i know they suck monopolistic ass, but damn arent they good at doing the bare minimum with excellence and not making us feel fucked over.
“Steam does like everyone else but gets praised for it.”
No console or handheld gaming system is giving out yearly refreshes.
It doesn’t even make much sense in the PC sphere either. It’s physically possible but in regards to cost and performance, there’s not much to gain from a yearly upgrade cycle.
I’d say updating the deck every year may hurt sales too, because why buy the deck now when you know a new, better one is only 6 months away?
And it’s easier to certify that a game works as expected when there aren’t too many hardware revisions.
I don’t think it would hurt sales, exactly, but I doubt it would be cost-effective to keep redoing them. People would still buy, but like you said, some people might wait, and that means the old ones go unsold, meaning Valve can’t recoup that investment.
I mean, Valve has more money than they know what to do with, but I imagine they’d like to keep it that way.
deleted by creator
Common Valve W
Good. It sucks when companies make you always have to get the latest and greatest hardware if you want the new features that, it turns out, run perfectly fine on the old hardware (once someone hacks it).
Valve being based.
Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.
For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.
Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.
old phones can be updated to the latest OS.
Even for phones, it’s a massive environmental problem.
