this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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This is nothing new. Before the steam deck came out, Handheld PCs have already been ~~overpriced~~ expensive. Other manufacturers haven't bothered about affordability before, during ot after the steam deck.
That said, Gabe Newell said the steam deck was priced "painfully", which means they probably had very low margins on the hardware and are making it back on sales on their store. Other manufacturers do not have that luxury.
Steam Deck hits a sweet spot. You can make it more powerful, but it'll cost significantly more. You can make it cheaper, but you'll cut out too many games people want to play.
Also, anything like this with a resolution higher than 720p is wasting pixels and GPU power, IMO.
There are several competitors that are more powerful, like the ROG Ally. They also need a bigger battery to support it, or they have worse battery life. And they're more expensive.
Clear text and UI is an issue because games don't scale their shit properly.
Those came after, Valve hasn’t a time machine (as far as I know)
You’re right about games not scaling shit properly, but that’s 99% of the time in gen 8 (console-first) games, where those games where designed solely for big screens with HD+ resolutions. Modern games have already started figuring out scaling for different resolutions and aspect ratios
Higher resolution will mean smaller text by default.
They can find some margin in using a rolling Arch distro instead of paying for Windows, Gabe helpfully provided the template that you can reuse.
Which if anything is other manufacturers benefiting from the R&D that Valve have done with Proton and just making it freely available to anyone.
I doubt Windows is the reason these are more expensive. Microsoft wants Windows in the handheld PC space, so they are likely to provide licenses for free and likely help subsidize the costs a bit, especially if they include trials for gamepass.
Except that Windows versions of the same handheld are more expensive.
I am not aware that you are able to use SteamOS on anything that isnt an AMD CPU and GPU (only APU?).
If it's not yet generally available for any hardware combination it would be very tempting to switch.
Already used the desktop of the deck quite a bit to customize some behaviour (automatic start of syncthing after (game-mode) boot to sync save states to my PC, EmuDeck, emulators in general)
I wouldnt call devices like the GPDwin overpriced considering it's probably lower volume production and niche use case.
But they are overpriced in direct performance comparison.