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.
The big ones obey, because they have international presence. From what I’ve heard, the small ones will provide it on request, since chances are they have no financial reason not to anyway.
Yep.
A decade or so ago it used to be that GPL source requests/demands were an uphill battle. You had to beg, threaten legal action, for months to get somewhere.
Nowadays most manufacturers recognise that open sourcing actually helps them because people will create custom ROMs, or do the kernel upbring for newer versions the ODM refused to, so now with 0 work you have a new BSP and can push updates faster.