn't opt in for some reason.

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Still, it would be nice no matter what distribution of Linux you pick, if we can just tell people to "go here" to get whatever app it is they're after rather than having to do a support-dance to find out their specific distribution and version to see what's available to find out how they can grab something.

We already can. The "app store" interfaces like Discover don't care if you're on a distro that uses debs, rpms, or whatever, or if you're pulling snaps from snapcraft or flatpaks from flathub; they'll just present a list of applications and an install button. Packaging formats are only of interest to distro maintainers and angry people on the Internet - end users have no reason to care.

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I can recommend Parkitect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable), which is 50% off in the sale.

I'm surprised Two Point Hospital (which is also a great game) isn't included - it seems like it would have been a good fit.

I have Megaquarium [External Link] and Prison Architect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable for both) but I've not actually got around to playing either of those, so I can't specifically recommend them.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat is interesting--although I think to be fair we should note that many games that don't sell could be perfectly sincere, even good, games that just didn't happen to find their audience.

That is true. And elsewhere in Valve's document they say that the limited community stuff doesn't affect sales for genuine games - it just scuppers those games that only exist for card/emoji/whatever farming.

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