[lordofgibbons]

Just after leaks of a killer VR headset from Valve? No thank you, Meta.

For those not in the know, Valve is coming out with a successor to the Index headset called Valve Deckard. They'll probably announce it later this year. From the leaked information, it looks like an absolute beast of a headset.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I didn't realize the Index was still being sold - it was unavailable so long that I thought they launched it, sold the initial batch, then never made more and abandoned the product. As a result, I wrote Valve off as "launches awesome tech demos but doesn't want to make consumer products".

(I thought they also launched then cancelled another hardware product, but I don't remember details and can't find anything, so my memory may be playing tricks on me? Maybe I subconsciously mixed up the Nvidia Shield and Valve?)

The Deckard seems to be standalone too. That's excellent. In practice, being standalone was a killer feature. You can just grab and use it like a phone, instead of having to boot a PC, mess around with cables, make sure the lighthouses are powered up, inevitably spend the first 15 minutes debugging the setup... (and of course having to own a gaming PC in the first place was also a significant hurdle).

[smoldesu]

> (I thought they also launched then cancelled another hardware product, but I don't remember details and can't find anything, so my memory may be playing tricks on me? Maybe I subconsciously mixed up the Nvidia Shield and Valve?)

There was Steam Link, another little hardware experiment that boiled down to an ARM chip in a black box that streamed games from your PC. I heard great stuff from the people who used them (Ethernet is a must-have, obviously), and they were priced really competitively iirc ($25 or something?). In any case, the product never really saw mainstream success and ended up going the way of the Steam Controller, getting excess stock sold-off at $5/piece just to get the units out of their warehouse.

Nowadays, much as you've highlighted, Valve takes a lot of caution with their product releases. Back in the Steam Machine/Controller/Link era, I think Valve forgot that they aren't a lifestyle company and ultimately make highly-desirable niche products. With the Valve Index and Steam Deck, though, I think Valve is finally settling into a groove. Part of that groove is probably not mass-producing products that don't even have pre-orders open yet, the Index and Deck are pretty good examples of learning that lesson.

[mmis1000]

Index is on the sales rankings like since forever. It is always in the top 10 sales (probably due to its high pricing?)

[lordofgibbons]

From what we know, it will be both standalone but will also be able to connect to a PC to make use of a more powerful GPU.

[quartzic]

The Steam Link was pretty Shield-like, in that it supported game streaming.

[kilroy123]

Yes but for how much? The Oculus 2 is crazy cheap and more accessible to a wider audience. I doubt that will be. I imagine ~Facebook~ Meta took a loss on every headset sold.

[bombcar]

Deckard Cain? Stay while and listen.

[growt]

More likely named after Rick Deckard (Blade Runner)? After all Diablo is a Blizzard IP.

[henriquecm8]

And it's also probably not the final name.

[spywaregorilla]

I presumed some relation to the steam deck

[jonny_eh]

I assume it's both, a pun.