>>716484286
>Yeah 2 or 3
So? Was Steam planning on selling 50 or a 100 million of these devices? Were they going to do that with no marketing whatsoever? The only "marketing" that I ever saw was that I occasionally saw an ad for it on the homepage of Steam for a few months. You know their own platform that they own. I never saw an ad outside of Steam for the Deck that was made by Steam. Never saw an ad on TV. Never saw it in physical stores ever. The fact that they sold a couple of million devices for what is effectively still a beta product (Steam OS is still very much in development) is actually really impressive. I know for a fact that it's impressive, because major hardware brands are literally making dozens of them from ASUS, MSI to Lenovo to now even Microsoft getting into this market.
>Handheld PC already existed
So? Were they EVER as mainstream as when the Deck was released? I see PC handheld videos every day now. I see developments being made in this industry every day now. It's not about who is first, it's about who does it the best.
>>The Steam Deck was extremely innovative
>lmao
Yeah, it was EXTREMELY innovative. In fact, as someone who is not really interested in these PC handheld devices (yet), it is a device and a market that I closely follow as a desktop PC gamer. Why? Because they've elevated Linux with Proton to become an actual competitor to the behemoth that is fucking Microsoft Windows from a PC gamer perspective. That is innovation. That is almost unimaginable to any PC gamer that has been around for 20+ years. That there might be an actual alternative worth hopping to for the everyday casual PC gamer. I will argue that the Steam Deck's innovation, especially when it comes to operating systems, is one of the most important developments we've seen the past decade or two.