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).
> (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.
(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).