Based on the 2014 first-person horror title, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter VR supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It offers two settings – Normal for full movement and Comfort for a less strenuous time. Since its launch, the VR version has received 167 user reviews on Steam, with 56 percent positive, resulting in a “Mixed” rating.

The Astronauts are working on Witchfire, a dark fantasy rogue-lite first-person shooter in early access for PC on the Epic Games Store. The Ghost Galleon patch revamped several systems, and the developer is working on two new maps while revamping the difficulty. The first will be small next to the existing locations (and arrives in the next patch), while the second is large to a “mind-blowing” degree. Stay tuned for further details in the coming weeks.

On some level, this does make sense – in spite of the general certainty around VR being the next great tech paradigm for not just video games, but computing as a whole (remember, Facebook rebranded itself into a VR oriented company at the height of its powers and prominence, and even companies like Apple were looking into investing in the format), it just never quite caught traction the way you might expect. Meta Quest 2 (née Oculus Quest 2) has certainly done well for itself, selling almost 15 million units globally, and becoming the de facto VR platform for a mainstream audience. But that’s essentially the level of success we are talking about here – the bestselling VR system has sold 15 million. The others? Much, much less than that (given that Meta Quest 2 is the dominant VR platform after all).

Sony’s own original entry into the VR market was the PSVR, and it sold… actually fairly well, with 5 million units sold globally. Now, in a vacuum and in the immediate context of the discussion, those numbers aren’t quite so bad, are they? The PSVR sold a third of the dominant VR platform, and selling 5 million of anything is hardly anything to scoff at. But business decisions, especially financial ones, are never made in a vacuum, and in the broader context, the PSVR’s performance starts to look less impressive, and raises the question of why a follow-up exists at all – and certainly, why in the state it does (we’ll get to this bit shortly).

Just as a reference, the PlayStation 4 sold roughly 115 million units worldwide, meaning that very literally less than 1 in 20 of PS4 owners were willing to buy the PSVR. This, by the way, was in spite of heavy discounts, great bundling, and some not insignificant software support. At the peak of the PSVR’s life cycle, you could buy one for $200, and it would come bundled with some amazing games, such as Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Iron Man, Gran Turismo Sport… and sometimes even multiple games.

This was also at the peak of VR hype. You know how I alluded to that period where the entire tech world was convinced that VR would be the next step, and there was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm surrounding the format? PSVR came right at the crest of that wave, and rode it to garner a lot of attention, support, and interest. Remember, major third parties were all announcing some fairly big name PSVR projects. Remember when every developer or publisher would have at least some VR project (even if not a full fledged game) planned? And remember how almost all of them hit the PSVR?

That was the market the PSVR launched in, those were the circumstances going in its favor. And with all of that, it managed to sell 5 million units globally.

5 million! That’s a pittance. You know what sold more than 5 million? Very literally every other PlayStation platform ever. This isn’t exaggeration! The original PlayStation sold over 100 million, the PS2 sold over 150 million, the PS3 sold over 80 million, the PS5 is already north of 30 million; the PSP sold over 80 million, even the PS Vita, the one and only real failure the PlayStation brand has had, is estimated to have sold 13-15 million units worldwide (as in, very literally three times as much as PSVR managed).

We’ll get back to the Vita in a bit, because that, after all, is central to the point that I am making here, but for a second, let’s compare the success of PSVR to other PlayStation add ons. The PS Move, for example, sold 15 million units in two years. The EyeToy? 10.5 million units in five years. The PocketStation, which was a Japan-only portable add-on for the PlayStation, sold 5 million units, and that was exclusive to one market.

So even with everything going its way, the PSVR didn’t do too well, and that’s actually not the platform’s fault, the issue appears to be that for the broader public, VR simply is not appealing enough to sell in anything remotely resembling mainstream numbers. So why, then, did Sony persist in sticking with this segment at all? Why, after PSVR, and after seeing the state of the broader VR market, did Sony decide to do a PSVR2?

I don’t ask this question out of spite, but out of consideration for some very basic and straightforward logistics that Sony themselves admitted to back in 2013-14, when the Vita was floundering after being all but abandoned by them. Sony, back then, admitted that supporting two platforms was an increasingly difficult endeavor, that maintaining two distinct development pipelines, with their own distinct set of services and games, was challenging in an era of resource intensive game development. This explanation rang true! It made total sense!

As games become more and more time and resource intensive to develop, supporting multiple systems at a time becomes increasingly difficult, and so Sony wisely made the decision to focus on their core competences, as well as the market where the bulk of their audience lies – high end home consoles. It’s the exact same problem Nintendo faced in the early 2010s, which led to the infamous struggles of the Wii U and 3DS, and which led Nintendo to consolidate their own pipeline and platforms into one hybrid system – once more, we’ll get back to the Switch later, but right now, the point of bringing it up is, Sony’s explanation made sense.

What didn’t make sense is Sony then deciding to… split their resources across two distinct platforms and pipelines anyway, because what do you imagine PSVR is, exactly? Its its own distinct platform, which requires games to be developed for it specifically, and unlike handheld game development, which is just pared back console development, VR game development is a whole other beast, requiring totally different tech pipelines on the development side, and an entirely different set of skills and considerations to be done properly. In other words, it is much more difficult to spread your resources across a console and a VR platform, than it is to do that across a console and a handheld.

If Sony was always going to split resources, why not just stick with the handheld market? Their decision to abandon it does make sense in context of when it was made – this was in the early 2010s. The PS Vita had face planted spectacularly, even Nintendo was struggling to get the 3DS to gain traction, and general wisdom at the time was that dedicated game portables were dead, more or less subsumed by the mobile and tablet gaming market. On the other hand, VR was a promising new frontier with the potential for what then appeared to be massive growth, and with its high tech trappings, potentially very appealing to the audience Sony had cultivated for PlayStation. Deciding to drop the handheld market in favour of the VR one at the time made total and absolute sense! No arguments there at all.

But now, when the state of the VR market, and the performance of the PSVR itself, is on hand and readily referenceable, the decision to double down on VR makes no sense at all. And they’re not just doubling down on the VR market, they are doubling down on it while also stripping away a lot of the advantages the PSVR had that helped it find the traction that it did find in the market. The cost of PSVR2, for example, is eye wateringly high, with its sticker price being at least as much as the PS5 itself in most countries, and higher in several. That sticker shock, which comes right as we are reportedly entering economic recession in years, is already an issue in and of itself, but the PSVR2 also launches in an era where the VR optimism is dead, and the bulk of the development community has decided to jump off the train.

You won’t get an EA Star Wars game with VR compatibility on PSVR2, you’re not getting a Batman Arkham VR game, you’re certainly not getting Bethesda VR games, given that Bethesda is now, you know, owned by Xbox.

Except Horizon, nothing major has been announced from PlayStation Studios! The original PSVR had either full or partial VR support for several Sony games – Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Concrete Genie, Dreams, Gran Turismo Sport, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, RIGS, Farpoint, Wipeout Omega Collection… remember all those? Games fully playable in VR, games with VR specific modes, games that were VR exclusive, you got everything.

Most of Sony’s bigger IP and developers sat PSVR out (a whole other issue that this really isn’t the place to get into), but there was still a lot. Do you want to know what the PSVR2 has announced from Sony so far? Horizon: Call of the Mountain, and Gran Turismo 7 being fully playable in VR on it. That’s it. That’s all that has been confirmed. This $550 headset is three weeks away from release, and I don’t even know what games I can expect on it from the platform holder. And while I would love to have the faith that Sony will surely support it with their best games and teams, a) they likely won’t, Sony never supports secondary platforms and hardware well (just look at how badly the Vita or even the original PSVR were treated on this front) and b) if you are asking people to buy this extremely expensive peripheral for an arguably expensive console, then you should probably give them some reassurance upfront, rather than holding your cards close to the chest.

Even games aside, the PSVR2 is doing a lot of things that seem to be going against the common recipe for “success” (such as it is) in the VR market – the current trend for VR success mandates wireless headsets. The PSVR2 is wired (though the jumble of wires and breakout boxes that the original PSVR involved have been streamlined to just one). The current trend for VR success is for standalone headsets. The PSVR2 is tethered. The current trend in the VR market is cheap headsets; the PSVR2 is $550 (on top of a $500 console, to be clear), and while, yes, the tech that it packs is amazing, and the price is actually very fair given that, and the PSVR2 is actually cheaper than the original PSVR with inflation considered, that’s not how the market approaches these things.

The average person who might have some interest in PSVR2 but be put off by the price won’t be thinking “okay, the economy is tough and my finances are tight, but it’s okay to spend $550 plus tax on the PSVR2, which has very few games announced for it right now, because the tech is great, and because with inflation considered, I am actually paying less than I would have for the PSVR back in the day.” Arguably, no real person thinks like that, that entire line of counterargument is bunk. The PSVR2 isn’t even building on the success of its own predecessor, with it not being backward compatible, and games having to be updated on an individual basis by developers before they are playable on the PSVR2.

Which now returns me to what is ultimately the point of this whole article – if Sony were going to continue splitting their resources, why did they decide to stick with VR? Again, this isn’t about the original PSVR, as I mentioned, the decision made sense at the time. But in the present day context, the VR market has been shown to be making minimal inroads, and even Sony’s own first VR product was, at most, a heavily caveated success.

You know what market isn’t dying, but thriving? Portables. The market that Sony confidently gave up for dead back in the day made a stunning resurgence off the back of the Switch, which, at 115 million consoles sold, and sales accelerating six years into its life cycle, is currently en route to becoming the highest selling system of all time. The Switch is managing this, by the way, without any price drops. It has demonstrably proven that there is a market for portables, which is something we are seeing in the smattering of imitators that have come up in its wake, the most prominent of which, the Steam Deck, is another huge success in its own right!

Let’s talk about the Steam Deck for a second. It’s a portable system with no exclusives, just the ability to play a portion of your existing library portably. It has already sold over a million units in a year. Before Valve did their fan favorite portable, though, they also did a high end VR headset, a high end VR headset that they pushed with the long awaited next Half-Life game in Half-Life: Alyx. Backed with such a high end, high caliber title from Valve, do you know how much the Valve Index sold? 149,000 units in its first year on the market. You can actually take the lifetime sales of the Index and the HTC Vive (the first VR hardware Valve worked on, albeit in collaboration with HTC) and combine them, and the Steam Deck has still outsold them in a year. With no exclusive games.

All of which is to say, there is a thriving market for portables (given that portables actually represent a real world use case for most people). You don’t have to invest in the portable market, and I can see the logic in not wanting to split your resources… but if you are already doing that, which Sony is, then why are you investing in VR over portables? What sense does that even make? What was the decision making process, not just financially, but also economically, which considers factors such as opportunity cost, which somehow led Sony to this decision?

A Sony portable could have continued subsisting on the kind of low- and mid-tier first party support Sony provided the first PSVR, and it absolutely would have had no shortage of games to play, because the Switch exists – and if you are making games for the Switch (which, see above, pretty much everyone is at this point), then why not also put them on the PS handheld? We no longer live in the era of specialized boutique hardware like the 3DS and Vita, which made multiplatform development across those two difficult.

The Switch uses standardized hardware, development tools, and development pipelines, and any Sony portable would too (in fact, the Vita was actually the first handheld to do that). Any game hitting the Switch or the Steam Deck (which, between the two of them, they cover very literally almost every new game that comes out at this point) would also hit the PS handheld, because why not? Third parties alone could carry it. It would probably not sell Switch levels, it might not even sell PSP levels. But even if it sold 30-40 million units, that would be six to eight times more than the PSVR. And, perhaps most importantly, Sony would still have maintained a meaningful presence in the consumer and development community of Japan, rather than more or less ceding that entire market to Nintendo wholesale and allowing them to encroach upon PlayStation’s territory in terms of success and software support even more.

I just cannot wrap my head around this. What was this decision making? I mean, I know what it was, it was wrong is what it was, but to watch it play out in real time is flabbergasting. Sony has decided to split their resources, and they are going with the VR market over the portable one. I appreciate VR, and I really do hope the kinks that prevent it from catching on are worked out sooner than later, so that the format can hit its full potential, but at this point it is abundantly clear that for the broader market, VR holds less  appeal.

It is an answer to a question no one is asking. To split your resources for that, versus portables, where the financial and strategic advantages would be immense in comparison, and taken on their own as well, is just mind boggling. I wish the PSVR2 well, but in the here and now, if you were to ask me about this entire sequence of decisions and events, I would say this represents some of the poorest decision making ever by Sony in their entire history in the gaming market.

May they prove me wrong.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Released in May 2019 for PlayStation VR and PC, Beat Saber sees the player using motion-controlled sabers to slice glowing blocks to the beat of the music. Along with different positions for blocks to hit, requiring adjustments to the slicing angle and direction, one must also move physically to avoid walls and bombs. Various new mechanics were added over the years, including a Level Editor for players to create stages.

As of February 2021, Beat Saber has sold over four million copies. It’s also sold over 40 million songs through paid DLC. Though Meta currently owns Beat Games, the developer remains independent. Stay tuned for more details on the PlayStation VR2 version in the coming weeks.

https://twitter.com/BeatSaber/status/1610813767130152961

While HTC hasn’t gone in-depth into revealing the features of its new VR headset, the company has revealed that it will make use of cameras on the outer shell of the headset for purposes of tracking and mixed-reality experiences.

HTC global head of product Shen Ye has also revealed that the new headset won’t be as competitively priced as the Meta Quest 2.

We’re in an era when consumer VR headsets have been massively subsidized by companies that are trying to vacuum up and take personal data to provide to advertisers,” Ye said to The Verge. “We don’t believe the way that we want to approach it is to compromise on privacy.”

HTC’s last major VR headset, the HTC Vive Cosmos Elite, was released back in 2020.

Here’s the complete list of games, along with the platforms, that will have their online services disabled.

• Anno 2070 – PC
• Assassin’s Creed II – PC, PS3
• Assassin’s Creed 3 (2012 Release) – PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U
• Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – PC, PS3, Xbox 360
• Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD – PC
• Assassin’s Creed Revelations – PS3, Xbox 360
• Driver San Francisco – PC, PS3, Xbox 360
• Far Cry 3 (2012 Release) – PC, PS3, Xbox 360
• Ghost Recon Future Soldier – PS3, Xbox 360
• Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands – PC
• Rayman Legends – PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U
• Silent Hunter 5 – PC
• Space Junkies – PC (HTC Vive, Oculus)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist – PC, PS3, Xbox 360
• ZombiU – Wii U

It is worth noting that the vast majority of these games are from two console generations ago, and as such, the disabling of their online services shouldn’t be too surprising. As part of the process, players will not be able to play multiplayer, link their Ubisoft accounts in the games, or use online features.

The PC versions of all of these games will also be losing access to DLC. This also includes trying to reinstall previously-purchased DLC.

Ubisoft has also made it clear that games with more recent HD re-releases will not face any discontinuation of online services on September 1.

It releases this Holiday season for Meta Quest 2 and Steam VR (which includes HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Valve Index). From the first trailer, it seems that everything about the social deduction party game has carried over pretty well. The Skeld Map becomes much more harrowing now that you have to look around corners, to say nothing about venting in first person.

While no kills were showcased, the awkwardness of discovering a corpse, hitting the big red button to call a meeting and descent into panic is still intact. Stay tuned for more details on a release date. In the meantime, the original game will still be getting updates with more Roles, Cubes and so on being added.

Despite the prevalence of explosives, SMGs and pistols, Sniper Elite VR still retains the sniping gameplay that’s made the series a success. It takes place in 1943 Italy with the Resistance battling against the Nazis across 18 missions in the campaign. You could go all out and mow down enemies or utilize stealth and find the right opportunity (movement is free rather than guided).

When utilizing a rifle, wind direction and ballistics will need to be taken into account. But pull off a particularly nasty shot and the X-Ray Kill Cam goes to work, showcasing the destruction in slow motion. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the meantime.

Valve’s other hardware efforts haven’t fared much better either; HTC Vive, a VR headset made in collaboration with Taiwanese company HTC, was praised for its incredible tech, but always trailed Oculus and PlayStation VR; Valve Index, Valve’s own attempt at VR hardware, was, again, praised, and has seen reasonable sales in the wake of last year’s Half-Life: Alyx, but again, in terms of sales, it’s been a bit player in an already small market. Arguably Valve’s biggest successes in the hardware arena have been Steam link (a remote play extender for your Steam games) and the Steam Controller – but they were both also less than $100 apiece, indicating that Valve’s hardware success has been contingent on selling cheap hardware at best.

Which was why when Valve head Gave Newell promised some “console efforts” from Valve later in the year, the initial reaction from many was to assume that he was talking about Valve games for consoles again, rather than another Valve hardware entry to the market. Since then, a lot of speculation has centered on a potential new Valve hardware platform again, however, though the crux of the discussion has always returned to the central question – why? Why would Valve attempt to do something like this again, given how poorly their debut effort went?

To be fair, the original Steam Machine initiative may have been a total bust, but Valve did end up getting a lot from it. SteamOS, a Valve produced Linux distro, was originally developed in conjunction with Steam Machines, but has outlived those, and in turn given rise to Valve’s Proton, a compatibility layer that allows games developed for Windows to run on Linux without any extra effort or resources necessary from the developers. Big Picture Mode, Steam’s console-style UI, was developed for Steam Machines, but it ended up outliving them, and remains a popular way for users to interact with Steam to this day. Steam Link, the hardware, may have died out, but the brand and the streaming tech both live on in the form of Steam Link remote play apps for smartphones and tablets. So even while the Steam Machines themselves were colossal misfires, everything else that came out of it was extremely successful in the long run – in and of itself, one could always argue that is reason enough to justify a second attempt. 

But the whole discussion got a new interesting angle associated with it in light of recent leaks about what Valve’s upcoming hardware efforts may entail. Recent SteamDB leaks have unearthed evidence of a new Valve controller associated with a new Valve system, codenamed “Neptune” and “SteamPal” respectively. Based on some findings in this code, a lot of speculation has been recontextualized in light of the belief that Valve’s next hardware attempt may not be a set top box console such as PlayStation or Xbox at all – instead, it may be a Switch-style hybrid handheld console. Which makes things a whole lot more interesting.

You see, one important reason that Steam Machines failed was that there was literally no reason for them to exist. There was no niche that they were addressing that hadn’t already been addressed, and addressed better (and cheaper); there was no question they were answering; they were providing no utility or value that hadn’t already been provided by other devices on the market. If you were in it for PC gaming, everything a Steam Machine could do, actual PCs could do better, given that unlike Steam Machines, they ran Windows (and Proton wasn’t a thing yet back then). If you were in it for console gaming, everything Steam Machines did, actual consoles did better (especially since, again, Steam Machines couldn’t run most of the popular consoles games because they ran on Linux, and they were more expensive while providing often more compromised specs and experiences). If you were just in it to get a living room extension of your gaming PC, Steam Link did it better, while also being a fraction of the cost. If you just wanted to tinker with SteamOS or Big Picture Mode, you could already did it on your existing PC (Valve offered SteamOS for free for everyone, and Big Picture Mode was added to the Steam Client for everyone as well). So there was literally no reason whatsoever to go for a Steam Machine – it almost felt like Valve went out of its way to hobble whatever potential appeal the platform may have had by offering that same appeal elsewhere, better, cheaper.

But a portable Valve console, in the same form factor as a Switch, ends up sidestepping these problems and opening up a market for success for itself, in much the same was that the Switch itself was where traditional set top Nintendo consoles had clearly struggled to sell consistently for almost decades by the time of its release. You see, portability in and of itself is a huge selling point. There is clear utility to offering you the chance to play the exact same games you play elsewhere on the go, whether in bed, or in the bathroom, or just on the go. Portability has huge appeal – there’s a reason so many third party games sell the most on Switch, and people keep asking for Switch versions of most games even when it is clear that the Switch is far less capable than other machines those games are already on. People are willing to compromise on the graphics and presentation to get the utility of being able to play their preferred games on their own terms, rather than being tethered to a TV or monitor.

Portability in and of itself, then, adds utility to a Switch-style Steam Machine, giving Steam players an actual reason to purchase one – because buying one will let them do something that their current Steam enabled PCs can’t. And while the Steam Link app can let you stream your games on a tablet or smartphone with a paired controller, that is a significantly more compromised experience than playing games natively on an integrated package, like the Switch is (again, this is one reason for why the Switch has seen so much success even in the face of remote play offerings from, well, just about everyone else in the industry).

So a portable Steam Machine gets a reason to exist by having an actual shot at market success by virtue of providing actual meaningful utility to end users, things that the older ones never had or could. The issue, of course, is that while portability is clearly a killer app to some extent that provides actual assurance of success, it’s not enough in and of itself. The history of video games as a medium is littered with the corpses of dead portable systems, all from companies who legitimately thought they had a shot at market success, and then failed in spectacular fashion. Arguably, getting a portable gaming system right is even more difficult than getting a home console right – while there are at least five companies that have managed to deliver successful home consoles more than once, there are only two companies that managed to deliver successful gaming handhelds, period, and only one that has managed to do it with any consistency. That one company is Nintendo, who were able to survive and fend off portable competition in the market from entrants such as Atari, Sega, Sony, and even Nokia. 

So, making a system successful needs more than just it being a portable. Which means that even with a portable Steam Machine (or Steam Pal, going by that codename), Valve has their work cut out for them. There are several things they will need to do to be able to gain any traction with this hypothetical Steam handheld – though the one good thing is that many of the initial obstacles a new portable entrant might face are already surmounted due to some of the groundwork Valve has been laying down over the last few years (unwittingly or otherwise).

Let’s talk about those things that Valve needs to get done right, though. The most important factor here is price – as I’ve said several times, clearly portability is a killer app that offers a lot of utility in the gaming sphere, but it also has a hard cap in terms of the price the markets willing to pay for it. Your portable system can not be too expensive, because it simply won’t sell otherwise. The most expensive price a purely portable system has ever been able to sell at in the past is $200 – beyond that, portable systems have outright failed, with even Sony and Nintendo being unable to make $250 price points work for their handhelds.

There is, of course, always the chance that Valve makes the Steam Pal a hybrid like the Switch, so it’s not just a handheld, but can also dock in and become a home console. At that point, they give themselves some leeway to be able to sell their system at higher prices (the Switch sells at $299 currently, and rumours for the Switch Pro peg it at an even higher price point). But in general, especially given that Valve lacks the pedigree in the portable arena that Nintendo has, or even the reputation for long term support of their hardware initiatives, they can’t really afford to price the system too high. $250 is the max they can and should go – and at that point, they’re already basically consigning it to sell to a niche of presumably existing Steam customers. Realistically, with the Steam Pal, the lower Valve prices it (without it becoming a loss generating initiative to a ridiculous degree, at any rate), the better.

At least as important as the price, though, will be the library. The Switch didn’t just sell like it did because of the form factor, it got the traction and momentum that it did because of its amazing library, a significant part of which is exclusive to it. The Switch is one of the most widely supported systems of all time, and the catalog of indie, third party, and especially first party games that it has built has been the reason behind its ongoing success.

The thing is, unlike Nintendo with Breath of the Wild, Valve is almost certainly not going to be launching the Steam Pal with any big killer app exclusive game. In fact, it’s up in the air as to whether or not Valve launches any game alongside Steam Pal at all. The Steam Pal doesn’t have to launch with an exclusive, strictly speaking – even it launching alongside, say, Portal 3, which can be played on it, allowing players to play the exciting new game in the beloved franchise on the go in addition to their PCs, would be enough. But Valve is extremely slow in terms of releasing new games (last year’s Half-Life: Alyx was their first new premium release in eight years; in those intervening eight years, Valve only released two free-to-play titles, and some tech demos), and also, none of their previous hardware platforms have launched alongside new games. Steam Machines lacked any “launch title”, and so did Valve Index. So not only is it unclear, based on precedence, whether or not Valve would have a flagship launch game for a hypothetical new Steam Pal, it’s unclear that they would be able to give it any consistent ongoing game support at all. Which means the Steam Pal would end up having to succeed, largely, on the basis of third party titles.

That’s actually not the death sentence one might think it is, though. The very appeal of a Steam Pal would be that it interacts and allows continuity with your existing Steam library. In other words, the appeal is that you get to play your existing Steam games on the go, not that it’s a new system with a distinct library of its own. But this, again, requires some actual effort on Valve’s part, not just in terms of the technology (where, with Proton, they have laid down the groundwork already), but enforcement of policies for developers and publishers.

Given that by definition this Steam Pal is going to be weaker than many PCs, Valve will have to ensure it mandates a certain minimum level of optimization and, preferably, a single optimized profile of preferred settings and controls, for developers and their games. Of course, Valve and developers can then allow users to go in and start tweaking settings to their liking – after all, the very strength of PC gaming is in the flexibility it gives users, and that shouldn’t be taken away here – but a minimum baseline of optimization in terms of how the game runs, and the controls, should be mandatory for games to be allowed to be whitelisted for the device. Otherwise, you are giving users an extremely janky and poorly optimized experience, which doesn’t really make the most convincing case for itself, particularly since there’s already an existing inconvenient method to play your Steam games portably. The whole point of this kind of a Steam Pal is that by being a fully integrated package that plays your games locally, it’s giving you a more convenient, better experience overall.

The question then becomes – would developers even bother with hitting those thresholds of optimization? After all, they can just not spend the time and resources on doing that, and still sell to the existing universe of 100 million+ Steam users. Here, again, the onus is on Valve as the custodian of the ecosystem to incentivize developers to support the Steam Pal where technically feasible. While initiatives such as Proton obviously help (presuming this thing runs on a fork of SteamOS), Valve can probably try some monetary and financial incentives as well. Things like a lower cut of revenues, for example, where they take only 20% of your game sales on Steam rather than 30%, if you also make it Steam Pal compatible, is likely to make a lot more developers put in the work to make their games compatible with this new hardware. Other incentives Valve can offer can include better placement on the Steam Storefront, better co-marketing pushes, and so on. But Valve needs to do whatever it can to have these developers support the Steam Pal – otherwise, imagine a situation where, for example, Hollow Knight Silksong is available on Steam and Switch, but not whitelisted for Steam Pal. At that point, why would Steam players buy a Steam Pal when a Switch fulfills that promise better? Especially given that so many Switch games already allow cross-save with their Steam counterparts, such as Hades, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and so on?

Ultimately, that’s actually a good and concise summary of what Valve needs to do to ensure that the Steam Pal isn’t the latest in a not short line of hardware failures and misfires from them. They have to be involved and engaged with trying to make it a success. They have to actually market it, incentivize developers to make sure their games run on it, and generally make a constant, ongoing, active push for it for it to succeed. being hands-off with to – as Valve typically is, and has been in the past as well – will only cause it to fail, much like Steam Machines did. Even if it’s an actual good bit of hardware, it won’t sell without a concerted, ongoing, and coordinated push and campaign for it. Being a platform holder comes with responsibilities to generate and equally important, maintain momentum. being hands-off doesn’t do either. You end up with something like the PS Vita or the Steam Machines, which never get off the ground, because they never get the support of their platform holders once they hit the market. But if Valve does something entirely uncharacteristic of them, and if they keep pushing for the Steam Pal on an ongoing basis even after its launch, then I think the platform would stand a chance at some pretty good success, and a healthy and rich library not unlike the Switch. It can also serve as a friendlier entry point into the Steam ecosystem for many who traditionally may be daunted by PC gaming, but would be willing to get a portable – and who knows, those people might well transition to full-blown PC players in the future too.

It’s important to remember, however, that in spite of all this potential for success, one must keep their expectations properly calibrated and in check. It’s never going to become a 100 million selling Switch-level success (most importantly, it lacks the exclusive Nintendo first party games that give the Switch an edge that simply cannot be contended with by any other platform holder on the market). It probably will not even match the 3DS, which is Nintendo’s lowest selling portable system of all time. But at the very least, I can see it selling more than any other Valve hardware platform has in the past, and at least a few dozen million units, if handled right – which automatically makes it more successful than all but one non-Nintendo portable platforms ever. And, as mentioned, it has a lot of other intangible benefits as well, on the customer and developer support side both. 

Of course, right now, there are a lot of questions in the air – in addition to all the speculation I’ve already listed out, the biggest question to begin with is about whether or not this thing is even real (or if it’s indeed a portable system at all). But, assuming that this is real, and it is a portable, and that Valve plays its hand right, I think there is a legitimate chance for a Steam handheld to succeed where no other Valve hardware has in the past. Whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

It’s been a busy day for Oculus VR with the Oculus Quest 2 being announced. Respawn Entertainment’s Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond was part of today’s Facebook Connect, receiving a release date for December 11th. However, it was also confirmed to be launching on Steam VR as well.

Previously, the first person shooter was confirmed for Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest. With Steam VR support, HTC Vive and Valve Index users can enjoy it as well. An Oculus representative further confirmed on Reddit that Steam users wouldn’t require a Facebook login. However, “This also means that Steam users and Rift users can not send each other direct invites, but they can find each other in public matchmaking.”

Thus far, Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has been shaping up quite well with the three act campaign taking players on a tour of Europe as they battle the Nazis. Multiplayer will also be included though Respawn has yet to reveal details or gameplay footage for the same. Stay tuned in the meantime and check out the story trailer for here.

Originally slated to release last Fall, Survios’ The Walking Dead Onslaught will now be releasing on September 29th. The VR title will be available Oculus, Valve Index, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Check out the latest trailer below courtesy of IGN to see the game in action (and admire Norman Reedus).

Unlike The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, this title is based on AMC’s The Walking Dead. It promises some pretty visceral combat based on real-motion as players dismember foes in brutal fashion. You can lop off undead arms, legs and heads or impale them. There are some interesting physics at play as well as players might experience some resistance when trying to remove a weapon from a hacked corpse.

The Walking Dead Onslaught will feature two modes – a campaign with an original plot and a survival mode where weapons and loot are randomized. Overall, it looks decent and the shooting appears to be fairly responsive. We’ll see how it pans out next month at launch.