t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
Gamers Nexus went over the privacy concerns with the Meta Quest 3 and they’re arguably worse than LGs TV fiasco. That is the price you pay for cheaper devices in this market. I’d rather the extra price overhead rather than giving a corporation access to everything in my home with cameras and microphones attached to my face but that’s just me.