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And the thing with your idea is there's already millions of lowend/entry level machines out there. If that's not enough to implement different versions as you suggest over the last decade, I somehow doubt the Steam Deck demographic warrants it yet.
yeah totally true for most games, now that devs are being encouraged by steam to make changes to their games to make them deck compatible it would make sense to encourage them to make them size friendly.
Here's hoping. steam seems to be going all out with it's hardware and mobile push. being able to fit games on it seems sensible and i don't think any low end rig finds storage to be it's bottleneck.
While it maybe nice to consider I just don't see it happening. Devs haven't bothered making changes for all the laptops and desktops with weaker restricted hardware for several decades now. Really doubt they're going to start making modifications to games now,
They can't even allow users to keep a separate version for mods that doesn't get forced to update to their updated version. Or allow you to download a 4k version without all the 720p, 1080p,1440p resources and vice versus.
Yeah, compressed versions are something NEW, in a lot of ways, a new idea, like dlss or other unimplemented or un-thought of things, before now they ain't been done. Monster Hunter World has it's high resolution textures as a free dlc which you must enable, saving at least 50 GB of hard drive space if you simply don't install it. Hardly a seperate version or branch install.
It might not have been necessary before to do these things, it might have been too bothersome, but if the steam deck is going to have more then 1 game on it at a time it might be in steams favour to encourage it or somehow facilitate it.
compressed in the sense of quality reduction of certain elements like textures or sound files, not rar'd up
That's been done for lots of games tbh. Again problem is devs aren't going to want to spend time making that sort of option available on games that have already been sold. Maybe for future games but not the old ones
The concept has been on consoles for literal decades. And yeah it basically is gonna come with a few drawbacks. YOu're going to have some hellish load times and transition delays..
Here's the thing about compression. It takes ttime and resources to run decompression. So basically you're chewing up more cpu and ram, as well as increasing wait times for the user.
There's no real way around this. HDD space is considerably cheaper than ram hence why games have been getting bigger.
Secondly you're kinda assuming that games aren't already compressing their assets. Many are.
Have youever tried to compress a JPeg or an mp4?
Yeah that's not gonna be somehing Steam's gonna want. "Hey kinds , gett a Steam Deck where you can play your favorite PC games but with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ graphics and frame rates'
And devs aren't going to be up for taking the considerable time required to create an iopttimized build for a veeeeryspecific piece of hardware.
Some devs are going out of their way to make their games steamdeck friendly and some devs ain't gonna care, some incentive from steam to do this and get front and center on a new handheld launch might motivate some enough but even if it's only for future games that itself would be enough of a win. making them smaller is something i don't think is a concern for many devs even ones making them work on the deck, which is something I think should be addressed.
Well most games so far as I know will fit on the Steam Deck, so arguably space isn't a bottleneck there either. It's just a problem when you want to fit as many games on the SD as a PC with several TB's of storage.
I don't think it's a bad idea. Hardware specific versions would have some benefits. A lot of people with lower end hardware could opt to run the Seam Deck version. Or anyone who's space conscious, whatever. And we already have hi-Def texture packs on some games as free DLC. So an enhancement of that strategy might be reasonable. There's some challenges with buy-in I feel like.
But I think there's some realities where Valve doesn't have the power to change the industry. And the Steam Deck may not be enough to force that change. So I wouldn't be surprised if the status quo remained the same and Steam Deck owners either have to buy additional storage (like I did with my Switch) or they have to manage their limited storage space, like everyone with modest machines has had to do for years.
the concept has been on consoles, but not for literal decades, literally decades ago it was. ever since the ps3 sizes have been bloating up like some sort of fat cult. size stopped being an issue and now, with handhelds hopefully back in fashion, it's started being a problem again. it does take time and effort to decompress, but the type of compression i'm talking about it to reduce the time and effort, there will be no decompression, you get reduced quality, and you like it. I'm not assuming anything about games or devs already compressing assets, I know for a fact that when I see a 100 GB install of a game it's 100 GB of ♥♥♥♥ thats not gonna fit, and I know for a fact that if Bethesda is behind it half of it can be reduced in size through mods.
rarely have I found reducing the settings in games to decrease my fps - and if games had the option to download only the files required to run it on low settings wouldn't that be a step forwards, I don't think you'd need to make a new build for a new piece of hardware either, I mean, there isn't a new build of a game for each new graphics card which comes out.
Textures and sound can't be compressed more than they already are unless they are for what ever crazy reason being used in a raw format with zero compression which is just not done in games today. The only way to get their sizes down for Steam Deck would be for the developer to include Deck specific texture pack and have it not include the textures for everything else. But there are lots of other things in the games that take up lots of space too.
There are many games on Steam that use compression already. Payday 2 is one I use as an example as its the one I know best. At one point they were pushing 50 gigs or so. The community complained about the size, so they compressed the game, they got it down to I think under 30 gigs. At this point, people then started complaining about how slow the game was to load and to patch. Now the game is over 70 gigs while still compressed.
So you are going to suffer either way. Either by not being able to install all the games you want, or for the Deck work harder, using more battery by needing to run the game in a compressed format requiring at least some decompressing to play, which also means longer load times.
I suggest getting a few 500 gig or 1TB microSD cards. Maybe put 1 kind of game on each one so its easier to find what you want to play.
Maybe in Steam Deck 2, they will include the ability to have a second physically larger NVME or just have it so that the only drive in there is not limited to the smallest physical size (though even that one has 2TB drives but it is slower). I like the idea of the deck and if I traveled more I'd get one. though I would prefer if I could stick in one of those 8TB m.2 sticks and then just pretty much forget about needing to add more later.