In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads.
Valve absolutely did not have to change their screws, and its probably actually against their best interests. While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers, Valve goes out of their way to update their screws to make them easier to install/remove by changing to torx screws and added metal threads in the backplate. Those who know anything about mechanical engineering know this is not an insignificant amount of effort they put into it.
This is a small change that makes a huge impact, and speaks volumes about the ethos of the company. It says:
We want to make our devices last longer, and be easier to repair.
If you want to buy the cheaper tier and save yourself a few bucks by installing whatever SSD you want, go right ahead.
We trust you to make decisions for yourself.
Most importantly, we respect you, the consumer, and want you to fully own and control the devices we sell.
Valve is by no means perfect, and there’s plenty more they could be doing, but they’ve earned my respect and my patronage and I won’t buy games from anywhere else. I will buy whatever future products they sell, even if I don’t think I’ll use them regularly.
Yeah I haven’t even made an account on Epic to get free games from there. Valve almost single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform and I’m grateful for that (I know wine has existed far longer than proton, but the difference before and after proton is day and night).
Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.
SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.
Steam is an infinite money generator, yes, but any publicly owned company would have fucked it up for short term profits. Valve absolutely has its problems, but its focus on the long term and respecting its customers means it can make infinite money and do stuff like this.
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically…however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
When I couldn’t repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans’ greed may be limitless.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
That’s interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don’t want to stray outside the community.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
Fortunately Gaben has only a minor interest in Volvo 😉.
But actually his son is involved in the games industry, and there’s plenty of other like-minded people at Valve. Hopefully the (far) future of Valve is as bright as its present.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It’s what I think it’s happening with netflix & others. It doesn’t matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don’t want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don’t care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don’t know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
Valve doesn’t use physical media, so there isn’t a need to enforce DRM at the hardware level
the Deck itself is sold at a small profit regardless of the configuration, so there’s no benefit to pushing users to higher-price configurations
Valve enforces its DRM in software via the OS
The biggest reasons to lock down hardware aren’t really there on the Deck. On top of that, it benefits Valve to have other devices running their storefront, so using off-the-shelf parts when possible makes it easier for others to use the Deck as a template.
I really have no idea what this comment is supposed to be about. Do you think companies like Apple don’t make buckets of money from their app store? Or their subscription services? Do you think they “need” to charge exorbitant prices for their hardware? Do you think they “need” to strike partnerships with their suppliers to ensure they can’t sell their parts to anyone else? Do you think they “need” to lock them down so that even if you’re able to obtain third party parts, they still won’t work?
Corporations don’t care about “needs”. Their goals are to extract as much money from the consumer as humanly possible.
Didn’t they change to torx and change the base they screw into metal?
The former is a mild annoyance, but they’re a pretty standard bit now that anyone that does any electronic DIY has in their set. The latter is a huge improvement.
Must admit I didn’t look too much into it though
but mostly seems positive.
Aha, OK. That’s my bad. When I read it on the phone earlier, I read the four point list as something you thought they should be doing, and not what they were doing. As such, I thought you were ranting against them.
Yeah, the OG Steam Deck video before it even released made very clear that the original run was made with self-tapping screws, which meant that disassembly and re-assembly was always going to result in a less firm and tight re-assembly because the holes have already been tapped once.
It was honestly my personal biggest complaint considering it seemed otherwise like they were aiming to support self-repair. Very refreshing to see they changed tack to a costlier option for the sake of their customers. Very true, companies rarely do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and Valve is an unusual company.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !gaming@beehaw.org
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it’s gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
Yeah I haven’t even made an account on Epic to get free games from there. Valve almost single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform and I’m grateful for that (I know wine has existed far longer than proton, but the difference before and after proton is day and night).
Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.
SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.
Made by hardware hackers for hardware hackers.
Strange how a company with infinite money just produces stuff they like huh?
Every company should try that.
Look at the shit Apple produces and understand it is not only a function of money.
Steam is an infinite money generator, yes, but any publicly owned company would have fucked it up for short term profits. Valve absolutely has its problems, but its focus on the long term and respecting its customers means it can make infinite money and do stuff like this.
People ITT: it’s called ranting and raving!
When Gaben dies there will be fucking riots.
I really hope he’s cultivating at least one successor within the company to carry on his vision.
Less of a rant, more of a rave.
Cool upgrade for hobbiests.
Are rants inherently negative?
By definition, no, but most people probably assume negativity when they hear the word rant.
rant /rănt/ intransitive verb
My b
epilepsy warning
Ya from the title I expected OP to be complaining because they don’t own a torx head screwdriver/bit.
Whoops. Unintentional clickbait.
Me, as one who only read the first line before scrolling to the comments, good thing that others pointed out about the topic itself
Was expecting the same and I didn’t even know they switched to torx. Philips screws are bad. I go out of my way and spend extra money to avoid them.
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically…however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
Any opinions on Samsung or Google?
deleted by creator
When I couldn’t repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
Good to hear, got a Fairpone 5 recently and I’m very happy with it so far.
Although breaking it probably won’t take more than a year for clumsy me.
I saw rant and got raved
Got me in the first word, not gonna lie.
You bastard, take that upvote.
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans’ greed may be limitless.
I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren’t public and not beholden to shareholders.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
That’s interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don’t want to stray outside the community.
This is the correct answer.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
Always be on guard and claim no allegiance to any huge company.
Also, Valve have been pretty consumer friendly for 20 years.
I fear when lord gaben dies volvo will go public and enshittification will begin
Fortunately Gaben has only a minor interest in Volvo 😉.
But actually his son is involved in the games industry, and there’s plenty of other like-minded people at Valve. Hopefully the (far) future of Valve is as bright as its present.
Looks at copier sheet that’s not a Vol-vo.
Valve is not a new company and they’re easily worth billions.
Okay, I may have misplaced few zeros here ant there, my apologies.
Gabe himself is worth over 4 billion.
I don’t think it will happen. Enshittification has a predictable life cycle. Valve has had years of opportunity to sell out, but haven’t.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It’s what I think it’s happening with netflix & others. It doesn’t matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don’t want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don’t care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don’t know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn’t I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
The fact that you said Volvo on accident brings me back to the old ThioJoe troll days
It’s almost like Valve doesn’t absolutely hate their customers.
Three thoughts:
The biggest reasons to lock down hardware aren’t really there on the Deck. On top of that, it benefits Valve to have other devices running their storefront, so using off-the-shelf parts when possible makes it easier for others to use the Deck as a template.
I really have no idea what this comment is supposed to be about. Do you think companies like Apple don’t make buckets of money from their app store? Or their subscription services? Do you think they “need” to charge exorbitant prices for their hardware? Do you think they “need” to strike partnerships with their suppliers to ensure they can’t sell their parts to anyone else? Do you think they “need” to lock them down so that even if you’re able to obtain third party parts, they still won’t work?
Corporations don’t care about “needs”. Their goals are to extract as much money from the consumer as humanly possible.
Didn’t they change to torx and change the base they screw into metal?
The former is a mild annoyance, but they’re a pretty standard bit now that anyone that does any electronic DIY has in their set. The latter is a huge improvement.
Must admit I didn’t look too much into it though
but mostly seems positive.
Yes that’s what I said
Aha, OK. That’s my bad. When I read it on the phone earlier, I read the four point list as something you thought they should be doing, and not what they were doing. As such, I thought you were ranting against them.
Torx is the king of screws, change my mind :D
I prefer the Arthur head screw.
What is the advantage of torx over Phillips?
You strip them was less easily. Also, better grip on the screw=more torque
Good to know. I’m converted
Yeah, the OG Steam Deck video before it even released made very clear that the original run was made with self-tapping screws, which meant that disassembly and re-assembly was always going to result in a less firm and tight re-assembly because the holes have already been tapped once.
It was honestly my personal biggest complaint considering it seemed otherwise like they were aiming to support self-repair. Very refreshing to see they changed tack to a costlier option for the sake of their customers. Very true, companies rarely do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and Valve is an unusual company.
I consistently pray for shareholders never getting their deathgrip on Valve
I just don’t use my impact drill on them and I’ve never had an issue.
But how do you know if the screws are tight when you’re not counting ugga duggas?
The fact that it’s usually fine is probably why they didn’t feel like they had to do this to start.
The failure rate probably isn’t that high, but it’s extra wear over time that can be prevented.
You’re clearly doing it wrong then. You need to torque those screws more than you do your lugnuts
I just sonic welded my steam deck, with extra rivets through the screen and fan to be sure.