More Steam Deck hype

One of the few obvious weaknesses of Valve's Steam Deck was support for Easy Anti-Cheat titles. Epic, who make EAC, had already announced that Fortnite will not support SteamOS, apparently just to hurt Valve; Bungie, who make Destiny 2, have also refused to support the Steam Deck, although whether they're taking that stance to ingratiate themselves with Sony (who are in the process of acquiring them), or just to be dicks, is not known.

Thankfully, though, not every developer of an EAC-laden title is so short-sighted. As reported by Jason Evangelho at Forbes:

Bungie isn’t playing nice with Valve’s Steam Deck, but EA and Respawn Entertainment certainly are. Today’s absolutely thrilling news is that popular hero shooter Apex Legends has earned a “Steam Deck Verified” checkmark, meaning that the game legally and officially supports an implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) on Linux. So whether you’re playing on Valve’s handheld or on desktop Linux, Apex Legends is ready for you.

[...]

That’s two massive games getting official Linux support in the last week, the other being Elden Ring, which currently runs more smoothly on Linux than on Windows thanks to Valve’s custom patches.

This is great news for Valve's newly-released handheld PC, because EAC really is the Achilles' heel of the thing. A quick look at ProtonDB's EAC page shows both the problem, and the progress that Valve is making here, but the more momentum that Valve can achieve by convincing developers of EAC titles to support Steam Deck, the better.  

In other news, overall progress "Deck Verifying" games is also brisk:

Two weeks after its official launch, Steam Deck has achieved another milestone with more than 1,200 games certified by Valve as “Playable,” with 10s of 1000s more waiting to be tested.

[...]

It’s remarkable how much progress Linux gaming has made in the past few years. Hopefully holdouts like Fortnight and Destiny 2 will see the light in the near future.

Man, Q2 2022 can't come soon enough...

Stupid hot take is stupid (plus, Steam Deck hype)

So, I was watching the Broken Silcon podcast the other day, when Tom and Dan's conversation made its way around to the Steam Deck, and I have to say... I had to stop watching.

For the record, here's the video in question:

Here's the product that they spend ten full minutes trashing as being a waste of time, when a laptop can be had for "the same price":

Here are the actual prices of the really-real-world gaming laptops:

And this is what you'll pay for a gaming laptop that can seriously outclass the Steam Deck:

 

We're still waiting for full benchmarks and reviews, but so far, it looks like the $499 CAD Steam Deck can easily keep pace with $1100 CAD Lenovo (only 220% of its price), and is only clearly beaten by $2100-plus CAD of Alienware (only 420% of its price). 

Tom and Dan acknowledge that they may be coming across as too negative about the Steam Deck, but only after spending ten full minutes delivering the stupidest stupidest of stupid takes that I've heard in a long time about any tech product. 

Yes, you can buy a laptop for a similar price... maybe. But you won't be gaming on it:

Best Buy has one $550 CAD laptop, and one $650 CAD model, neither of which looks like a gaming machine of any description, and both are still more money than a Steam Deck. After that, prices double to $1120 CAD (only 224% of a Steam Deck).