Thoughts regarding SD successor

[David Kay]

After 2 years of Steam Deck experience I have some thoughts about how a new potential device could be improved.

My general experience is that SD wants to be too many things at once and is a product of too many compromises.

I find the specs on this device to be overkill for a handheld. It gets loud and hot and uncomfortable when I try making use of it's potential. This is why I would be in favor of creating something like a SteamDeck Lite existing alongside the original Deck. It would be focused to provide a more streamlined PC handheld experience for less demanding titles and in the same time be more compact and mobile. The things I would change around would be:
- scale down the specs and drop the fan. Would make the device silent and make it smaller and lighter. Lower specs and no fan would also decrease power usage and increase battery life.
- drop the Gyro - It only works in a handful of games, most of which are not really suitable for a handheld.
- drop the trackpads - same as the gyro. If you need trackpads than you will probably not enjoy the game and you would rather use a mouse on a desktop.
- drop the Touchscreen - Only really needed when something goes wrong unless for mobile games. But why would you play mobile games on a Deck and not on your phone instead?
- drop the back buttons - Although they have way more use cases than the things listed above they are still finnicky to use and not necessary for most games out there.
- instead of the trackpad have an option to turn one of the sticks into mouse temporarily to take care of any popup windows or places where only mouse input is valid.
- with reduced specs the screen reolution could also be lowered about 30% - most people will not see a difference with a screen of such a small size and the games will run better

And look I was also excited for the Gyro, the trackpads, for the back buttons. But after 2 years of extensive usage I found that they don't really improve the handheld experience. And those features are also unavailable when playing in docked mode.
Some of those features can be handy in desktop mode but people like me who just want a handheld experience the desktop mode might as well not exist.

All I need right now is just a streamlined way to play my PC games on a handheld or TV. Games like classic Survival Horrors, platformers, metroidvanias, twin stick shooters, etc. I don't want to play first person shooters or realtime strategies on this device.

I really appreciate the willingness to break new grounds and innovate the way our inputs and controllers work but there is only one innovation to the standard controller layout that I would really like to see that in my opinion would revolutionise the industry:

Make a control layout where the bumpers are UNDERNEATH the triggers. And turn those bumpers INTO triggers as well. This way:
- you could use your middle fingers to easily access those secondary triggers
- you could finally be able to easily press triggers and bumpers IN THE SAME TIME.
those secondary trigggers wouldn't need the features of a trigger - soft pull, hard pull, etc, just a binary input like in a regular bumper so all games remain compatible.

This would do more for the avarage player than all the trackpads, touchscreens, gyros, and back buttons combined.

You could test this idea by making a controller with this layout first. I would buy one in a heartbeat.

And just to clarify - this device could exist alongside the regular Deck - the Deck would be like a multipurpose handheld powerhouse for years to come and the Lite version could arrive as something more streamlined and ergonomic.

And yes - Steam Deck will always be a powerhouse - because it's a handheld. And I really doubt that future handhelds could become significantly more powerful than this. They would have to become so big, loud, hot and power hungry and expensive that it would absolutely defeat the purpose. Steam Deck and even the Switch could easily run most of the games library in existence. So the future of handhelds is not in providing better specs but to make that library compatible, playable and accessible.

So my additional proposal to the SD successor is to focus on retro gaming and expanding the library to other storefronts like GOG and Itch - and make the process of adding and running non steam games as simple as buying them from Steam.

[AL2009man]

Is there a lore reason why Gyro, Trackpad, Back Buttons and Touchscreens should be removed?

[David Kay]

Very few use cases, at least for me. Idea being that regular controllers don't usually have them and most games work fine without utilising them. And it's assuming that it would decrease the price and production costs while allowing other features to be improved.

[Moskeeto]

A gyroscope (IMU) costs nothing to add. There's no reason to remove it since the cost is negligible. The cheapest phones have them.

[Trackpad Chad]

Originally posted by David Kay:

After 2 years of Steam Deck experience I have some thoughts about how a new potential device could be improved.

My general experience is that SD wants to be too many things at once and is a product of too many compromises.

I find the specs on this device to be overkill for a handheld. It gets loud and hot and uncomfortable when I try making use of it's potential. This is why I would be in favor of creating something like a SteamDeck Lite existing alongside the original Deck. It would be focused to provide a more streamlined PC handheld experience for less demanding titles and in the same time be more compact and mobile. The things I would change around would be:
- scale down the specs and drop the fan. Would make the device silent and make it smaller and lighter. Lower specs and no fan would also decrease power usage and increase battery life.
- drop the Gyro - It only works in a handful of games, most of which are not really suitable for a handheld.
- drop the trackpads - same as the gyro. If you need trackpads than you will probably not enjoy the game and you would rather use a mouse on a desktop.
- drop the Touchscreen - Only really needed when something goes wrong unless for mobile games. But why would you play mobile games on a Deck and not on your phone instead?
- drop the back buttons - Although they have way more use cases than the things listed above they are still finnicky to use and not necessary for most games out there.
- instead of the trackpad have an option to turn one of the sticks into mouse temporarily to take care of any popup windows or places where only mouse input is valid.
- with reduced specs the screen reolution could also be lowered about 30% - most people will not see a difference with a screen of such a small size and the games will run better

And look I was also excited for the Gyro, the trackpads, for the back buttons. But after 2 years of extensive usage I found that they don't really improve the handheld experience. And those features are also unavailable when playing in docked mode.
Some of those features can be handy in desktop mode but people like me who just want a handheld experience the desktop mode might as well not exist.

No offense intended, but there's a difference between not being necessary, and not being the target audience. You're not looking for a SD successor, you're looking for a low spec handheld which likely already exists.

I'm an enthusiast of unconventional controls, and trust me there is a lot of interesting takes on controller layouts. The vast majority of these controllers boil down to dumb gimmicks, but whatever Valve is smoking seems to be hitting the right notes.

- Scaling down the specs and dropping the fan would make the deck a glorified phone with a controller attached. Convective cooling is magnitudes more efficient/effective than passive cooling; also, the power consumption of the fan is negligible when you consider the efficiency gains from a cooled APU.

- Gyro chips cost next to nothing, and official gyro support in games is a mixed bag. It's not a handful of games when you use gyro for mouse input, which is comparable to mouse for aiming.

- Dropping the Trackpads is heresy.

- You're correct about the touchscreen, but most screens of this size in the market come with touch for little added cost. There is nothing to gain or lose from removing it.

- Back buttons' capabilities depend on user preference and the types of games you play. It's not "necessary" because most controllers do not have back buttons (IP laws are a ♥♥♥♥♥), and most games are designed as such. However, they make a huge difference for certain games like shooters because you don't need to lift your thumb off the camera for certain actions.

- You can already do that with Joystick to Mouse. It's not a very comfortable experience compared to Trackpads.

- You can manually lower the resolution yourself.

When you factor economies of scale, a lot of cost reductions like this ultimately boil down to a minimal impact on production cost in exchange for narrowing the market appeal.