- Hello, hello.
Now, on this channel, we chat about streaming,
we chat about it a lot.
But the word streaming can mean a couple different things.
At the most basic level, it's consuming content in one place
while it lives somewhere else.
I'm breaking in a fun new gadget.
This is the Steam Deck from Valve,
and it brings up a fun philosophical idea
on streaming content, not just music,
and movies and TV, but gaming.
Yeah, moving content around, it's a lot of fun.
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So I've been playing with the Steam Deck.
It's such a great piece of hardware,
bringing the portability of consoles
like the Nintendo Switch to the world of PC gaming.
This is more direct and it's faster to use
than a gaming laptop for gaming on the go.
But unlike than Nintendo Switch, this is also a full PC.
A little AMD computer lives inside the shell.
And it's quickly becoming a popular platform
for the folks who like to tinker.
That raw capability shows us a computing future
where the hardware, well, that might matter a little less
than the software and the network that computer lives on.
The Steam Deck doesn't compare in the slightest
to my main workstation.
I've got a pretty beefy PC under this table.
But making the right compromises probably matters more,
packing just enough compute power into something this small.
I've played more of my Steam library over this last month
than I have on my really nice computer
over the last three years.
On top of that though, the Steam Deck represents a freedom
which is kind of refreshing
in this age of walled garden ecosystems.
Increasingly, that word ecosystem
is starting to sound a lot like consumer lock-in,
and there's almost none of that here.
Do I play through my Steam library?
Yeah.
Can I play games acquired through the Epic Games Store?
Also yeah.
I'm not tied down to one app store.
I'm not even tied down to games installed locally
on the Steam Deck storage.
It's another step for gaming
in the same direction that we already take for granted
with movies, music, books, and TV.
At a basic level, the Steam Deck is a solid portal
to games streamed locally on my home network.
So if I wanna play a game that requires beefier specs
and I don't want to take as much of a hit
on the quality or the frame rate,
I can drive the game from this big workstation
and send it over my home network
to the little screen on my Steam Deck.
This is really basic stuff.
It's been around for years.
This is just a new container for that feature.
Recently, though, the viability of game streaming
has improved.
Now, obviously your network, broadband connection,
those are critical.
And the early attempts from Stadia
might not have been as successful as Google would've hoped.
But Nvidia and Microsoft see a future in this market,
and streaming is becoming that other solution,
moving a game library to anywhere you have the good data.
It's definitely not ready to completely replace the console
or the PC market, but it's turning into a great add-on.
It's a perk for services like Microsoft Game Pass.
Using those solutions on a Steam Deck
is still kind of techy.
It's not seamless.
But being able to boot this Deck into a proper Linux desktop
means we can install kind of any software
we might want to use, video players,
photo and document editing software,
alternative web browsers.
So if a company is hosting
and processing the game data on a server,
it matters a little less what you play that game on,
a low power laptop, a phone, or a portable console.
Switching over to Linux and firing up a browser
isn't much different than game streaming
on any other solution, any other PC, or phone, or tablet.
For the Steam Deck specifically,
the support seems to be best on Chrome
and on Microsoft Edge.
That bums me out a little as a Firefox fan,
as Firefox is also the built-in browser
that just comes pre-installed.
And depending on the game,
there could still be some support issues
with all the controls on the Steam Deck.
But just from a data perspective,
this is a computer with a browser,
so that stream is pretty much taken care of.
The trickier part is moving a game streaming service
to the main interface on the Steam Deck,
the easiest way to get around.
Just right here using Game Pass, as an example,
Microsoft has a nicely laid out guide on setting it all up.
It's not hard, but there are a few steps to follow,
from installing the Edge browser,
then adding Edge to a list of programs
that the gaming interface is able to launch,
and then setting up some specific launch options
to make sure the game is properly formatted
and scaled for the Steam Deck display.
A little bit of leg work up front,
but when it's all set up, it works.
It works really well.
I don't use Nvidia GeForce Now,
but the setup is kind of similar.
Just a few extra steps just to make sure
all of the controls are recognized
through the GEForce interface.
And that's the holding pattern we're currently in
with this product specifically.
We'll have to see if there's a more direct setup option
offered in the future.
When we look at Valve and we look at Steam,
it's a place to buy games and interact with your friends.
We'll have to see how much Steam wants to embrace
the greater library of PC-grade software,
all of the other services,
which end up being direct competitors
to Steam's game library.
Right now, it's kind of a tinkery solution.
Valve is not getting in your way
if you want to install another game store
on your Steam Deck.
But they're also not facilitating that relationship
through the easiest interface to use.
That said, the Steam Deck is the tip of the spear,
a gaming-specific product, representing a more open platform
and capable of more than just gaming on Steam.
That's why I feel this conversation
about the philosophy of a product like this is so important.
We see a lot of barriers
between different categories of products,
and something like this shows us
how we might be able to chip away
at some of those barriers.
Hopefully those barriers start falling down a little faster.
A lot of marketing goes into that consumer presentation.
The idea of phone use, or tablet use,
or computer use are mostly artificial constraints.
If something has a processor inside of it,
that means it can process information.
How we interact with that processed information
is often just a collection of small accessory trappings,
like a keyboard and mouse versus dual analog sticks.
Outside of the conversation
on one specific consumer electronics product,
we can also look at the overall trends
in the media landscape.
The move to streaming was so exciting
back in the early days of Netflix and Hulu.
And now, we take that streaming infrastructure for granted.
Gaming is definitely a different, a more difficult challenge
moving the interactive experiences to remote servers,
but it's already proving to be a solid solution.
And what really lights me up as an old tech geek,
we didn't have to wait for an Nvidia portable console
to use GeForce Now.
We didn't have to wait for an Xbox portable
to use Game Pass.
We started out with desktops and laptops,
we started moving to phones and tablets,
and now we've got some purpose-built solutions
just for that gaming too.
Oh, and if you really wanna watch HBO Max, or Disney Plus,
or Netflix, or Hulu,
a Steam Deck can do that really well too.
I mean, even just from the audio perspective,
the speakers are great and the headphone jack is baller
for plugging in some nice cans.
As the lines between gaming and computing
get a little fuzzier
on all of these different compute platforms,
what do you think the next evolution of gaming
will look like,
not just for the hardware of a future console,
but also for the platforms and services we might use?
Steam seems like such a monolithic platform
of game purchasing, but the consumer relationship
with Steam could totally end up as just another app
on a smart TV.
So we definitely need to hear from you.
Drop us the tastiest of hot takes down below.
As always, thanks so much for watching,
for sharing these videos, subscribing to the channel.
For reviews.org, I'm Juan Carlos Bagnell,
AKA Some Gadget Guy,
and I will catch you all on the next video.