313: Chan's on the Move

00:00SPEAKEROkay, so spoiler alert, we're recording the cold open

00:03SPEAKERafter we had the, recorded the main conversation here.

00:05SPEAKERWait, you're letting him know?

00:07SPEAKERBut like-

00:08SPEAKERPulling the curtain back?

00:09SPEAKERI'm just gonna say, after talking to Norm today,

00:12SPEAKERby the way, Norm's here.

00:14SPEAKERI'm not here here.

00:15SPEAKERNot here, not now, but he'll be here in a minute.

00:17SPEAKERLike five minutes tops.

00:19SPEAKERBut also he was here in the past.

00:20SPEAKERSo after talking to him, I was like,

00:22SPEAKERmaybe I should dig out my index and plug it in.

00:25SPEAKERMaybe you should dig out.

00:26SPEAKERI heard there's a pretty spectacular new VR game

00:29SPEAKERout there to play.

00:30SPEAKERThat's what people have said to me.

00:32SPEAKERAnd I'm interested and intrigued.

00:35SPEAKERTalking about Luminous Arise.

00:37SPEAKERI think I quite literally said on the next Lander podcast

00:39SPEAKERthis week that VR now is a thing that I plug in

00:42SPEAKERevery time Enhance puts out a new game, basically.

00:44SPEAKERYeah, like between Tetris Effect and this,

00:47SPEAKERlike they're banger VR games sitting in a chair.

00:50SPEAKERIt is, dude, like the first time I played

00:52SPEAKERthrough the Luminous Arise journey mode,

00:53SPEAKERwhich was the kind of campaign, full synesthesia,

00:56SPEAKERfull synesthetic experience.

00:59SPEAKERLike borderline religious at times.

01:00SPEAKERLike some of the best use, it's a fricking puzzle game,

01:02SPEAKERbut it's some of the best use of VR I have ever seen.

01:05SPEAKER- I mean, you haven't played Alex also.

01:07SPEAKER- No, well, I've played a little bit of Alex.

01:09SPEAKER- Okay.

01:09SPEAKER- I was very impressed with what I've seen of Alex,

01:11SPEAKERbut like the fact that they can take a VR,

01:13SPEAKERlike, sorry, like a block dropping puzzle game,

01:16SPEAKERwhich both Tetris and Luminous are,

01:18SPEAKERand turn them into this overwhelming at times

01:21SPEAKERaudio visual experience really feels like a testament

01:23SPEAKERto like what you can do with VR

01:25SPEAKERwith some good old fashioned artistry.

01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so now the question is, did you set up controllers

01:30SPEAKERall around you so that you were feeling the vibrations

01:33SPEAKERthrough the chair?

01:34SPEAKER- Sorry, I don't think the trans vibrator

01:36SPEAKERis PS5 compatible, unfortunately.

01:38SPEAKER- Sir, in Tetris Effect, you can set up controllers

01:42SPEAKERand plug them in and trans vibrator them.

01:44SPEAKER- God, that's right, they did, they did.

01:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

01:47SPEAKER- Poor trans vibration technology.

01:49SPEAKER- Yeah, we have, now it's even, it's higher resolution

01:51SPEAKERwith all that HD rumble and your Switch Pro controllers,

01:56SPEAKERand like, you can get crazy with that business if you want.

02:00SPEAKER- Is that what VR has been missing all this time,

02:02SPEAKERis that they just need to develop

02:03SPEAKERhigh definition teledildonics?

02:05SPEAKER- I assure you that the one thing that VR

02:07SPEAKERhas not been missing is high definition teledildonics.

02:11SPEAKER- Fair, I've heard some things actually.

02:14SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a, look, it's a,

02:17SPEAKERI would say it's a thriving cottage industry

02:20SPEAKERof advanced teledildonics technology

02:24SPEAKERfor your virtual reality pleasure, literally.

02:29SPEAKERWe should start the show.

02:30SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:54SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:58SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

03:01SPEAKERI'm Will.

03:02SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

03:03SPEAKER- So, okay, we pulled back the curtain,

03:05SPEAKERwe talked about VR in the cold open.

03:08SPEAKERThere's really not a whole lot else to say here

03:11SPEAKERother than young Norman Chan of tested.com

03:16SPEAKERand youtube.com/tested, I think now,

03:20SPEAKERmaybe it's tested.com, I can't remember

03:21SPEAKERwhat the short URL is, anyway.

03:23SPEAKER- Keep talking, I'll find out.

03:24SPEAKER- Find Tested on YouTube.

03:27SPEAKERNorm got invited to go up to Valve to see what,

03:30SPEAKERI think he, to see a new hardware slate.

03:33SPEAKERThey didn't even, well, you'll find out.

03:35SPEAKERThey didn't tell him what it was, but he's here.

03:38SPEAKERWe're gonna talk to him about three big products

03:40SPEAKERthat Valve just announced this week.

03:42SPEAKERIt's all stuff that's coming in 2026.

03:45SPEAKERAnd I don't know about you, Brad,

03:47SPEAKERbut I wasn't expecting any of this this week.

03:51SPEAKER- No, quite a surprise, quite a slate,

03:53SPEAKERquite a salvo of, here you go, three new hardware.

03:56SPEAKERWe didn't do one at a time, we didn't spread them out.

03:58SPEAKERWe don't have a marketing plan.

03:59SPEAKERHere's three new hardware products, go nuts.

04:04SPEAKER- Welcome back to the show, Norm.

04:05SPEAKERWe're so glad to have you here.

04:07SPEAKERIt's exciting to have somebody here

04:10SPEAKERwho's had hands-on time with the thing

04:12SPEAKERthat I think everybody's most excited with

04:14SPEAKERout of this Valve event, the Steam Controller.

04:16SPEAKER- Two hands-on, two capacitive sensing hands.

04:20SPEAKER- Two thumbs-on. - Yeah, thumbs-on.

04:23SPEAKERLow touchpad, thumbs-on.

04:25SPEAKERYeah, Steam Controller, right?

04:27SPEAKER- Okay, I gotta ask you, I don't think actually

04:29SPEAKERmost people are excited about the game controller,

04:31SPEAKERthe most excited about the game controller.

04:33SPEAKERWhat was the thing that you, like what was the thing?

04:36SPEAKERIt was the headset for you, right?

04:38SPEAKER- Oh yeah, Steam Frame. - You were excited

04:39SPEAKERabout coming out of this?

04:40SPEAKER- Yeah, and I, you know, the expectations were there

04:43SPEAKERgoing into it that they would be announcing the headset.

04:45SPEAKERThe rumors were real hot.

04:48SPEAKERSo both Steam Machine and Steam Controller,

04:50SPEAKERit's not Steam Controller 2,

04:52SPEAKERthey're just calling it Steam Controller.

04:53SPEAKERThose are the surprises.

04:54SPEAKERWhen we walked into the briefing room and they're like,

04:56SPEAKER"We're gonna announce three hardware things."

04:58SPEAKERLike, "Oh, what are the three?"

05:00SPEAKER- Wait, did you expect them to be all in one box?

05:02SPEAKER- Hang on. - It's like,

05:03SPEAKER"Hey, I'm just gonna show you three things today."

05:04SPEAKER- Wait, hang on, I have to back up.

05:07SPEAKERThey didn't tell you anything

05:08SPEAKERabout what they were showing you before you went out there?

05:09SPEAKER- No, no, it was hardware briefing.

05:11SPEAKERAnd I mean, you didn't say no to hardware briefing

05:13SPEAKERfrom Valve? - Oh no, of course not.

05:14SPEAKERYeah, it's just like, I love having gone

05:16SPEAKERto a million press trips in my life.

05:18SPEAKERI've had like two, maybe,

05:20SPEAKERwhere they wouldn't tell you anything

05:21SPEAKERabout what they were showing you before you went.

05:23SPEAKERAnd like one of those turned out to be Apex Legends.

05:25SPEAKERYou know, it's like, there's a very short list of companies

05:28SPEAKERthat you will say yes to when they say like-

05:30SPEAKER- It comes down to all of them.

05:32SPEAKER- But we don't know what,

05:32SPEAKERwe're not gonna tell you what we're showing you.

05:34SPEAKERAnd yeah, Valve is definitely-

05:35SPEAKER- Let me tell you,

05:35SPEAKERhere's a, I'm gonna go on a lot of tangents today.

05:39SPEAKERI expected, the relationship with Valve is interesting

05:42SPEAKER'cause you know, we've got a good relationship.

05:44SPEAKERWe went for Steam Deck, Steam Deck OLED,

05:46SPEAKERand obviously, like Will, you and I went to go up

05:49SPEAKERto check, play Alyx before Alyx,

05:53SPEAKERthe full previews were out there.

05:54SPEAKERAnd we went for specifically to try Half-Life Alyx

05:57SPEAKERon a bunch of different headsets, right?

05:58SPEAKERThat was this.

06:00SPEAKER- Yeah, for reasons that were inexplicable to me,

06:02SPEAKERValve has liked us since we were at Maximum PC, right?

06:05SPEAKERLike we got early access to,

06:08SPEAKERwe got into the Vive briefings.

06:10SPEAKERWe got all the stuff that we-

06:11SPEAKER- Yes, that's right.

06:11SPEAKERWe were the only outlet- - They've always

06:12SPEAKERbeen very generous with us.

06:13SPEAKERWe had two people to use the Vive GDC

06:16SPEAKERwhen they first showed it.

06:17SPEAKERIt was a very strict limit of one person per outlet.

06:21SPEAKERAnd then you and I row-chambered it or something, Will.

06:23SPEAKERAnd I won. - Yeah, you're much better,

06:26SPEAKERyou're much better at rock, paper, scissors than I am.

06:28SPEAKERAnd Chet took pity on us. - I got to go in.

06:30SPEAKEROh, he absolutely did.

06:30SPEAKERWe were about to shoot our video, Reactions,

06:32SPEAKERwhere I was gonna tell you about that room-scale demo.

06:35SPEAKERAnd then Chet came out and said, "All right, come on, Will."

06:37SPEAKERAnd then you had to do it.

06:38SPEAKER- Chet and I were very bullish on VR early, I would say.

06:40SPEAKER(laughing)

06:42SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yeah, that's true.

06:44SPEAKERWell, I think Chet wanted to have a picture of me

06:46SPEAKERwith the headset on too, honestly.

06:47SPEAKER- The story I wanna tell is unrelated to that.

06:50SPEAKERI don't think I've told this before,

06:51SPEAKERbut every time, it was back when Doug Lombardi

06:53SPEAKERwas running PR at Valve.

06:55SPEAKERAnd I remember there was an invite that he sent out

06:58SPEAKERto some event at PAX.

07:01SPEAKERIt was at PAX, I wanna say maybe six years ago,

07:06SPEAKERafter they had, before they had announced Alex,

07:10SPEAKERor right after they announced Alex before,

07:12SPEAKERthey had done press previews.

07:14SPEAKERAnd he described it as a Steam library update.

07:19SPEAKERAnd I interpreted that as him saying in a non-committal way,

07:27SPEAKER"We are showing a game that's gonna be in the library."

07:31SPEAKERSo I thought he meant that this is gonna be an Alex demo.

07:35SPEAKERAnd so I got up there, bought a ticket, went to PAX,

07:40SPEAKERbrought camera gear, I was all amped up,

07:42SPEAKERreally like very anxious, lots of anxiety going into it,

07:46SPEAKERlike this is the chance, we're gonna play Alex,

07:47SPEAKERbut it's gonna be a brief briefing, walked into it,

07:50SPEAKERand I think I bumped into like Wes from PC Gamer there,

07:53SPEAKERand then saw Doug, said, "Hi, Doug.

07:54SPEAKER"Oh, what are you guys showing today?"

07:55SPEAKERHe goes, "Well, an update to the Steam library."

07:58SPEAKERAnd it ended up being a briefing

08:00SPEAKERabout the changing of the library display,

08:04SPEAKERthe way they organize the libraries.

08:06SPEAKER- Moving up from GTK or something, yeah.

08:08SPEAKER- Literally the UI updates.

08:10SPEAKERAnd I'm like, why am I here?

08:12SPEAKER- They didn't lie, it was an update to the Steam library.

08:15SPEAKER- Exactly, but I just like, I willed it, I want it so much.

08:18SPEAKERAnd so I live right in that realm of the Copium, right?

08:23SPEAKERAnd if you guys are on, like I'm on the subreddits,

08:25SPEAKERthere's the Valve Deckard subreddit,

08:27SPEAKERand it's 21,000 Copium engineers in there,

08:31SPEAKERand they just like read the tea leaves.

08:33SPEAKERThey're borderline conspiracy theorists.

08:35SPEAKER- Well, we've got too much tangible Valve stuff

08:38SPEAKERto talk about here to really get into this.

08:39SPEAKER- I know, I know.

08:40SPEAKER- But I assume you've seen the rumors swirling

08:42SPEAKERabout like there's a new game showed up

08:44SPEAKERin the database from Valve, and like people are,

08:47SPEAKERlook, people are saying the words Half-Life 3 a lot

08:49SPEAKERright now, and it's maybe a little--

08:51SPEAKER- Or HLX or whatever, and any game awards

08:53SPEAKERis in like a week or so, or early December, right?

08:56SPEAKER- Yeah, like three weeks.

08:57SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, that's right.

08:59SPEAKERAnd like in terms of games, they're not,

09:02SPEAKERI straight about some, is there any new content

09:05SPEAKERthat they're debuting with these machines?

09:07SPEAKER'Cause with like Steam Deck, they had the new Aperture game

09:11SPEAKERto show off demon controllers,

09:13SPEAKERand I would assume there would be something,

09:14SPEAKERand they said the only thing was maybe an update

09:16SPEAKERto the Aperture hand testing lab to work

09:19SPEAKERwith the new Steam frame controllers.

09:22SPEAKERExactly, so there's no content.

09:24SPEAKERBut at the same time, I'll tell you this at the same time,

09:25SPEAKER'cause you know, Valve, kind of like Pixar,

09:28SPEAKERlike you go there and like you say,

09:29SPEAKER"Is this the first time you guys have been to Valve?"

09:31SPEAKERI say, "Oh no, I've been there, it's a really amazing place."

09:34SPEAKERThis time at Valve, curtains everywhere, escorted security.

09:40SPEAKERYou'll see in some of the other videos

09:41SPEAKERof some of the other press who went,

09:43SPEAKERwe had name tags that we had to put on.

09:45SPEAKERAll of the Valve engineers had name tags,

09:46SPEAKERso it'd be easy to converse with them,

09:49SPEAKERbut the name tags for press had press escort required,

09:51SPEAKERand they had these like stern looking dudes in suits,

09:54SPEAKERlike right out of like a Michael Bay movie,

09:58SPEAKERlike everything short of comms in their ears

10:02SPEAKERat every corner, walking with us.

10:04SPEAKERChan's on the move.

10:06SPEAKERExactly, bathrooms, you can go bathroom here,

10:08SPEAKERyou can't go this hallway,

10:10SPEAKERand it wasn't just block off hallways, it's curtains.

10:12SPEAKERCurtains everywhere, and so it's not Chan,

10:15SPEAKERyou have to have a code name,

10:16SPEAKERit's like glasses is on the move.

10:20SPEAKERExactly, yeah, goggles.

10:22SPEAKERWhat's funny is we had Steve from Gamers Nexus

10:26SPEAKERon The Full Nerd this week to talk about this too,

10:29SPEAKERand he said that the day he went,

10:31SPEAKERthey didn't have the security stuff there.

10:33SPEAKERSo Sean Hollister was there from The Verge,

10:35SPEAKERand he said that the security was the same

10:37SPEAKERas when you were there,

10:38SPEAKERbut on the day that Steve was there,

10:40SPEAKERhe said that he didn't have any recollection

10:42SPEAKERof guys in suits standing around looking like.

10:44SPEAKEROh wow.

10:45SPEAKERYeah, so maybe there was just,

10:46SPEAKERmaybe they had like a head of state upstairs

10:48SPEAKERor something that like, yeah, anyway.

10:51SPEAKERThe Valve team did tell me that there were

10:53SPEAKERsome more sensitive stuff going on,

10:55SPEAKERprobably maybe in game development,

10:58SPEAKERbut maybe also like, who knows, legal stuff, lawyers

11:01SPEAKERor whatever, this wasn't in their main floor,

11:04SPEAKERso there was no B-roll of the actual Valve,

11:07SPEAKERtheir main lobby, all the awards that they have,

11:10SPEAKERand it was just like, what are their other floors

11:12SPEAKERthat they occupy, and maybe some of the stuff

11:14SPEAKERthat they do on those other floors

11:15SPEAKERthey didn't wanna show.

11:17SPEAKERMaybe. Maybe, of course, of course.

11:19SPEAKEROkay, well, okay, so let's get to it.

11:21SPEAKERCan we talk about, let's start with the Steam Machine then.

11:23SPEAKEROkay.

11:25SPEAKERIt's a little computer, it runs COS,

11:29SPEAKERseems pretty straightforward, great talk.

11:31SPEAKERYeah, exactly.

11:32SPEAKERIt's AMD APU, right, so it's--

11:35SPEAKERActually, I think it's--

11:36SPEAKERIt's a discrete GPU.

11:38SPEAKERYou're right, you're right, sorry,

11:39SPEAKERit's AMD with a CPU and a discrete GPU, you're right.

11:43SPEAKERNot to get too much into minutia right off the bat,

11:45SPEAKERI read the Digital Foundry write up about it this morning,

11:48SPEAKERthey're speculating that the CPU is actually an APU

11:50SPEAKERwith the GPU turned off.

11:52SPEAKERThat makes a lot of sense.

11:53SPEAKERBased on just like which, you know, Zen generation it is

11:56SPEAKERand blah, blah, blah, and like actually made me wonder,

11:59SPEAKERand then the GPU is like an RDNA 3,

12:01SPEAKERit's like a 7600 XT cut down.

12:04SPEAKERSo I wonder if they're actually, I mean,

12:07SPEAKERwe're kind of this little cart before the horse,

12:08SPEAKERbut I wonder if they are getting chips from AMD

12:11SPEAKERthat are binning poorly, and that might be a way

12:13SPEAKERfor them to keep prices down more than we would expect.

12:16SPEAKERThey did say it wasn't custom silicon,

12:18SPEAKERso unlike in Steam Deck OLED, it really seemed like

12:21SPEAKERthat was a custom version of the APU for Steam Deck OLED

12:24SPEAKERthat Valve probably paid the hundreds of thousand dollars

12:27SPEAKERfor the tape out for.

12:29SPEAKERThis is off the shelf and very well could be

12:32SPEAKERthey just found something that was,

12:34SPEAKERthat AMD had excess of, or that they could make,

12:37SPEAKER'cause the cost is like they call this

12:38SPEAKERan entry level gaming PC,

12:40SPEAKERand I think cost is gonna be a big thing.

12:42SPEAKERAnd we're gonna talk about this with Steam Frame

12:43SPEAKERwhere the price is uncertain, but you know,

12:46SPEAKERto make Steam Machine appealing, 6X the power of Steam Deck,

12:49SPEAKERI think it's gotta be like that $500 price range.

12:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I agree that it needs to be that

12:55SPEAKERto justify where it sits in the price continuum,

12:57SPEAKERbut I kind of worry it's gonna be more than that.

13:00SPEAKERI'm not sure.

13:01SPEAKER- I mean, it's gotta be console priced.

13:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I agree with you, 'cause it seems like

13:05SPEAKEReverything I've seen makes it seem like it's roughly

13:07SPEAKERin the base PS5 Series X ballpark of performance.

13:10SPEAKER- Exactly, yep.

13:11SPEAKER- I mean, it's, well, okay, so two things.

13:13SPEAKEROne is I think that their probably price target

13:15SPEAKERwas 500 bucks before tariffs and AI ate all the RAM

13:19SPEAKERand SSDs, and I'd say they probably have some wiggle room

13:23SPEAKERand configuration and stuff like that

13:24SPEAKERthat they can make it hit.

13:27SPEAKERI also, I mean, I don't think it's gonna be $500,

13:31SPEAKERjust to be clear, given the current larger

13:34SPEAKERmacroeconomic pressures on them.

13:38SPEAKERThe thing that was most interesting to me

13:40SPEAKERabout this machine is I think that they're trying

13:41SPEAKERto establish the Steam Deck, the first one,

13:46SPEAKERas a baseline for video game performance,

13:50SPEAKERlike a min-spec PC for people who play video games on Steam.

13:55SPEAKERAnd then this is the, hey, what hardware do we need

13:58SPEAKERto run games that run on the Steam Deck

14:00SPEAKERat 1280 by 800 well at 4K well?

14:03SPEAKERAnd that, to me, looks like exactly the path

14:06SPEAKERthat they took to get here.

14:07SPEAKER- 2.5K, really.

14:08SPEAKERIt's a 4K FSR.

14:10SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so when they're doing,

14:14SPEAKERare they doing the FSR quality upscale?

14:16SPEAKERIs that the one that they had it set on,

14:18SPEAKERor could you tell?

14:19SPEAKER- They just said FSR three,

14:20SPEAKERand honestly, couldn't really tell with the TVs they had.

14:25SPEAKER- I read that apparently there's been some talk

14:28SPEAKERabout FSR four coming to those older AMD cards,

14:30SPEAKERso like Valve engineers, apparently,

14:33SPEAKERthis was in the DF write-up.

14:34SPEAKERLike they basically said, yeah, we hope FSR four

14:37SPEAKERdoes come to this hardware at some point.

14:40SPEAKER- The problem with that is that it won't use the,

14:43SPEAKERthere's no tensor cores on those FSR three chips,

14:46SPEAKERso it takes shader from the GPU.

14:50SPEAKER- Even if they do get four, the improvement will be lesser.

14:54SPEAKER- Yeah, the problem is still

14:55SPEAKERthat you're balancing game performance

14:57SPEAKERversus upscaling performance is not using discrete hardware.

15:02SPEAKEROkay, so it's like tissue box size norm?

15:06SPEAKER- It's a lot smaller than I thought,

15:08SPEAKERthan the picture, and when you look at the pictures,

15:10SPEAKERlike I actually don't have the exact dimensions,

15:12SPEAKERbut tissue box size is a really good comparison,

15:14SPEAKERlike the square tissue box, very, very small,

15:18SPEAKERa 70% of the volume is cooling.

15:20SPEAKERSo, you know, it's basically, it's a giant heat sink,

15:25SPEAKERa massive heat sink with a fan in the back.

15:28SPEAKER- Did you see it running

15:29SPEAKERor were you getting demos on something else?

15:31SPEAKER- No, it was out running, yeah.

15:33SPEAKER- Was it loud, did you notice?

15:34SPEAKER- No, no, no, no.

15:36SPEAKER- They'd call out being quiet

15:38SPEAKERon their kind of top line list of features on the site?

15:41SPEAKER- Yep.

15:42SPEAKER- I saw, there's a couple of good videos,

15:45SPEAKERI don't know, yours just went up this morning,

15:46SPEAKERlike literally as we were starting to record this,

15:48SPEAKERso I haven't had a chance to watch it yet,

15:50SPEAKERbut I saw that, I think Steve at Gamers Nexus

15:54SPEAKERpulled it apart and you can see the heat sink,

15:56SPEAKERyou can see the kind of construction of the thing inside.

16:00SPEAKERIt's running Steam OS, obviously,

16:01SPEAKERso not a Windows machine, it's running like the Arch variant

16:05SPEAKERthat they built for the Steam Deck,

16:06SPEAKERwhich I think is really cool.

16:07SPEAKER- Yeah, although they do say explicitly like,

16:09SPEAKER"Hey, you can install whatever OS you want on this thing,

16:11SPEAKERit's just, it's your PC."

16:13SPEAKER- Yes, 86, yep, yep.

16:15SPEAKERMicro SD card, so one of the things I was really cool

16:17SPEAKERabout Steam Deck to Steam Deck OLED

16:18SPEAKERis that people discovered that if you had a Steam Deck

16:21SPEAKERwith a micro SD card, you could just pop that

16:23SPEAKERinto your other Steam Deck, any Steam Deck,

16:25SPEAKERand the storage just registers, you don't have to reformat,

16:28SPEAKERall the games that have been installed

16:29SPEAKERjust work as a volume.

16:31SPEAKERThat works across Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well,

16:35SPEAKERso those are the ways they've architecture Steam OS.

16:37SPEAKER- Right, so they intend, I was kind of surprised to see

16:39SPEAKERthey stuck with micro SD in this larger box,

16:41SPEAKERlike they, so they intend for people to load games

16:43SPEAKERoff of micro SD, 'cause that seems not super performant.

16:47SPEAKER- I mean, there's built-in storage,

16:48SPEAKERand I think there'll be, yeah, and it's upgradable, so.

16:51SPEAKER- Oh, the built-in is, like I was gonna ask,

16:53SPEAKER'cause I know that like people pull their Steam Decks apart

16:55SPEAKERand replace the storage all the time,

16:56SPEAKERI wasn't sure if that would be the case here,

16:58SPEAKERor if it'd be like soldered onto the board.

17:00SPEAKER- Two things are upgradable, both system memory,

17:02SPEAKERnot graphics memory, but system memory and storage.

17:04SPEAKER- Oh my God, I am not real as well.

17:06SPEAKER- System memory and storage are upgradable,

17:08SPEAKERstorage is more easily accessible.

17:09SPEAKERIf you take off the shell just in the bottom,

17:12SPEAKERyou can see the NVMe stick, and it can fit both sizes

17:17SPEAKERof NVMe stick.

17:19SPEAKERThe micro SD is just for expandability,

17:21SPEAKERand that's really just for like, if you have a Steam Deck,

17:23SPEAKERand you have games loaded on there, or vice versa,

17:26SPEAKERyou can like move your games easily between devices

17:29SPEAKERon one micro SD card.

17:30SPEAKER- But anybody who's remotely motivated

17:32SPEAKERcan swap out the fast storage?

17:34SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

17:35SPEAKER- Yeah, and the RAM is so dims, is my understanding,

17:37SPEAKERbut you have to pull the entire heat sink off,

17:39SPEAKERwhich means you have to replace the CPU and GPU

17:41SPEAKERand put them back.

17:42SPEAKER- Yep, that's doable, but that's definitely more work.

17:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:45SPEAKER- Also, it's 32 gigs, or is it 16 gigs?

17:48SPEAKERDid they say?

17:48SPEAKER- That's 16 for the system memory.

17:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:51SPEAKER- Okay.

17:51SPEAKER- And only eight for the VRAM, which is kind of a pretty big,

17:55SPEAKERmaybe the biggest sticking point on the performance.

17:58SPEAKER- I think on the GPU that they picked,

17:59SPEAKERI'm not the GPU person when Steve and Adam

18:02SPEAKERwere talking about it on the full nerd this week,

18:05SPEAKERthe eight gigs didn't even come up, for what it's worth,

18:08SPEAKERfor the kind of scale,

18:09SPEAKER'cause realistically you're not running it to 4K,

18:12SPEAKERyou're running it 1080p and upscaling, right?

18:14SPEAKER- Yeah, you're probably not doing a lot of retracing.

18:16SPEAKER- Or 1440p and upscaling.

18:16SPEAKER- Probably not doing a lot of retracing.

18:17SPEAKER- They emphasize entry level.

18:19SPEAKERReally, entry level, entry level.

18:21SPEAKERJust like the Steam Deck plays last gen games really well,

18:25SPEAKERand some current gen games, really low settings,

18:28SPEAKERbarely 30 FPS, this is, I think,

18:31SPEAKERgonna be the equivalent of that for living room.

18:34SPEAKER- This very much feels like it's being positioned

18:36SPEAKERkind of as like a supplement to like,

18:38SPEAKERhey, if you have a Steam Deck and really like it,

18:39SPEAKERhere is an option for interoperating with that thing

18:42SPEAKERon your TV with much better performance,

18:44SPEAKERbut not like, this is definitely not going to

18:47SPEAKEReat the lunch of the next Xbox,

18:48SPEAKERlike a lot of people seem to be thinking it will.

18:50SPEAKER- No, no, no, absolutely not.

18:51SPEAKERAnd I'll take one step back and say,

18:52SPEAKERlike from a broader strategy standpoint,

18:55SPEAKERwe have like four hardware devices

18:57SPEAKERin the Steam hardware family now, right?

18:59SPEAKERSteam Deck, Controller, Steam Machine, and Frame,

19:03SPEAKERthese are devices that having any more than one of them

19:08SPEAKERcompounds the usefulness, right?

19:10SPEAKERTwo or three of them, Steam Controller with Steam Machine,

19:13SPEAKERSteam Deck with Steam Machine,

19:14SPEAKER'cause then you can stream from Steam Machine

19:16SPEAKERand extend the battery life of your Steam Deck, right?

19:19SPEAKERWorks with Steam Machine and Steam Frame,

19:21SPEAKERlike they want people to have two or three of these.

19:24SPEAKER- They're building an ecosystem.

19:25SPEAKER- Or actually it's funny because like they kind of

19:27SPEAKERalready did build the ecosystem a decade ago,

19:29SPEAKERit's just that none of those earlier iterations,

19:31SPEAKERlike none of these devices are new, you know,

19:33SPEAKERit's like they have made a previous iteration

19:35SPEAKERof every one of these things,

19:36SPEAKERbut none of them were successful enough.

19:37SPEAKERIt was like the Steam Deck being a runaway success

19:40SPEAKERis what paved the way for them to reiterate these things

19:42SPEAKERand create a coherent, like now they can make a coherent

19:48SPEAKERecosystem because they had a successful product.

19:51SPEAKER- Who do you, like, who did you,

19:52SPEAKERdid you get a sense that they have an idea

19:54SPEAKERof who this is for?

19:55SPEAKERIs this for people who bought Steam Decks

19:56SPEAKERand that's their first gaming PC?

19:58SPEAKERIs this for people who want entry to PC gaming

20:02SPEAKERand don't wanna build a computer?

20:04SPEAKERIs this for people who have computers

20:06SPEAKERand want stuff in their living room?

20:07SPEAKER- I think all three, yeah, absolutely.

20:09SPEAKERThe price point has to be compelling enough that like,

20:12SPEAKERmost of their audience probably have gaming PCs

20:15SPEAKERand they know the min spec, they know the average spec,

20:17SPEAKERright, with the Steam survey.

20:19SPEAKERAnd as long as this is right above that average spec,

20:23SPEAKERthen it's great for people who just wanna play

20:26SPEAKERtheir League of Legends Counter-Strike or whatever.

20:30SPEAKERBut it's also gonna be for people who first system

20:33SPEAKERwas a Steam Deck and I put my Steam Deck as a docked system

20:37SPEAKERfor most time when I'm not using it.

20:39SPEAKERAnd I don't like it as a docked system

20:40SPEAKER'cause it's not as efficient, I need to,

20:42SPEAKERI don't have the exact controllers I want,

20:44SPEAKERthat's why they have the Steam Controller

20:45SPEAKERand that's why they have like background downloading.

20:48SPEAKERAnd so this will take the place of that.

20:50SPEAKER- Yeah, I literally saw a quote from them out there

20:53SPEAKERsaying like, "Hey, based on Steam hardware survey results

20:56SPEAKER"for the vast majority of people in those results,

21:00SPEAKER"this will be a hardware upgrade."

21:01SPEAKERAnd it seems like that's how they were looking at it.

21:04SPEAKER- I mean, that makes a ton of sense

21:05SPEAKER'cause like there are a lot of people out there

21:09SPEAKERthat have like 1063 gig cards who are like,

21:11SPEAKER"Man, I have a great computer."

21:13SPEAKERAnd they're like, "Why does God of War Ragnarok

21:15SPEAKER"not run right?"

21:16SPEAKERAnd--

21:18SPEAKER- Actually, that's just really interesting.

21:20SPEAKERI've been thinking of this thing entirely

21:21SPEAKERas a console substitute that hooks up to your TV.

21:24SPEAKERI didn't even really think about the idea

21:25SPEAKERof people just buying this and using it at a desk

21:27SPEAKERwith a mouse and keyboard and a monitor as their computer.

21:30SPEAKERAnd it really, this definitely slots into

21:32SPEAKERthe kind of like small form factor phenomenon

21:34SPEAKERof people that want shoebox-sized computers.

21:38SPEAKERBut now if you get this thing,

21:39SPEAKERyou don't have to play the Tetris of trying

21:40SPEAKERto make like a giant graphics card fit in there with zero.

21:43SPEAKER- That's part of the fun.

21:44SPEAKER- Well, sure, for giant nerds like us, yes,

21:47SPEAKERbut like this is kind of a turnkey version of that.

21:49SPEAKER- Yeah, one comp is actually the framework PC,

21:53SPEAKERthe framework desktop that they announced

21:55SPEAKERwas also a small form factor.

21:56SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't see that.

21:57SPEAKER- And that one uses an AMD--

22:00SPEAKER- It's a Strix Halo.

22:01SPEAKER- Strix Halo, exactly.

22:02SPEAKER- It's a big APU, yeah.

22:03SPEAKER- Yep, yep.

22:04SPEAKERSo, but similarly sized and customizable

22:09SPEAKERand they use a lot of the same verbiage

22:11SPEAKERin terms of being your PC,

22:13SPEAKERbut that one really for AI workloads

22:15SPEAKERand Valve did not mention the phrase AI once the whole day,

22:19SPEAKERso this is the gaming version of that.

22:21SPEAKER- Sean says the first briefing he's been to in years

22:22SPEAKERthat nobody said AI at any point,

22:25SPEAKERexcept for he said somebody asked a question

22:27SPEAKERabout the AI in one of the game demos.

22:31SPEAKERSo did you get a sense,

22:32SPEAKERone of the things I wanna talk about is Proton in a minute,

22:35SPEAKERbut did they talk about how far along,

22:39SPEAKERdo they feel like Proton is getting close

22:40SPEAKERto being a solved problem for them?

22:42SPEAKER- I think so, I absolutely think so, yeah.

22:45SPEAKERYeah, they're really confident in it.

22:47SPEAKERIt's really edge cases.

22:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a pretty magical piece of,

22:53SPEAKERI mean, it's not magical,

22:53SPEAKERit's the result of an insane amount of work

22:55SPEAKERover the last 10 years.

22:56SPEAKER- I mean, it's been like, it's like a couple of years now

22:58SPEAKERsince you started seeing people say like,

23:00SPEAKERhey, certain games are running better on Linux with Proton

23:02SPEAKERnow than they do natively on Windows.

23:04SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:06SPEAKERWhich we'll get to when we talk about Steam Frame.

23:08SPEAKERI mean, as a, yeah, as a translation layer,

23:10SPEAKERit's just like, it just mostly works

23:12SPEAKERand it's really the anti-cheat stuff

23:13SPEAKERthat ends up being a problem.

23:16SPEAKER- Does the controller and stuff,

23:19SPEAKERdoes it support like wake from the controller

23:20SPEAKERand things like that that you'd expect on a console?

23:22SPEAKER- Yep, yep.

23:23SPEAKERSo it has the wake your TV, your speaker.

23:27SPEAKERIt does also do low power.

23:30SPEAKERIt's a device that never turns off,

23:31SPEAKERkind of like your Mac MIDI, right?

23:32SPEAKERLike it's gonna do background downloading,

23:34SPEAKERbackground updates.

23:35SPEAKERThese are things that the Steam Deck doesn't do

23:38SPEAKERbecause Steam Deck has to have the screen powered on.

23:40SPEAKERThey just don't wanna kill that battery

23:41SPEAKERand they don't know if it'll be, have it plugged in or not.

23:43SPEAKERSo it's much, can be much more user-friendly

23:48SPEAKERthan the Steam Deck as a, and they talk about that a lot.

23:51SPEAKERThey know a lot of people use the Steam Deck

23:52SPEAKERas like a living room gaming computer.

23:56SPEAKER- What, did they talk about power draw at all?

23:58SPEAKER- Oh, I asked them specifically about the idle draw

24:03SPEAKERand they couldn't say specifically what it was,

24:06SPEAKERbut they said best in class.

24:07SPEAKERThey were really proud of it.

24:08SPEAKERAnd then max draws in that 200 watt,

24:11SPEAKERI think 130 watt max for a GPU.

24:13SPEAKER- Okay.

24:15SPEAKEROne of the things I loved while watching the interviews

24:17SPEAKERI've seen up so far is that they put engineers

24:20SPEAKERin front of people instead of like trained,

24:25SPEAKERno knock against project managers, it's what I do.

24:27SPEAKERBut like they had people who were actually doing

24:30SPEAKERthe hard work answering questions and talking about this,

24:33SPEAKERwhich I always love.

24:34SPEAKERIt's always a sign of confidence.

24:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and even when it wasn't on camera,

24:38SPEAKERthey would just be hanging around and everyone was open

24:40SPEAKERto be approachable and to chat with.

24:42SPEAKERAnd if you want to put a mic on them and interview,

24:44SPEAKERlike that wasn't one of the best press experiences

24:47SPEAKERI've ever been to.

24:48SPEAKER- I got to get out there for one of these to go talk

24:51SPEAKERto those engineers myself.

24:53SPEAKER- Should we talk about the frame?

24:55SPEAKER- Well, before we move, I mean,

24:56SPEAKERdo we have any more proton talk?

24:57SPEAKERThe thing I was going to ask actually is,

24:59SPEAKERdid they have any comment about anti-cheat at all?

25:01SPEAKERI mean, I assume it's going to be their same stance

25:03SPEAKERthey've had with Steam Deck, which is not our problem.

25:05SPEAKERLike that's on developers figure out.

25:08SPEAKER- Yep.

25:09SPEAKER- Okay.

25:10SPEAKER- To be clear, like Arc Raiders uses the same,

25:14SPEAKERsame easy anti-cheat that Fortnite does,

25:16SPEAKERwhich is one of the big holdouts.

25:17SPEAKERAnd it's like, there's a Linux,

25:19SPEAKERthere are Linux versions of those anti-cheats.

25:21SPEAKERIt's just that they choose not to apply them.

25:23SPEAKER- I didn't realize there were solutions out there.

25:25SPEAKER- Well, Riot famously makes their own anti-cheat, right?

25:30SPEAKERAnd I don't know that they have Linux versions,

25:32SPEAKERbut the vast majority of other anti-cheats

25:36SPEAKERthat are out there, there are commercial versions.

25:38SPEAKERLike Apex Legends uses anti-cheat

25:40SPEAKERand now the game works great on Linux.

25:41SPEAKER- Did you say Easy does?

25:43SPEAKER- Easy anti-cheat has a Linux version.

25:45SPEAKERIt has for years.

25:46SPEAKER- Isn't that the one that Epic bought?

25:48SPEAKER- Yeah, Epic owns it.

25:49SPEAKER- I thought Epic hated Linux, though.

25:52SPEAKER- No, no, Epic doesn't want Fortnite on Steam

25:54SPEAKERbecause Tim Epic is upset with Gabe Valve, right?

25:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they could make the Epic Games version

25:59SPEAKERof Fortnite work on.

26:00SPEAKER- Yeah, but that still helps Gabe Valve

26:02SPEAKER'cause it helps put their big giant game

26:04SPEAKERon his tiny little platform.

26:06SPEAKER- And I mean, they'd have to bring the Epic Store

26:07SPEAKERto Linux at that point.

26:09SPEAKER- I guess my question is, do they think that these hard,

26:11SPEAKERdo you feel like they think this hardware is gonna get,

26:14SPEAKERget Steam OS to 100 million people

26:18SPEAKERor is this just another incremental step on the way?

26:20SPEAKER- This is incremental.

26:21SPEAKERI mean, look at how many Steam decks were sold, right?

26:23SPEAKERLike it's half of the number of ESP does.

26:26SPEAKER- It's like 6 million, right?

26:28SPEAKER- Four, I wanna say is the last estimated count.

26:30SPEAKER- Four is the last official, yeah.

26:31SPEAKER- I guess honestly, on the anti-cheat stuff,

26:33SPEAKERI mean, I really, it's just like,

26:36SPEAKERjust like the Gabes and Tim Epics of the world

26:38SPEAKERwould ideologically want to happen,

26:40SPEAKERit's for the market to decide, right?

26:41SPEAKERIt's like, hey, if enough people start moving to Linux,

26:45SPEAKERif I have this machine or anything else,

26:46SPEAKERthen everybody will do the anti-cheat

26:48SPEAKERbecause hey, then now the demand is there.

26:50SPEAKER- Here's the big question is,

26:51SPEAKERand they explicitly talked about Steam Machine,

26:54SPEAKERthat the things that they had to do for Steam OS

26:57SPEAKERand develop for Steam OS to make Steam Machine work

26:59SPEAKERas it does and is up to their standards,

27:01SPEAKERthey're hoping will pay forward to third-party partners

27:04SPEAKERto make their own Steam Machines

27:06SPEAKERand to put Steam OS as an OS on set-top boxes,

27:10SPEAKERwhich is the same language

27:12SPEAKERthat they were talking about for Steam Deck,

27:14SPEAKERand it's never happened, really, for Steam Deck.

27:15SPEAKER- What has?

27:16SPEAKERIt started, Lenovo shipped a Steam Deck OS device.

27:20SPEAKER- No, I don't think it's, you know,

27:22SPEAKEReveryone just wants to buy the Steam Deck.

27:23SPEAKERIt turns out Valve can make good hardware,

27:25SPEAKERbut I think for something that's more of a PC side,

27:27SPEAKERthere's more scalability, right,

27:28SPEAKERand there's a lot more options,

27:30SPEAKERand maybe they don't want to undercut in pricing, right?

27:33SPEAKERIf they take a hit on the pricing to get this out there,

27:37SPEAKERthen it makes their potential partners

27:38SPEAKERand ecosystem of Steam Machine devices less appealing

27:42SPEAKERbecause those other companies

27:43SPEAKERaren't making money from a store.

27:45SPEAKER- I wonder who shoulders the burden

27:46SPEAKERof driver support once there are new Steam Machines out there.

27:49SPEAKERI mean, it's happening with the handhelds,

27:50SPEAKERso somebody's doing it,

27:51SPEAKERbut like, Valve has one hardware target to support,

27:55SPEAKERyou know, like, is it AMD or is it the manufacturer

27:57SPEAKERof a given Steam Machine that has to handle that,

27:59SPEAKERor does Valve take hold? - I think it's the

28:00SPEAKERmanufacturer. - Yeah, that's my guess.

28:02SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah. - But also it's Linux,

28:03SPEAKERso like, your AMD driver works

28:05SPEAKERwith all your AMD GPUs and APUs, right?

28:07SPEAKERIf they're using off-the-shelf stuff,

28:09SPEAKERit's way more straightforward, I guess.

28:10SPEAKERI guess the problem with the Steam Deck

28:11SPEAKERis that they were using the custom hardware

28:13SPEAKERthat probably needed its own driver.

28:15SPEAKER- Right, right. - Well, they're using,

28:16SPEAKERthey're using what's now kind of, Jerry,

28:18SPEAKERit's like Zen 2 GPU, or Zen 2 and RD,

28:23SPEAKERZen 3 and RDNA 2, I think, is what the Steam Deck is,

28:26SPEAKERand the new stuff is all supersets of that, right?

28:30SPEAKERSo it's like the Z2 Extreme and all that

28:34SPEAKERbenefits from the downstream on that.

28:38SPEAKER- I think that's, oh, did they talk about SteamOS,

28:41SPEAKERlike an official SteamOS distro release?

28:43SPEAKERAre they gonna do--

28:44SPEAKER- I think this is all gearing toward that.

28:46SPEAKERI would not be surprised-- - You think so?

28:47SPEAKERYou think so?

28:48SPEAKERThat doesn't hurt.

28:49SPEAKER- I mean, I think that-- - I never got,

28:49SPEAKERI kinda got the sense they did not want to be in that,

28:52SPEAKERor that seems like a big support burden for them.

28:54SPEAKER- Okay, maybe not distro release,

28:56SPEAKERbut in terms of SteamOS being just on way more devices,

28:59SPEAKERand like, SteamOS is a thing that they want

29:02SPEAKERany hardware maker to be able to have

29:05SPEAKERas the operating system for their console-like.

29:08SPEAKER- I wonder, I almost wonder if they should come at it

29:10SPEAKERfrom the other direction of just extending more

29:11SPEAKERof the SteamOS features to Steam on Linux,

29:15SPEAKERand let existing distros handle the distro part,

29:18SPEAKERand just say, hey, install some, you know,

29:20SPEAKERmake it easier to just like boot straight into big picture,

29:22SPEAKERor whatever the SteamOS front end is,

29:24SPEAKERlike kinda bring all the UI enhancements to the Steam client,

29:27SPEAKERand not necessarily have to make a bespoke distro,

29:29SPEAKER'cause like, you can get all the features of SteamOS

29:32SPEAKERwith other distros already.

29:34SPEAKER- Right, right, huh, I don't know.

29:36SPEAKER- Yeah, well, okay, interesting, interesting.

29:38SPEAKERIt sounds like that was, it sounds interesting,

29:41SPEAKERpeople are, it's a very divisive product.

29:44SPEAKERThe PC hardware nerds are in message boards

29:47SPEAKERaround the country right now, around the world right now,

29:49SPEAKERsaying the exact same stuff they did

29:50SPEAKERwhen they announced the Steam Deck,

29:51SPEAKERwhich is like, whoa, this is woefully underpowered hardware,

29:54SPEAKERblah, blah, blah, nobody's gonna buy this,

29:56SPEAKERand then they sold a couple million of them,

29:57SPEAKERso we'll see.

29:58SPEAKER- I think it's a super cool, like new sort of stratum

30:00SPEAKERin the product stack.

30:02SPEAKERAgain, though, I think some people that are like,

30:05SPEAKERI mean, justifiably frustrated

30:07SPEAKERwith the way console ecosystems work these days,

30:09SPEAKERand X, Y, and Z factors are very excited

30:12SPEAKERabout ditching video game consoles

30:14SPEAKERand getting this instead, this is not bad, though.

30:17SPEAKERLike, I think when PS6 and the next Xbox come out,

30:20SPEAKERlike you're gonna see very quickly the difference

30:22SPEAKERbetween this thing and those.

30:24SPEAKER- Well, from stuff Pierre Lou said at CES this year,

30:28SPEAKERearlier this year, and other places,

30:30SPEAKERit seemed, the feeling I get is that they're building

30:33SPEAKERa generation of this for each generation

30:35SPEAKERof console hardware.

30:36SPEAKERSo like, this is the PS5, Xbox series generation

30:40SPEAKERof the hardware, and when the new hardware comes,

30:42SPEAKERthey'll spin the Steam Deck, and they'll spin the machines

30:45SPEAKERand all the other stuff.

30:46SPEAKER- That makes sense.

30:47SPEAKER- Do you think there are a big audience of console gamers

30:50SPEAKERwho are just unaware of the aggressiveness of Steam sales,

30:53SPEAKERand just how much of that library you can get?

30:56SPEAKER- I think that, hmm, I'd say that--

30:58SPEAKER- I think they're legendary.

30:59SPEAKERI think those sales are legendary.

31:01SPEAKER- That segment still exists,

31:02SPEAKERbut it's probably way smaller than it used to be.

31:05SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause that's one of the big appeals, right?

31:06SPEAKERLike, if you're choosing between which library to invest in,

31:10SPEAKERthe type of library you can build on Steam

31:13SPEAKERis just way more robust, and people come built in

31:15SPEAKERwith like, you know, big libraries already.

31:18SPEAKER- I'm almost surprised they don't push that harder.

31:20SPEAKERIt's just like, hey, what if you bought our box

31:22SPEAKERand then only ever paid $10 for video games?

31:24SPEAKER- Right, yeah.

31:25SPEAKER- I think that's a big part of the appeal, honestly.

31:28SPEAKERI think that Valve's business has shifted

31:30SPEAKERfrom selling triple-A games on day one

31:32SPEAKERto selling catalog and indie titles for under 20 bucks.

31:36SPEAKERAnd I bet if you look at the bulk of their revenue,

31:39SPEAKERI bet they have a huge spike at the front

31:40SPEAKERfrom $60 triple-A games, and then I bet

31:43SPEAKERthere's an enormous, really wide curve of games

31:45SPEAKERthat are selling between like $30 and $7

31:49SPEAKERthat make the bulk of their revenue.

31:52SPEAKERSo this whole strategy screams to me,

31:55SPEAKERhey, we wanted to make a machine

31:56SPEAKERthat can play Hades and Peek, and here you go.

32:00SPEAKER- Yeah, this thing's gonna be great for Andes on a TV.

32:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:04SPEAKEROkay, let's talk about the frame,

32:05SPEAKER'cause I think the frame, I'm,

32:08SPEAKERas a past VR aficionado who kind of burned himself,

32:14SPEAKERI'm interested in the frame in a way

32:16SPEAKERthat I haven't been in a VR headset in quite a while.

32:19SPEAKERI mean, to be honest, a big part of the appeal for me

32:21SPEAKERis that it's not made by Facebook,

32:22SPEAKER'cause I'm not giving them any of my money ever again.

32:26SPEAKERBut at the same time, they've done

32:29SPEAKERsome really cool tech stuff here,

32:30SPEAKERand I'm just like, where do you want,

32:33SPEAKERI'm gonna let you drive this, Norm,

32:34SPEAKERI have a big list of questions I wanna get to.

32:36SPEAKER- Sure.

32:37SPEAKER- Like, what was the demo experience?

32:39SPEAKERHow did they introduce this to you?

32:41SPEAKER- So after the three pieces of hardware were produced,

32:43SPEAKERthey were split off in different rooms,

32:45SPEAKERgot the Steam Machine and controller demo first,

32:47SPEAKERand then went to the frame, and then for frame,

32:49SPEAKERit was four engineers, or three engineers and a designer

32:51SPEAKERtalking about the many ways

32:54SPEAKERin which you can play games on frame, right?

32:56SPEAKERAnd it's my interview, they explicitly talk about

32:58SPEAKERfour different ways of playing games.

33:00SPEAKERYou can play flat-screen games locally or streamed,

33:04SPEAKERand VR games-- - Flat-screen games

33:05SPEAKERare traditional PC games-- - Exactly.

33:08SPEAKER- For people who aren't in the VR space.

33:09SPEAKER- Yep, and they started with that first,

33:12SPEAKERand then VR games off Steam locally,

33:16SPEAKERand then also streamed.

33:17SPEAKERSo we can dive into any of those,

33:20SPEAKERbut I think the big thing is,

33:22SPEAKERthe way this is gonna make money for Valve

33:24SPEAKERis people buying this to play that back catalog

33:27SPEAKERof flat-screen indie games on a giant virtual screen

33:31SPEAKERin a virtual living room,

33:33SPEAKERnot your pass-through style necessarily,

33:36SPEAKERbut kind of in your, the UI is still being tweaked

33:40SPEAKERand developed, but it's a floating window

33:42SPEAKERin kind of that Steam VR loading area right now

33:45SPEAKERthat you have. - Okay.

33:46SPEAKER- Not the environment, but actually the concentric circles

33:49SPEAKERand the-- - And the couch, yeah.

33:51SPEAKER- Oh, in that room, okay. - Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

33:54SPEAKERThe CVR setup room.

33:56SPEAKER- Sorry, not to digress too much,

33:58SPEAKERbut the thing you just said about

33:59SPEAKERhow are they gonna make money on this thing

34:00SPEAKERI feel like applies to all of this stuff, right?

34:03SPEAKERLike hardware is not a high-margin business,

34:04SPEAKERso at the end of the day, literally everything

34:07SPEAKERValve makes really is just in service

34:09SPEAKERof selling more Steam games, right?

34:11SPEAKER- But I would say when Index came out

34:13SPEAKERand when they did VIVE, it was like,

34:14SPEAKERhere's a new type of game.

34:17SPEAKERThis hardware exists to showcase

34:18SPEAKERa new type of gameplay or interface

34:21SPEAKERor it's a new computing platform.

34:23SPEAKER- Here, to be clear, to be clear and to some degree,

34:26SPEAKERit is a massive multi-billion dollar company

34:29SPEAKERreinvesting some of their profits into making cool stuff

34:31SPEAKERbecause it's cool and that's actually the buy deal case,

34:34SPEAKERbut I'm just thinking from the cynical business perspective,

34:37SPEAKERlike these things are not gonna be huge money makers

34:39SPEAKERcompared to the Steam business.

34:41SPEAKER- Well, if they've sold four million Steam decks

34:43SPEAKERand what do you think the attach rate for games is,

34:46SPEAKERsorry, is that a billion dollar business?

34:48SPEAKERIs the Steam deck in contact, right?

34:50SPEAKER- I guarantee you that they know that the attach rate

34:52SPEAKERfor Steam deck is higher than for your 1060

34:56SPEAKERwith a three gig card, right?

34:59SPEAKER- And I think that their hope,

35:01SPEAKERas much as they are true believers in VR

35:04SPEAKERin some form, factor or another in some way,

35:08SPEAKERI don't think that they commit to having this be a pillar

35:12SPEAKERof their hardware release unless they think

35:13SPEAKERthis is gonna be a tens or hundreds of millions

35:18SPEAKERdollars business.

35:20SPEAKER- I think, I also think this is something Jeff Grubb

35:24SPEAKERtalked about over a giant bomb a couple of times

35:26SPEAKERwith the Steam deck, but I don't think we as nerds

35:30SPEAKERwho are used to dealing with computers

35:31SPEAKERand keeping them running can overestimate,

35:34SPEAKERoveremphasize how important, hey, this is a low hassle way

35:38SPEAKERto play PC games is, like you think about updating drivers

35:42SPEAKERand updating Windows and updating Bioses

35:44SPEAKERand all the crap you have to do on your Windows machine

35:46SPEAKERversus hitting the update button in the Steam deck

35:49SPEAKERand it just updating and booting back up

35:52SPEAKERand being like everything's good to go.

35:54SPEAKER- All right, let's get to the hardware though, okay.

35:56SPEAKER- What is this headset, Norm, is it tethered?

35:59SPEAKERIs it, give me the rundown.

36:02SPEAKER- No tether, so big departure, index is retired,

36:05SPEAKERit is inside out tracking, no more base stations,

36:07SPEAKERwe're technically inside out, but no more room setup.

36:10SPEAKERThere's a put the headset on, you're on a couch,

36:12SPEAKERyou're on an airplane, you're in your room,

36:15SPEAKERand you are playing games almost immediately.

36:17SPEAKERSo everything is in the way, the controllers are designed

36:20SPEAKERto the form factor, I think there are targets here

36:22SPEAKERwho are both weight, comfort, and cost, I think.

36:26SPEAKERAnd performance is something, and I'll tie in

36:29SPEAKERlike display quality and all that under performance.

36:32SPEAKERI think that they did not strive to make the most expensive,

36:35SPEAKERbest looking headset, and there are economies of scale

36:38SPEAKERthat just don't work for that type of, that category yet,

36:40SPEAKERas anyone who buys VR hardware will know.

36:44SPEAKERBut I think they want this to be under $1,000,

36:47SPEAKERI think it'll probably, if we're lucky, it'll be $1,000,

36:50SPEAKERbecause it's not gonna be $600,

36:53SPEAKERI don't think it's gonna be six or $800, I don't think--

36:55SPEAKER- You don't think it's gonna be competitive

36:56SPEAKERwith the Quest 3 in terms of price?

36:58SPEAKER- No, and that's 500 bucks, I think it's gonna be,

37:01SPEAKERspecifically it said premium hardware device

37:05SPEAKERtargeting under the price of an index,

37:07SPEAKERand I think if tariffs were less uncertain,

37:09SPEAKERI think they would have said less

37:11SPEAKERthan the price of an index for sure.

37:13SPEAKERBut they couldn't commit to that

37:14SPEAKERbecause of the changing state of tariffs.

37:17SPEAKERSo it's two 2160 by 2160 LCD panels,

37:20SPEAKERand that's right in like the mid range,

37:23SPEAKERmid high range of VR headset right now.

37:26SPEAKERSo better on the index, it's almost very similar

37:30SPEAKERto Quest 3, less than your high-end dedicated PC VR headsets

37:33SPEAKERnow from Big Screen Beyond to your Pimax

37:37SPEAKERand your Play for Dream MR, and Galaxy SARS.

37:42SPEAKER- You're rattling off, I've come to realize

37:44SPEAKERthere was a whole ecosystem of high-end VR headsets

37:46SPEAKERfrom companies I've never heard of at this point,

37:49SPEAKERlike that market just kind of took off

37:51SPEAKERand flew away into the stratosphere.

37:54SPEAKER- And that market services the true believers

37:56SPEAKERwho use VR for sim gaming, and social and sim gaming

38:00SPEAKERare the big drivers of VR right now.

38:04SPEAKEROn the Apple Vision Pro side, they won't even call

38:06SPEAKERtheir headset a headset or a VR device,

38:08SPEAKERthat's a special computer, that's for media consumption.

38:11SPEAKERSo this kind of straddles that line

38:12SPEAKERand like where's the utility for most people

38:16SPEAKERfor something that you put on your face?

38:17SPEAKERAnd the utility for most people isn't necessarily

38:20SPEAKERgonna be sim gaming or social gaming,

38:23SPEAKERit's gonna be kind of flat screen media content

38:25SPEAKERseen in a way that you could not experience it

38:28SPEAKERbefore practically without having a big projector.

38:33SPEAKER- So one of the things that struck me about the design

38:35SPEAKERof this thing is that Valve, from the time we saw the index

38:38SPEAKERthe first time, has been a true believer

38:40SPEAKERthat you need to counterbalance the weight

38:42SPEAKERon the front of the face with something on the back.

38:45SPEAKERAnd this time they just hung the battery for the thing

38:47SPEAKERoff the back of the headset it looks like, is that?

38:50SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so the actual dimensions of the thing

38:55SPEAKERyou put in your face is not only really light,

38:58SPEAKERbut it doesn't protrude away from your eyes

39:01SPEAKERnearly as much as, even the Quest 3,

39:04SPEAKERwhich has pancake optics and is a relatively small

39:08SPEAKERdimensional stack, but the Quest 3 has its battery

39:11SPEAKERright in the front as well.

39:12SPEAKERSo weight distribution right off the bat,

39:14SPEAKERthe actual, how much the headset is cantilevered

39:18SPEAKERaway from your face is all best in class.

39:22SPEAKERI mean-- - That's great.

39:24SPEAKER- Big screen beyond is the only one that is lighter,

39:26SPEAKERbut that's a tethered headset without a battery,

39:27SPEAKERwithout a processor, but this gets close to that.

39:30SPEAKER185 grams for what they call the compute module,

39:33SPEAKERwhich is a modular replaceable unit.

39:37SPEAKERThe head strap and the speakers and the battery separate

39:41SPEAKERand they really hinted and alluded to the fact

39:43SPEAKERthat they'd be either working with partners

39:44SPEAKERor releasing themselves other audio solutions

39:47SPEAKERor ways to even mitigate the weight with a hard strap

39:54SPEAKERrather than a soft strap.

39:55SPEAKER- If you want like a halo strap, like the PSVR

39:57SPEAKERor something like that, then do you think

39:59SPEAKERthat those are gonna be on them or dedicated headphones?

40:01SPEAKER- Exactly. - 'Cause this is just using

40:02SPEAKERpiped audio from the headset, right?

40:04SPEAKER- Well, and yeah, it was spoken to a bit.

40:07SPEAKERI think Gaber XS has a really great interview with Joy,

40:11SPEAKERwho is audio engineer on this work on index and steam frame.

40:14SPEAKERAnd she talked a little about it in my interview

40:16SPEAKERwhere it's, these are speakers.

40:18SPEAKERSo kind of like, they're not on-ear headphones,

40:20SPEAKERnot on-ear speakers that the index was,

40:23SPEAKERthey're off-ear speakers that the index was.

40:25SPEAKERSo they're not pointed like from the side

40:26SPEAKERdirectly into your ears.

40:28SPEAKERThey're pointed more angularly from the headset

40:30SPEAKERto your ears, but on each side,

40:32SPEAKERthey're actually two drivers.

40:33SPEAKERAnd they're two drivers pointed in opposite directions

40:36SPEAKERthat counteract and mitigate the vibrations

40:39SPEAKERof the ears themselves so they don't disrupt the IMU

40:44SPEAKERand they don't affect the display.

40:47SPEAKERBut they sounded really good.

40:48SPEAKERAnd I think they're, listed off in the Gamer Nexus interview

40:52SPEAKERlike what the driver size was.

40:54SPEAKERBut theoretically, they get pretty loud.

40:56SPEAKERBut they also know that some people really want

40:58SPEAKERand some type of index-like solution.

41:00SPEAKERSo my hope and dream is maybe some type of rigid strap

41:04SPEAKERwith the index-style speakers.

41:06SPEAKERAnd that's probably a cost, a cost issue.

41:10SPEAKER- How did you think this strap was gonna work

41:12SPEAKERfor people who are like sitting in like a sim sled

41:13SPEAKERwhen they're, sit down with their head in the headrest

41:16SPEAKERand they're doing racing or flying or something?

41:18SPEAKERIs it gonna, is it the back of it gonna hit them

41:20SPEAKERlike the old hard straps did?

41:21SPEAKEROr is it gonna be?

41:23SPEAKER- Yeah, Jeremy, the VR engineer there said that

41:26SPEAKERthe way he uses it, he uses it laying down

41:27SPEAKERand the battery is curved.

41:28SPEAKERIt's a segmented battery, so it has a contour.

41:31SPEAKERBut the way we wore it in the demos

41:33SPEAKERand the way people wear it at Valve,

41:35SPEAKERit's not cup to the back, the bottom back of your head,

41:39SPEAKERlike where the curve of your neck touches your head.

41:41SPEAKERIt is really the back, the most round part of your head.

41:45SPEAKERAnd so I can see if you're sitting on a headrest

41:48SPEAKERand a chair, that might be uncomfortable.

41:51SPEAKERBut at the same time, this is why I can imagine

41:53SPEAKERsome modularity where there's like some soft strap

41:56SPEAKERand then the battery is separated in more of a pack

42:00SPEAKERor just not in the back of your head.

42:02SPEAKERBut I know they have to have designed this

42:04SPEAKERwith people who use VR either laying in a bed

42:07SPEAKERor sitting on a couch in mind.

42:09SPEAKER- And they said four hours of battery life?

42:12SPEAKER- They did not give a battery indication.

42:14SPEAKERAll they said was capacity, so 21.9 watt hours.

42:18SPEAKERAnd this is basically a seven watt part on the SOC.

42:23SPEAKERBut you have to have consumption on panels

42:26SPEAKERand it's all variable.

42:29SPEAKERI think the calculation is that if you're playing games

42:31SPEAKERlocally at max load, it has active cooling,

42:35SPEAKERso it's gonna be more aggressively pushed

42:37SPEAKERthan like your smartphone because it has active cooling.

42:40SPEAKERYou're probably gonna get like an hour

42:42SPEAKERof high-end local play, but maybe up to four hours

42:44SPEAKERof streaming play.

42:46SPEAKER- What's the perf target?

42:48SPEAKERLike what refresh rate are the screens and stuff like that?

42:52SPEAKER- 90 hertz default, but 120 or 144 as experimental mode,

42:58SPEAKERso just like on index.

42:59SPEAKERAnd one of the interesting things they were talking about

43:01SPEAKERis that actually heat and warmth on the LCD panels.

43:04SPEAKERSo they chose LCD because probably cost.

43:07SPEAKERField of view, a big choice there,

43:09SPEAKERbut also low persistence.

43:10SPEAKERThey needed none of this kind of ghosting and motion blur

43:13SPEAKERand self-backlit pixels of OLED panels.

43:16SPEAKERIt's hard to get that kind of same low persistence

43:19SPEAKERat the high refresh rates 'cause you need to have

43:21SPEAKERthe brightness, like the switching of the--

43:23SPEAKER- The backlight strobing, and there's no backlight

43:25SPEAKERto strobe on the OLEDs, right?

43:26SPEAKER- Are there starting to be LCDs with lower persistence

43:29SPEAKERthan in the past, is that becoming a thing?

43:30SPEAKER- Yeah, low persistence, this is a very low persistence LCD.

43:34SPEAKERAnd it's interesting, the warmer the panel gets

43:37SPEAKERto a sweet spot, the panels actually need to be warm

43:41SPEAKERto have the low persistence, to have the backlight strobe

43:44SPEAKERat that 104 hertz, yeah. - Wow, that's exciting.

43:46SPEAKERI have not heard about it, like that's still the thing

43:48SPEAKERI miss from my plasma TV the most

43:50SPEAKERis the super smooth motion clarity.

43:52SPEAKER- Well, so the trade-off you get

43:54SPEAKERwith the low persistence LCDs is they're usually not,

43:57SPEAKERthe black levels are usually kind of bad.

43:59SPEAKER- Muddled, I need more time with it,

44:02SPEAKERbut it was not pitch black OLED, and yeah.

44:08SPEAKER- What were the lens, they did pancake lenses, right?

44:10SPEAKER- Great pancake optics, and so much of this reminds me

44:12SPEAKERof the Quest 3, you know, really good edge-to-edge clarity.

44:18SPEAKERThe eye box is really nice, the field of view seemed

44:20SPEAKERgenerous, but not, again, compared to a $3,000,

44:25SPEAKERfour, $5,000 high-end simulation VR headset,

44:28SPEAKERlike that's gonna destroy this in terms of field of view,

44:32SPEAKERbut it was better than the Quest.

44:34SPEAKER- How did it compare to something like the Apple Vision Pro?

44:38SPEAKERCould you see loading up your desktop on this thing,

44:40SPEAKERor is it gonna be too noisy for that?

44:42SPEAKER- I couldn't see loading up my desktop to this.

44:44SPEAKERI think that's resolution.

44:46SPEAKERI mean, 2160 by 2160 was great like five years ago

44:50SPEAKERwith the reverb, and I was noticing more details

44:54SPEAKERon those headsets than I did in the Quest 2, right?

44:57SPEAKERAnd the first couple generations of VR hardware,

45:01SPEAKERbut every time I get a new VR headset in,

45:03SPEAKERI go into Half-Life Alyx, and even though

45:05SPEAKERthat's a five-year-old game, I put the Russells

45:08SPEAKERclose to my face, I put any of the hand objects,

45:11SPEAKERthe models and the textures, even like the guns,

45:14SPEAKERyou see scratches, you see serial numbers,

45:16SPEAKERyou see the fine print that's in the textures

45:19SPEAKERthat the Valve artists put in that game.

45:21SPEAKERYou can see so much more clarity on the high-end

45:24SPEAKERVR headsets today than you could five years ago.

45:28SPEAKERDoing that same test in Half-Life Alyx

45:30SPEAKERstreamed to Steam Frame, I couldn't read

45:34SPEAKERthat detail as clearly as I know I can

45:36SPEAKERon a $3,000 headset.

45:39SPEAKER- I mean, it makes sense, given the--

45:40SPEAKER- Or a $1,000 headset, I don't think it's gonna be on, right?

45:43SPEAKERI think for me, there's a sweet spot of like,

45:45SPEAKERI think 2560 by 2560 is like my ideal sweet spot

45:50SPEAKERfor resolution without going with like a 4K OLED.

45:58SPEAKER- So what's the, can we talk about the streaming stuff

46:00SPEAKERa little bit, 'cause I think this was the,

46:02SPEAKERlike we tested these 10 years ago, eight years ago,

46:08SPEAKERwith the HTC Stream thing that they did

46:11SPEAKERfor the first HTC Vive. - Oh my God.

46:13SPEAKERA giant radio plugged under your forehead, right?

46:15SPEAKERWith like two antennas sticking out.

46:17SPEAKER- Yeah, a big bar antenna off the back of your head.

46:19SPEAKERSeemed good, if I get brain cancer, blame HTC.

46:22SPEAKER- And those are using specific, like before,

46:24SPEAKERthat was before Wi-Fi 6E, before Wi-Fi 7, right,

46:26SPEAKERto get the kind of six gigahertz band,

46:29SPEAKERhigh bandwidth radio, dedicated signal, you needed those.

46:32SPEAKER- Yeah. - Receivers and transmitters.

46:34SPEAKEREveryone does, people of Quest have been doing Steam Link,

46:37SPEAKERlike streaming pretty reliably now

46:40SPEAKERfor the past couple of years.

46:41SPEAKERVirtual desktop does it really well.

46:43SPEAKERI have actually a dedicated at home, a dedicated router,

46:46SPEAKERjust to stream from my gaming PC to the Quest.

46:49SPEAKER- Oh, okay. - So it's,

46:49SPEAKERI have a dedicated line of sight, six gigahertz signal,

46:53SPEAKERand if you use virtual desktop, you can pump that up

46:56SPEAKERto three, 400 megabits per second, no problem.

46:59SPEAKERAnd it looks fantastic.

47:01SPEAKERWhat they're doing here is a dedicated,

47:04SPEAKERlike 250 megabits per second with a router stick.

47:08SPEAKERSo as opposed to buying a router,

47:09SPEAKERyou plug in a USB-A stick into front of your Steam machine,

47:14SPEAKERinto the top of your computer,

47:16SPEAKERand it's gonna stream directly to the Steam frame

47:18SPEAKERwith a separate radio on the Steam frame

47:20SPEAKERjust to receive that signal.

47:23SPEAKER- Oh, in addition to the normal Wi-Fi radio.

47:25SPEAKER- In addition to the normal Wi-Fi radio.

47:27SPEAKER- Oh, that's nice. - So the Steam frame

47:28SPEAKERconnects to Wi-Fi for data transfer,

47:31SPEAKERmultiplayer, whatever, but this is just for video signal,

47:34SPEAKERgoes to the Wi-Fi stick.

47:36SPEAKERAnd in addition to that, they're also doing

47:38SPEAKERdynamic foveated compression or encoding, streaming.

47:42SPEAKER- Oh, that's neat. - So where your eyes

47:44SPEAKERare looking, well, that information gets sent back

47:47SPEAKERto the gaming PC, and the gaming PC is rendering

47:50SPEAKERthe full scene as if it's running a game locally,

47:53SPEAKERlike edge-to-edge, super sampled.

47:56SPEAKERIf you have a 5080, I recommend pushing your Steam VR

47:59SPEAKERrender resolution way past double what your headset

48:02SPEAKERcan actually do, 'cause super sampling matters a lot in VR.

48:06SPEAKERSo you have your gaming PC taking 800 watts of power,

48:11SPEAKERbut the Steam stick, the Wi-Fi stick,

48:13SPEAKERis only gonna send the 250 megabits compressed

48:17SPEAKERto where you're looking at, and they're saying

48:19SPEAKERthat's a 10X quality in visual fidelity.

48:22SPEAKER- That's incredible.

48:23SPEAKERI didn't realize, so you are gonna be soft tethered

48:25SPEAKERto whatever's running the games here.

48:27SPEAKERI mean, this is very ignorant.

48:28SPEAKERI didn't realize that your streaming

48:30SPEAKERdoesn't just go over your Wi-Fi LAN.

48:32SPEAKERLike, you still need to be nearer.

48:33SPEAKER- And you can, you can, you can, yeah.

48:35SPEAKERSo you could stream--

48:36SPEAKER- It's just not gonna be as good.

48:37SPEAKER- Well, it's not gonna be as,

48:41SPEAKERit's not gonna be just right out of the box, right?

48:43SPEAKERLike, they actually, they talk about,

48:44SPEAKERin their headquarters, they have great Wi-Fi.

48:46SPEAKERThey just use the Wi-Fi, 'cause it's a Wi-Fi 7 router

48:48SPEAKERin the same frame, or Wi-Fi 7 radio in the same frame.

48:50SPEAKERSo if you have great Wi-Fi at home,

48:52SPEAKERand you have a dedicated router set up, you can do that.

48:54SPEAKERBut most people don't, so this is just an easier way

48:56SPEAKERfor people to have that direct connection.

48:58SPEAKER- So not, not required? - If you want.

49:00SPEAKERNot required. - Okay, cool.

49:01SPEAKER- Yeah, the thing that I found doing the Wi-Fi streaming

49:05SPEAKERis that it's wildly dependent on the quality

49:07SPEAKERof your network, and like, the difference between Wi-Fi 5

49:11SPEAKERand Wi-Fi 6 was substantial.

49:13SPEAKER- Sure, congestion too, right?

49:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:15SPEAKER- If you're not doing port forwarding,

49:16SPEAKERyou're not kinda setting aside, like,

49:17SPEAKEReven if you have a strong, you know, high bandwidth signal,

49:21SPEAKERthere's so much going on in your Wi-Fi network, right?

49:24SPEAKERWhether it's at home or at work.

49:26SPEAKERLike, this is just a clean connection.

49:28SPEAKERIdeally, line of sight, right, like,

49:30SPEAKERand it's gonna be dependent on where you have

49:33SPEAKERyour gaming PC.

49:34SPEAKERAgain, this goes back to Steam Machine

49:36SPEAKERbeing your living room.

49:37SPEAKERMaybe you plug this into your Steam Machine,

49:39SPEAKERand then you can stream a VR game to the headset

49:42SPEAKERand walk around there.

49:42SPEAKER- Dude, I'm dragging it out to the backyard

49:44SPEAKERand doing it in the backyard, are you kidding?

49:48SPEAKEROkay, so the, Brad, you said something, though.

49:51SPEAKERYou can't play games on this.

49:52SPEAKERThis does have a full processor, a full GPU stack,

49:54SPEAKERyou can play, it seems like, I didn't get a good sense

49:57SPEAKERof where the upper limit of what you can play on this is.

50:01SPEAKERIt seems like all of the old Oculus min-spec one hardware,

50:05SPEAKERlike the, what was it, a sixth generation Intel

50:08SPEAKERand a 970 or something from 2015, 2016?

50:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

50:14SPEAKER- Will run on this without any problem,

50:15SPEAKERand then probably also Quest software.

50:18SPEAKER- I'm not sure about that.

50:20SPEAKERSee, like, they didn't even show me,

50:21SPEAKERif they wanted to show me that,

50:22SPEAKERthey would have shown me running locally on here,

50:25SPEAKERlike the original, the Lab, right?

50:28SPEAKERThat was a 2016 demo, but they didn't show me the Lab.

50:31SPEAKER- Did you get to play anything running locally?

50:34SPEAKER- Yep, yep, they played like a modern,

50:36SPEAKERwhat is this, like this ghost town VR game,

50:38SPEAKERbut it's basically--

50:39SPEAKER- It looked like Moss, maybe.

50:40SPEAKER- Yeah, Moss, exactly.

50:42SPEAKERBasically games that have already been optimized

50:44SPEAKERfor both x86 and ARM.

50:47SPEAKER- Oh, so were those native?

50:48SPEAKER- But they showed an x86 version of that running locally.

50:51SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause they're using this FEX.

50:54SPEAKER- Yeah, and here's where a lot of people

50:56SPEAKERare calling it ARM. - X86 to ARM translation.

50:57SPEAKER- No, it's not translation, this is emulation.

51:00SPEAKERSo I got a ton of shit with Steam Deck

51:04SPEAKERby calling Proton an emulator,

51:06SPEAKERand everyone's like, Proton's a translator,

51:07SPEAKERit's a compatibility, that's translation.

51:09SPEAKERThis is emulation from x86 to ARM

51:12SPEAKERon top of translation from Windows to Linux.

51:17SPEAKER- Although I did actually,

51:18SPEAKERI looked at the FEX repo this morning,

51:19SPEAKERit does do translation of the graphics API calls,

51:22SPEAKERbut it sounds like the instruction set stuff

51:25SPEAKERis still emulated, so that's probably slower.

51:27SPEAKER- And exactly, so one of my questions,

51:28SPEAKERI think it might not even have been in interviews,

51:30SPEAKERI asked what are your overheads, right?

51:32SPEAKERAnd the thing that you mentioned earlier, Brad,

51:34SPEAKERwas that even with Proton, there are some efficiencies

51:36SPEAKERthat have been done with translation

51:37SPEAKERwhere some games actually run more efficiently

51:40SPEAKERon Linux using Proton than on Windows, right?

51:43SPEAKERWith emulation, you're gonna have the CPU overhead,

51:46SPEAKERand they say it's in a realm of like five or 10% right now,

51:49SPEAKERbut because they move a lot of that graphic sec

51:52SPEAKERover on the translation side first,

51:54SPEAKERthey're only emulating a very small part of it,

51:56SPEAKERand they say they're aiming for like zero to 5% overhead.

52:00SPEAKERThey wanna get that as close to, you know, under 10%.

52:03SPEAKER- And it's a Snapdragon, not the current top of the line,

52:07SPEAKERbut it's like one gen back, I think is what it looked like.

52:09SPEAKER- All the Snapdragon stuff is like stuff

52:11SPEAKERthat was announced in 2023, released in like early 2024,

52:15SPEAKERso there's a lot of new Snapdragon stuff

52:17SPEAKERthat was just like even announced last week.

52:20SPEAKERNone of that stuff is making this hardware,

52:21SPEAKERthis hardware that's been in development for six years,

52:23SPEAKERbut it's not the XR chip, so it's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3,

52:27SPEAKERwhich was what was in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

52:31SPEAKERSo high-end smartphone SoC, not the same SoC

52:35SPEAKERthat's in their XR headset, the Galaxy XR.

52:38SPEAKER- Sounds like this thing for running games locally,

52:39SPEAKERmuch like the Steam Machine.

52:40SPEAKERIt's like kind of mid-range and Andy stuff locally,

52:44SPEAKERbut if you want higher quality,

52:46SPEAKERyou need to stream from a beefy PC.

52:48SPEAKER- They're looking at the top sellers, right?

52:50SPEAKERThey're looking at the Steam Deck top sellers,

52:52SPEAKERand people on Steam Deck are not playing Call of Duty.

52:54SPEAKERThey're playing Vampire Survivors,

52:56SPEAKERthey're playing all of Blueprints,

52:59SPEAKERthey're playing the stuff that's not graphically intensive.

53:02SPEAKER- Can you do a wired connection,

53:04SPEAKERor is it always wireless with this?

53:07SPEAKER- It's always, ooh, that's a really good question.

53:09SPEAKERI believe it's always wireless.

53:11SPEAKERThere is a data signal for transfer on the battery pack,

53:15SPEAKERso you charge the battery with a USB-C connection,

53:18SPEAKERbut that USB-C connection does also transmit USB 2.0 data.

53:23SPEAKER- Okay.

53:24SPEAKER- But I don't think you can use that for streaming.

53:26SPEAKER- That's just like for doing emergency firmware recoveries

53:28SPEAKERand stuff like that, probably?

53:30SPEAKER- Or file transfer or whatever.

53:32SPEAKER- Can we talk about the controllers a bit?

53:36SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, yeah, they look like

53:37SPEAKEROculus Touch controllers.

53:39SPEAKER- And it looks like they basically built

53:41SPEAKERa full console gamepad stack on the controller this go out,

53:45SPEAKERwhich seems good to me.

53:46SPEAKER- Yeah, so it has parity with gamepad,

53:51SPEAKERparity with Steam control, no,

53:53SPEAKERno parity with Steam controller,

53:54SPEAKER'cause I don't have touchpads,

53:55SPEAKERbut it has ABXY D-pad on left, two trigger buttons,

53:58SPEAKERso trigger and shoulder, they're haptics built in.

54:02SPEAKERThey did keep the CapSense from Index,

54:06SPEAKERso for backward compatibility,

54:07SPEAKERit has the finger sensing of all five fingers.

54:10SPEAKERWhat games actually supported that, right?

54:12SPEAKERIt was mostly the Valve first party stuff, right?

54:15SPEAKER- They're gonna put money in the hardware

54:16SPEAKERto support Alyx still, 'cause if you ask people,

54:20SPEAKERwhen I've talked to people who worked on Alyx,

54:21SPEAKEReverybody's bummed the number of people who played Alyx.

54:24SPEAKER- No one's played it, right?

54:24SPEAKER- I still haven't played it.

54:25SPEAKER- Oh my god, everyone's waiting.

54:27SPEAKERThis could be the headset for everyone

54:29SPEAKERto go actually play Alyx on.

54:31SPEAKER- I finally got my PSVR2 working acceptably on a PC

54:35SPEAKERlast month, and I was like,

54:36SPEAKER"Maybe this is the headset I should play Alyx on,"

54:38SPEAKERand then I was like, "Ah, maybe I'll wait a little longer."

54:41SPEAKER- PSVR2 is actually a really good comp for this,

54:42SPEAKER'cause that's 2,000 pixels, and this is 2,160,

54:45SPEAKERso slightly high resolution, has eye tracking.

54:47SPEAKER- Nice headset, for sure.

54:49SPEAKER- Exactly.

54:49SPEAKER- I will say, having just played through Luminesis Rise

54:52SPEAKERon that thing, so it's the first time I've touched it

54:53SPEAKERin a year, but putting all the face buttons

54:56SPEAKERon one controller here is fantastic,

54:58SPEAKERbecause the split face buttons they do on that thing

55:00SPEAKERis kind of terrible.

55:01SPEAKERI constantly forget which two face buttons they elected

55:04SPEAKERto put on the left side, so it's really nice to see

55:06SPEAKERwhat this just being a regular controller.

55:09SPEAKER- New thumbsticks, magnetic TMR thumbsticks.

55:13SPEAKERSorry, well, go ahead.

55:14SPEAKER- No, no, I was gonna ask about the thumbstick change

55:17SPEAKERand how the capacitance felt compared to the index.

55:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so thumbsticks feel like thumbsticks,

55:23SPEAKERit's just gonna be smaller dead zone,

55:25SPEAKERlower drift over time.

55:27SPEAKERThey'd said all thumbsticks fail at some point.

55:30SPEAKERThe thumbsticks on Steam Controller can be replaceable,

55:32SPEAKERyou can take the whole thing apart,

55:34SPEAKEReven you can take out the battery,

55:35SPEAKERthe rechargeable battery, you can fix it.

55:38SPEAKERThis Steam controller, Steam frame controllers

55:40SPEAKERrun on a single AA battery, 40 hours of battery life

55:43SPEAKERon that, and there is capacitive sense on the buttons

55:47SPEAKERas well, so it has resting thumb sense, right?

55:51SPEAKER- Oh, so you can see where your thumb is

55:53SPEAKERwhen you're playing in the game, that's nice.

55:55SPEAKER- Exactly.

55:56SPEAKER- Gotta get that hand presence, 2019's hottest feature.

55:59SPEAKER- Well, no hand tracking, right?

56:01SPEAKERSo that was one of the also big things,

56:03SPEAKERlike monochrome pass-through cameras,

56:07SPEAKERand this might be the choice that I think

56:10SPEAKERI'm most disappointed by, because pixel density,

56:14SPEAKERresolution, I'm okay with the spec they have here,

56:17SPEAKER'cause they chose the right choices

56:19SPEAKERfor low persistence and field of view,

56:21SPEAKERbut if I'm playing a game projected, right,

56:24SPEAKERa large, flat screen image in my living room,

56:29SPEAKERI don't want to necessarily be in a nebulous

56:34SPEAKERcinema environment.

56:36SPEAKERI like having the comfort and awareness

56:38SPEAKERof what my environment is, and you can toggle that on,

56:41SPEAKERbut that's kind of like quest two style,

56:43SPEAKERblack and white, pre-projected, geometry,

56:46SPEAKERmuddled geometry, and I'm just used to

56:49SPEAKERthe color pass-through on both quest three

56:52SPEAKERand Apple Vision Pro.

56:55SPEAKER- I, yeah, it's, when I look at the choices

56:59SPEAKERthey made for this, it says, hey, we're making

57:01SPEAKERa thing to play games on, not a thing for communications

57:05SPEAKERor whatever Facebook's trying to do

57:07SPEAKERwith their VR department at this point,

57:10SPEAKERand I like that somebody's making that game's first choice,

57:16SPEAKERbut I also wonder, I feel like if you're gonna make

57:19SPEAKERa games device, you also have to be,

57:22SPEAKERlike, I don't know what the state of Steam is

57:23SPEAKERfor VR games right now.

57:25SPEAKERI know that everybody who's making money in VR

57:27SPEAKERis being subsidized by Facebook still, probably,

57:30SPEAKERin some way or another, with a handful of exceptions,

57:34SPEAKERand I don't know how we're gonna get software

57:36SPEAKERfor this thing if somebody's not seeding it.

57:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I think most people who are gonna buy this

57:40SPEAKERare probably people who probably haven't played Alex,

57:43SPEAKERand they're gonna have their first experience playing,

57:46SPEAKERand maybe they already have, they're gonna buy,

57:48SPEAKERinvest in a Steam machine, or they have a good gaming PC,

57:50SPEAKERand they're gonna dive into that back catalog,

57:52SPEAKERand maybe that will reinvigorate sales,

57:54SPEAKERbut I think it's, like the Steam Deck,

57:56SPEAKERit's gonna be like, oh, I come into this

57:57SPEAKERwith the library of however many 20 years

58:00SPEAKERof Steam games that I've bought,

58:02SPEAKERand now I have a new way to play them,

58:04SPEAKERjust like Steam Deck was a novel new way

58:06SPEAKERto take those games on the go on the train or the airplane.

58:10SPEAKERThis is also a novel new way to play those games

58:12SPEAKERon the couch or on an airplane or in bed

58:14SPEAKERon a virtual big screen, and so you get that,

58:17SPEAKERunlike any new console launch,

58:19SPEAKERyou're not having to rebuy that content,

58:20SPEAKERyou get the value add of your existing library.

58:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:24SPEAKERNorm, did you feel like they have,

58:26SPEAKERlike the ARM thing, I think, was the most interesting thing

58:29SPEAKERfor me out of the whole VR side?

58:31SPEAKER'Cause it's like, they've already knocked down

58:34SPEAKERone of the big CS problems, which is

58:36SPEAKERhow do we translate Windows software to Linux,

58:38SPEAKERand now they're like, oh, well, you know,

58:39SPEAKERwe'll just do the thing that Microsoft's failed at

58:41SPEAKERthree times over the last decade,

58:43SPEAKERwith the ARM translate, with the ARM emulation.

58:47SPEAKERI'm curious, like that opens the door theoretically

58:50SPEAKERto a version of SteamOS that runs on ARM

58:52SPEAKERfor like a really light-powered, inexpensive streaming box,

58:56SPEAKERstreaming-only box, which I know,

58:59SPEAKERjudging by the fact that every time you went to Valve

59:01SPEAKERfor a while in the late 20-teens,

59:03SPEAKERlike they just hand you a couple of Steam links

59:05SPEAKERon the way out the door as a party favor,

59:08SPEAKERbut I have to wonder if that's gonna come back

59:11SPEAKERat some point.

59:12SPEAKER- Yeah, streaming-only was like one of the big questions,

59:16SPEAKERlike why don't any of these devices streaming-only?

59:19SPEAKERAnd I think that they do want, they know people,

59:22SPEAKERthey have the data, people with various internet connections,

59:25SPEAKERthey want to be able to have at least the ability

59:27SPEAKERto play locally, like the Steam frame could have been

59:30SPEAKERa stream-only headset, right, if it would've been easier,

59:33SPEAKERbut they did the extra work to make sure

59:35SPEAKERthings can play locally, and maybe it's a checkbox

59:38SPEAKERin the features, and like I think more people

59:40SPEAKERwould be complaining if it couldn't play

59:43SPEAKERat least a bare minimum of those OS games,

59:45SPEAKERand also it's a kind of like dig at like Meta

59:48SPEAKERand then Quest, right, 'cause like people can recompile

59:51SPEAKERthe games that they've made that only run on ARM,

59:54SPEAKERand now they can have it side-loaded,

59:56SPEAKERnot in APK 'cause it's not running Android,

59:58SPEAKERbut have it at least run locally

1:00:00SPEAKERon a higher-performing headset,

1:00:03SPEAKERand the Quest 3, with similar specs,

1:00:06SPEAKERmost games actually run on a lower-targeted

1:00:09SPEAKERrender resolution, and it'd be nice to play

1:00:12SPEAKERsome of those games at native resolution

1:00:15SPEAKERor even higher on Steam frame.

1:00:17SPEAKER- That's cool, I have one quick, tangential question

1:00:20SPEAKERto ask before we move on, 'cause okay,

1:00:21SPEAKERas a glasses wearer who touches a lot of VR,

1:00:25SPEAKERwhere are you at on prescription lens inserts,

1:00:27SPEAKER'cause I've, since I played through Luminesce

1:00:30SPEAKERand I've like kind of been messing with VR

1:00:32SPEAKERa little bit more, I was kind of thinking

1:00:33SPEAKERabout getting some for my PSVR too,

1:00:35SPEAKERbut do you like those? - 100%, I am,

1:00:37SPEAKERI love the inserts, I have to use, I don't have to,

1:00:39SPEAKER'cause I have like, one eye is like positive,

1:00:42SPEAKERone eye is negative, so I technically can use them without.

1:00:46SPEAKERValve Index fit my glasses, the glasses I was wearing

1:00:49SPEAKERat the time, in the headset.

1:00:54SPEAKERSteam frame, they said like some of the other people

1:00:56SPEAKERwho tested it could fit their glasses in the Steam frame,

1:00:59SPEAKERbut they're gonna work on inserts as a solution,

1:01:01SPEAKERand they want, I think inserts should be a standard

1:01:03SPEAKERfor all VR headsets as an option,

1:01:05SPEAKERand it shouldn't just be a third-party company,

1:01:07SPEAKERI think anyone who's making a headset

1:01:09SPEAKERshould have a bespoke insert solution,

1:01:12SPEAKERand most companies do, like Big Screen Beyond does,

1:01:15SPEAKERyou have to pay extra for them, I think it's worth it,

1:01:17SPEAKERyou get your prescription updated,

1:01:18SPEAKERbut the experience is so much better

1:01:21SPEAKERwhen you have the optics match,

1:01:23SPEAKERand you're not necessarily wearing glasses,

1:01:25SPEAKERI hate wearing contacts and putting on VR headsets,

1:01:27SPEAKERI don't wear contacts at all, so I kind of,

1:01:29SPEAKERI love the inserts.

1:01:31SPEAKER- Yeah, like I can do glasses,

1:01:32SPEAKERit's just like one extra thing to get smudged,

1:01:34SPEAKERand one extra thing to kind of get in the way

1:01:35SPEAKERand bump up against the exact--

1:01:36SPEAKER- And you scratch up your lenses too, it's not good.

1:01:39SPEAKER- I didn't realize--

1:01:40SPEAKER- You wanna minimize the distance between eyeball to panel.

1:01:42SPEAKER- For sure, for sure, I didn't realize first parties

1:01:44SPEAKERwere starting to do the inserts, that's cool.

1:01:45SPEAKERDo you have an unpaid recommendation?

1:01:49SPEAKERI found there's like three major third-party vendors

1:01:51SPEAKERI could find, is there one that you like

1:01:53SPEAKERif you have to buy third-party ones?

1:01:55SPEAKER- Ooh.

1:01:56SPEAKER- I can't remember the names of any of them right now.

1:01:58SPEAKER- Yeah, they are like VR optician or VR whatever.

1:02:01SPEAKER- I've had bad luck buying glasses online in the past,

1:02:04SPEAKERso I'm like a little skittish about getting--

1:02:08SPEAKER- No, most of them are pretty good,

1:02:10SPEAKERthey're not like 3D printed or anything,

1:02:11SPEAKERmost of them are coming from China,

1:02:13SPEAKERand the optics are fine,

1:02:15SPEAKERthey all have various different ways of,

1:02:17SPEAKERI find the ones that, and they all like are custom molded

1:02:19SPEAKERfor the box of, like the eye box of the lens

1:02:24SPEAKERof the VR headset, so for PSVR, there are a bunch.

1:02:27SPEAKERI'll send your recommendation for PSVR too.

1:02:31SPEAKER- Can we take a minute and talk about the controller,

1:02:34SPEAKERI wanna talk about the Android stuff that they talked about,

1:02:36SPEAKER'cause both of those are interesting.

1:02:38SPEAKERThe controller, we just have a couple minutes left,

1:02:40SPEAKERbut just high-level notes on the controller,

1:02:43SPEAKERit basically is like the same idea

1:02:46SPEAKERas the Steam Deck controller, just on a handheld form,

1:02:50SPEAKERis that fair? - That's it.

1:02:52SPEAKERThere is, people have in the past,

1:02:53SPEAKERI think one person took apart a Steam Deck,

1:02:56SPEAKERlike literally physically cut it, the Steam Deck,

1:02:58SPEAKERand merged the controllers, this is like that.

1:03:01SPEAKERIt's slightly angled, so ergonomically,

1:03:03SPEAKERI think it holds better than the Steam Deck controllers,

1:03:07SPEAKERso it feels more like, has like the wings, right,

1:03:09SPEAKERthat you grab onto, the paddles in the back

1:03:11SPEAKERare better than the Steam Deck paddles,

1:03:13SPEAKERtheir thumbsticks are improved,

1:03:15SPEAKERbut otherwise, I think it's two more motors,

1:03:17SPEAKERso four motors in here, motors for the touchpad,

1:03:20SPEAKERas well as motors for the grips,

1:03:22SPEAKERand then it has that capacitive sense for,

1:03:25SPEAKERthey know people love, like, you know,

1:03:27SPEAKERtheir bet on the touchpads in the original Steam Controller

1:03:30SPEAKERwas you could play first-person shooters

1:03:32SPEAKERwith the sensitivity of your thumb, right,

1:03:34SPEAKERthe dexterity of your thumb

1:03:36SPEAKERon these giant fat touchpads would work,

1:03:38SPEAKERand some people really love that,

1:03:39SPEAKERand I know those people are disappointed

1:03:40SPEAKERthat the positioning of the touchpads here are lower,

1:03:44SPEAKERlike in the Steam Deck,

1:03:45SPEAKERbut people love the high-thumb touchpad.

1:03:48SPEAKER- Well, high, huge, and round, yeah,

1:03:49SPEAKERit was three things, right? - Exactly.

1:03:50SPEAKER- This is low, square-ish, and smaller,

1:03:55SPEAKERand so that's gonna be a slight disappointment

1:03:58SPEAKERfor those folks,

1:04:00SPEAKERbut a lot of people have now gravitated toward gyro,

1:04:02SPEAKERgyro aiming, and they really--

1:04:04SPEAKER- Yeah, kill the water, I understand.

1:04:05SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so this has, like, the sense where,

1:04:07SPEAKERyou know, you can let go of one side of the controller,

1:04:10SPEAKERand then use your gyro, activate the gyro,

1:04:12SPEAKERthey show me a lot for, like, mouse control,

1:04:14SPEAKERand then, you know, Steam Input is just so robust now,

1:04:16SPEAKERso you can, like, you can do the gyro thing,

1:04:19SPEAKERlike, you know, calibrate the angle of pitch

1:04:21SPEAKERbased on where your, where the accelerometer is,

1:04:25SPEAKERlike, how far you're leaning back,

1:04:27SPEAKERso you don't have to be aiming at your screen, right,

1:04:29SPEAKERto have it match one to one, right,

1:04:31SPEAKERso you can fine tune the gyro.

1:04:35SPEAKER- My favorite gyro trick was to set up

1:04:37SPEAKERa trombone champ profile,

1:04:39SPEAKERwhere you control the pitch of the trombone

1:04:41SPEAKERby tilting your controller back and forth.

1:04:44SPEAKER- That's good stuff.

1:04:45SPEAKER- It's tracked, too, this controller for the--

1:04:48SPEAKER- Yes, yes, so the Steam Frame controllers use IR lights,

1:04:52SPEAKERand there are actually more IR lights hidden in there

1:04:54SPEAKERthan in the Quest 1,

1:04:56SPEAKERso it should be better for some of the occlusion.

1:04:59SPEAKERPets that should be able to see those better,

1:05:01SPEAKERand it was a nice surprise that Steam Controller

1:05:03SPEAKERalso has IR lights in there,

1:05:05SPEAKERand there was a whole generation of PSVR1 games,

1:05:08SPEAKERbecause PSVR4 controller, PS4 controller was tracked,

1:05:12SPEAKERand there were games like Super Hypercube,

1:05:14SPEAKERand the first rescue, Astrobot Rescue Mission,

1:05:18SPEAKERwhere you actually use the controller as a track input,

1:05:21SPEAKERthat works with Steam Controller here,

1:05:23SPEAKERso I would love developers to tap into that,

1:05:25SPEAKERbut no, if you're going back to Steam Frame,

1:05:27SPEAKERno whole ecosystem of track accessories.

1:05:31SPEAKERLike, remember, with Lighthouse and the Beacon system,

1:05:34SPEAKERyou could, HTC sold a track beacon

1:05:37SPEAKERthat you can attach to baseball bats,

1:05:39SPEAKERand all sorts of accessories can do feet tracking,

1:05:42SPEAKERnone of that's here, it's just the IR light base,

1:05:45SPEAKERand they didn't talk about releasing a spec for that

1:05:47SPEAKERfor people to make accessories to be tracked.

1:05:49SPEAKER- Okay.

1:05:50SPEAKER- They're using TMR joysticks on this,

1:05:52SPEAKERwhich I'd never heard of until this, which is cool.

1:05:54SPEAKER- Yeah, I do look more magnetic, TMR joysticks,

1:05:56SPEAKERwhich again, they said is--

1:05:58SPEAKER- Tunneling magneto resistance, I guess.

1:06:00SPEAKERApparently it's like the successor to the Hall Effect sticks,

1:06:02SPEAKERwhich I didn't know there was a successor, but that's cool.

1:06:04SPEAKER- Yep, yep, and that's both in Steam Controller

1:06:07SPEAKERand Steam Frame controllers.

1:06:09SPEAKER- And are they working with iFixit again on this stuff

1:06:11SPEAKERto get the custom parts out

1:06:13SPEAKERso that people can repair stuff if it breaks,

1:06:14SPEAKERor did they announce anything like that?

1:06:15SPEAKER- I don't think they announced anything like that,

1:06:17SPEAKERbut they did specifically say for Steam Controller,

1:06:20SPEAKERseven screws in the back, you can just take it apart,

1:06:21SPEAKERreplace the battery anytime you want,

1:06:23SPEAKERreplace the thumbsticks.

1:06:24SPEAKERIt's not like the PS5 Elite controller,

1:06:28SPEAKERwhere you can just swap out the thumbstick contact,

1:06:33SPEAKERbut it's repairable.

1:06:35SPEAKER- Steve, when we were on The Full Nerd,

1:06:37SPEAKERit even said that they don't use security screws

1:06:39SPEAKERor anything, it's just normal Phillips head screws.

1:06:42SPEAKER- Yep.

1:06:43SPEAKER- That's cool.

1:06:44SPEAKER- Can we talk about the Android stuff for just a minute?

1:06:46SPEAKER- Sure, I don't know how much I'll have to say about it,

1:06:48SPEAKERbut yeah, yeah.

1:06:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so part of the ARM thing is that it seems like

1:06:52SPEAKERthey can run Android software on the headset, right?

1:06:57SPEAKERBut it also seemed like they're gonna let

1:06:59SPEAKERAndroid APKs into Steam?

1:07:02SPEAKER- So I don't think that's the case.

1:07:03SPEAKERI don't know if you can just sideload an APK.

1:07:05SPEAKER- So that is coming, apparently.

1:07:07SPEAKERI've got the digital foundry right up on the headset here,

1:07:10SPEAKERand the line is, if a VR game developer already has

1:07:13SPEAKERa working APK version of a VR game,

1:07:15SPEAKERValve will soon begin opening up distribution

1:07:18SPEAKERof those APKs for Steam frame users.

1:07:20SPEAKER- I wonder if that means they're gonna do that.

1:07:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:24SPEAKER- Is that through Steam?

1:07:25SPEAKER- Is it sideloading if it goes through the platform?

1:07:27SPEAKERNot really.

1:07:28SPEAKER- No, there's a micro SD card in Steam frame.

1:07:31SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but if I press the button

1:07:33SPEAKERto download a game from Steam and it downloads an APK

1:07:36SPEAKERand I just don't have to think about it,

1:07:37SPEAKERthen that's not sideloading.

1:07:39SPEAKER- In fact, the wording-

1:07:39SPEAKER- Maybe it's desktop.

1:07:40SPEAKER- Oh, go ahead.

1:07:41SPEAKER- So the idea here is distribution of those APKs

1:07:43SPEAKERfor Steam frame users should they prefer.

1:07:45SPEAKERSo I wonder if that's like a download time

1:07:47SPEAKERor maybe even a client setting of just like prefer APK

1:07:51SPEAKERover whatever, or like, hey, do you want the APK version

1:07:54SPEAKERof those-

1:07:55SPEAKER- It'll be a native compiled version.

1:07:56SPEAKER- Right.

1:07:57SPEAKER- It's just a translation again, but-

1:07:59SPEAKER- My suspicion is that you'll just open up SteamOS desktop

1:08:04SPEAKERin the Steam frame.

1:08:05SPEAKERSo like Steam Deck, you have to kind of reboot

1:08:06SPEAKERinto desktop mode.

1:08:08SPEAKERHere, you don't have to reboot.

1:08:09SPEAKERYou can just open up a window that is the desktop

1:08:12SPEAKERand then you can just go into the repo

1:08:14SPEAKERand just download your APK.

1:08:16SPEAKEROr you can like go to the web browser

1:08:18SPEAKERand like, you know, you can web browse download APKs.

1:08:21SPEAKER- Oh, so you don't think they're gonna distribute APKs

1:08:22SPEAKERthrough Steam?

1:08:23SPEAKER- I don't think in Steam library.

1:08:24SPEAKERI don't think actually in the Steam store.

1:08:26SPEAKER- I wondered if that's a predecessor

1:08:29SPEAKERto them releasing Steam for Android

1:08:31SPEAKER'cause Google's had to open up to other stores now

1:08:34SPEAKERand then you can just play your PC games

1:08:36SPEAKERat different levels of fidelity on your Android phone.

1:08:39SPEAKER- Everybody's store on everybody's hardware

1:08:41SPEAKERseems to be the way forward.

1:08:43SPEAKER- I mean-

1:08:43SPEAKER- Unless you're Epic.

1:08:44SPEAKER- Better than a walled garden, I think.

1:08:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:47SPEAKERDave Snyder is very happy about this turn of events.

1:08:51SPEAKER- What, everything's an APK?

1:08:53SPEAKER- No, no, the erosion of walled gardens.

1:08:56SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.

1:08:57SPEAKER- He was not a fan.

1:08:58SPEAKER- I feel you.

1:09:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm sure-

1:09:01SPEAKER- They're bad for everyone except for the person

1:09:03SPEAKERwho owns the garden, right?

1:09:04SPEAKERThat's the TLDR.

1:09:06SPEAKER- I mean, whatever, there might be some arguments

1:09:08SPEAKERabout compatibility and ensuring user experience

1:09:10SPEAKERand blah, blah, blah.

1:09:11SPEAKER- Shake that money tree, everyone, whatever.

1:09:13SPEAKER- Norm, the thing that was exciting to me

1:09:16SPEAKERabout this stack of products

1:09:19SPEAKERis that it feels almost Appley, right?

1:09:22SPEAKERIt feels like they built an ecosystem

1:09:24SPEAKERof things that work together

1:09:25SPEAKERand they control the hardware and the software

1:09:27SPEAKERso they can do all sorts of stuff

1:09:28SPEAKERthat maybe Microsoft or Google or whoever else can't,

1:09:32SPEAKERbut also it's open.

1:09:33SPEAKERSo, you're not trapped.

1:09:36SPEAKERIf you decide you don't want to run a SteamOS

1:09:38SPEAKERor whatever on this, you can just boot into Windows

1:09:40SPEAKERand be good to go.

1:09:41SPEAKER- There's a cohesion and a polish

1:09:43SPEAKERthat we did not see 10 years ago

1:09:46SPEAKERwhen they first revealed their Steam controller

1:09:49SPEAKERand the Steam machine at GDC that we were at

1:09:52SPEAKERwhen Gabe was there to promote Steam machines.

1:09:54SPEAKERI think that they have a lot of hardware expertise.

1:09:56SPEAKERThey've built, because of Steam Deck

1:09:58SPEAKERand because of Index,

1:09:59SPEAKERthat they've built a great hardware team,

1:10:01SPEAKERbut it's still a 300-person company

1:10:04SPEAKERand so they're really nimble.

1:10:05SPEAKERAnd what Steam Deck showed

1:10:07SPEAKERis this great consumer-friendly hardware experience.

1:10:10SPEAKERYou see people in pop culture

1:10:12SPEAKERwho have nothing to do with gaming have Steam Decks

1:10:15SPEAKER'cause it's an easy buy, it just works,

1:10:18SPEAKERbut the frequency of updates is unmatched.

1:10:22SPEAKERThey don't do these Apple-style annual releases

1:10:25SPEAKERor Windows-style half-year releases of OS.

1:10:27SPEAKERIt's like, you get OS update,

1:10:29SPEAKERthey can just so nimbly just put new features in,

1:10:32SPEAKERexperiment with new features,

1:10:34SPEAKERand just get you in a beta channel

1:10:36SPEAKERand the actual experience of using the device

1:10:41SPEAKERis a different six months from now.

1:10:45SPEAKER- Well, and the speed at which

1:10:46SPEAKERthey're throwing out proton fixes is kind of nuts

1:10:49SPEAKER'cause you'll see a game will come out

1:10:51SPEAKERand then 36 hours later,

1:10:53SPEAKERthere'll be a proton experimental update

1:10:55SPEAKERthat fixes whatever weird rendering problem that game had.

1:10:59SPEAKERSo yeah, it's pretty amazing

1:11:02SPEAKERfor a 350-person company or whatever it is.

1:11:05SPEAKER- Yeah, considering they're running

1:11:06SPEAKERthe dominant PC distribution platform,

1:11:09SPEAKERthey're making one multiplayer game ongoing

1:11:12SPEAKERthat we know about,

1:11:13SPEAKERthen maybe they're making another game in the background,

1:11:15SPEAKERI don't know.

1:11:16SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:11:18SPEAKERAnything else?

1:11:19SPEAKERAny last thoughts, Norm?

1:11:20SPEAKERAnything we missed?

1:11:21SPEAKER- You know, pricing, I'll go back to what I said earlier,

1:11:23SPEAKERis that I think it's gonna be $1,000 if we're lucky.

1:11:27SPEAKER- With a headset?

1:11:28SPEAKER- With a headset, yeah.

1:11:29SPEAKER- And then the Steam Machine,

1:11:31SPEAKERsomewhere between 500 and 1,000?

1:11:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I really hope that one,

1:11:35SPEAKERmaybe it's the Copium,

1:11:36SPEAKERbut I really hope it's 500 bucks.

1:11:38SPEAKERAnd then the controller,

1:11:40SPEAKERthat's gotta be in that $60, $70 range or something.

1:11:43SPEAKER- I mean, the new high-water mark for controllers

1:11:46SPEAKERwas set by Nintendo at $85 or whatever it is.

1:11:48SPEAKER- It's true, true.

1:11:49SPEAKER- It's for a contours cost.

1:11:50SPEAKER- Everything's getting more expensive.

1:11:51SPEAKER- Oh, and the controller has a charging puck,

1:11:53SPEAKERwhich also is, so it's a corded charging dock

1:11:59SPEAKERthat looks like a little thumb stick.

1:12:01SPEAKER- It's like Pogo pins or something.

1:12:02SPEAKER- Pogo pins, exactly.

1:12:03SPEAKERBut also isn't just for charging,

1:12:05SPEAKERit also has a dedicated 2.4 gigahertz wireless signal,

1:12:09SPEAKERso the controller can be either Bluetooth

1:12:11SPEAKERor can be tethered directly to this for better latency.

1:12:16SPEAKERAnd internally, it was called the Chongle.

1:12:20SPEAKER- I like a Chongle.

1:12:21SPEAKERThat's a funny name.

1:12:21SPEAKER- The charging dongle.

1:12:23SPEAKER- That's a fun word.

1:12:23SPEAKERAnd that's just in the box, that's not separate?

1:12:25SPEAKER- Yeah, yep, built in the box.

1:12:27SPEAKERAnd you don't need that charging puck

1:12:31SPEAKERif you're using the Steam machine,

1:12:32SPEAKERwhich has that radio, the Steam controller radio built in.

1:12:36SPEAKER- Built in, but you have no charging.

1:12:38SPEAKERHow do you charge it then?

1:12:39SPEAKERIs it just USB-C on it?

1:12:40SPEAKER- There's also USB-C on it directly, yeah.

1:12:42SPEAKER- And does the machine come with,

1:12:44SPEAKERthe machine doesn't come with a controller,

1:12:45SPEAKERbut that'll be an option, I assume?

1:12:46SPEAKER- Yeah, there will be a bundle.

1:12:47SPEAKERSo there's where you can have your price,

1:12:49SPEAKERlike you can have the, maybe the machine by itself

1:12:51SPEAKERis 500 machine with controllers, 550,

1:12:56SPEAKERand then the higher storage capacity is 600,

1:12:59SPEAKERthat kind of, I think you look at Steam Deck

1:13:03SPEAKERand they had this really aggressive,

1:13:05SPEAKERthey probably took a hit on the base entry level model,

1:13:08SPEAKERand then they made all their margin

1:13:09SPEAKERor they got to cost with the higher end storage capacity,

1:13:13SPEAKEReven though it had expandable storage,

1:13:14SPEAKERbut people like built in storage.

1:13:16SPEAKERI think that's what they're probably gonna go with here.

1:13:19SPEAKERThey're gonna really have these internal debates

1:13:21SPEAKERof can we take a loss at the entry level one

1:13:23SPEAKERjust for mass market, it'll be most popular,

1:13:24SPEAKERbut the hardest one to get,

1:13:27SPEAKERbut then if you want the readily available one,

1:13:30SPEAKERpay more to get it at launch.

1:13:32SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, then this is all coming out

1:13:34SPEAKERearly next year, right?

1:13:36SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, I said, is it spring 2026?

1:13:38SPEAKERAnd they said, oh, early 2026, so I'm hoping--

1:13:41SPEAKER- That was the most media trained answer

1:13:43SPEAKERthat you got in your interview, I think.

1:13:45SPEAKER- So like by end of June, let's say,

1:13:47SPEAKERis probably what that means. - Early 22, oh gosh.

1:13:49SPEAKER- Early is January, man. - Early is January, yeah.

1:13:52SPEAKER- I'm gonna say anything in the first half could be,

1:13:54SPEAKERdepending on how marketing--

1:13:56SPEAKER- The boxes are ready. - Is what you wanna get.

1:13:58SPEAKER- The molds are made, right?

1:13:59SPEAKERIt's like I asked what's next,

1:14:01SPEAKERand it's really just software.

1:14:02SPEAKERIt's the polish on the software,

1:14:04SPEAKERwhich for it's always the last 5% of the user interface,

1:14:07SPEAKERall the environments for Steam Frame, all that stuff,

1:14:12SPEAKERthat's, and then also the region, like certification.

1:14:15SPEAKERNow that's out in the open,

1:14:16SPEAKERthey're getting these out to developers,

1:14:17SPEAKERso there's a whole window of like developers

1:14:20SPEAKERmaking, ensuring compatibility,

1:14:23SPEAKERordering their games, optimizing their games.

1:14:25SPEAKERLike this announcement comes out now

1:14:27SPEAKERso that developers can actively have units to work on.

1:14:30SPEAKER- Interesting. - Cool.

1:14:32SPEAKER- Impressive ecosystem they are building.

1:14:34SPEAKER- Yeah, thanks for coming by, Norm.

1:14:35SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you so much. - Everybody should go

1:14:36SPEAKERwatch your videos.

1:14:37SPEAKERThe one with the Frame interview was fantastic.

1:14:41SPEAKERI loved, you sat down and talked to three engineers

1:14:44SPEAKERfor like, it seemed like 20 minutes.

1:14:46SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I watched the 2x speed, so.

1:14:48SPEAKER- Oh, I watched everything at two, two to 3x speed now.

1:14:52SPEAKER- 3x, holy cow. - Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:14:54SPEAKERThe world was real slow for me, Will.

1:14:56SPEAKER- Oh, man, Norm, that explains a lot.

1:14:58SPEAKER(laughing)

1:14:59SPEAKER- Yeah, chatted with both the Steam Frame

1:15:02SPEAKERmedia briefing interview

1:15:03SPEAKERand also got to record interview with their optics engineer

1:15:06SPEAKERthat just talked about display and optics,

1:15:08SPEAKERand that's toward the end of the video.

1:15:10SPEAKERIt's a 56 minute long video, but if you watch it at 2x,

1:15:12SPEAKERit's only half an hour, I'm really proud of it.

1:15:15SPEAKERAnd there's some hat tips to the Valve hardcore fan base,

1:15:21SPEAKERthe Valve Deckard community on Reddit there, so watch that.

1:15:26SPEAKER- Look, I saw, I saw.

1:15:29SPEAKERThanks, Norm.

1:15:30SPEAKERBe sure to check out his work at Tested

1:15:32SPEAKERand the Tested YouTube channel,

1:15:33SPEAKERand we'll have you back soon, man.

1:15:35SPEAKERIt's good to see you.

1:15:36SPEAKER- Great to see you both.

1:15:37SPEAKER(upbeat music)

1:15:40SPEAKER- Thanks, as always, to Norm.

1:15:41SPEAKERPlease go over to the Tested YouTube channel

1:15:43SPEAKERand follow Norm.

1:15:44SPEAKERHe's doing, like, with new VR stuff,

1:15:47SPEAKERwith new mixed reality, when AR stuff comes out,

1:15:50SPEAKERhe's the one I go to for that information,

1:15:53SPEAKER'cause I think he's got the best takes in that space

1:15:56SPEAKERpretty consistently.

1:15:57SPEAKER- He knows the field.

1:15:58SPEAKERHe knows the space, the products.

1:16:00SPEAKERI still have not found out what their short YouTube name is.

1:16:03SPEAKER- Well, and also he pays attention

1:16:05SPEAKERto how people actually use that stuff, so it's not,

1:16:08SPEAKERyou know, his interview with the engineers

1:16:11SPEAKERwho worked on the audio and the lenses and all that stuff,

1:16:13SPEAKERand Lawrence Yang was there too,

1:16:16SPEAKERwho I think leads the whole hardware division at Valve

1:16:18SPEAKERat this point, was on the Tested,

1:16:21SPEAKERit's on the Tested Frame video, but it was fabulous.

1:16:24SPEAKERIt learned a lot, really interesting questions

1:16:27SPEAKERat a completely different angle

1:16:28SPEAKERthan I think anybody else takes on stuff.

1:16:30SPEAKER- Okay, youtube.com/attested.

1:16:33SPEAKER- Oh, @Tested, okay.

1:16:34SPEAKER- That's their short YouTube name.

1:16:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it used to be TestedCom,

1:16:39SPEAKERand I think they changed,

1:16:41SPEAKERwhen they changed from having just the slash name

1:16:42SPEAKERto the @ name, I think they got the good one at that point.

1:16:46SPEAKERBut anyway, thanks to Norm for coming by.

1:16:48SPEAKERPlease, please follow him.

1:16:49SPEAKERHe's also on the blue skies

1:16:51SPEAKERand all the places that socials are found.

1:16:55SPEAKERI'm excited about this hardware.

1:16:57SPEAKERLike, I'm not probably in the market

1:16:58SPEAKERfor a Steam machine, personally.

1:17:00SPEAKERI'm excited to test it and see what it actually does.

1:17:03SPEAKERI'm kind of stoked about the headset,

1:17:05SPEAKERlike having a standalone headset

1:17:08SPEAKERwith built-in streaming for Steam,

1:17:10SPEAKERand like, I don't have to buy, give Facebook money,

1:17:14SPEAKERsounds really compelling to me.

1:17:16SPEAKER- It's really striking how many people I have heard cite,

1:17:20SPEAKERit's not Facebook, it's not meta

1:17:21SPEAKERas maybe the primary selling point for the Steam frame.

1:17:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's right.

1:17:26SPEAKERI think that's exactly right.

1:17:27SPEAKER- I also, I think you're the one

1:17:28SPEAKERthat brought up the possibility

1:17:29SPEAKERthat maybe we'll get a Steam link refresh

1:17:31SPEAKERout of this whole thing, eventually.

1:17:33SPEAKER- The kind of nerds who say stuff like that,

1:17:36SPEAKERyeah, I did say that,

1:17:37SPEAKERthe kind of nerds who say stuff like that are my people,

1:17:40SPEAKERand I also am really mortally afraid

1:17:44SPEAKERthat Valve got burned so bad on that first Steam link

1:17:47SPEAKERthat they are never in a million years

1:17:48SPEAKERgonna try another streaming-only box.

1:17:50SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, that one probably

1:17:52SPEAKERdoes not help them sell Steam games

1:17:53SPEAKERquite as much as these other ones do.

1:17:55SPEAKER- I mean, I don't know, man.

1:17:57SPEAKERI would much rather sit in the living room

1:17:59SPEAKERand play God of War on my TV than in my office,

1:18:03SPEAKERand the streaming stuff is much easier now.

1:18:07SPEAKERWi-Fi is definitely good enough to do the streaming.

1:18:10SPEAKERIf you have a modern network in your home,

1:18:11SPEAKEReven if it's wireless, you're gonna be fine.

1:18:13SPEAKER- You know, like Norm talked about the receiver

1:18:16SPEAKERfor the controller that they've built,

1:18:17SPEAKERlike they've got that technology, you know?