i was gonna get a quest 3 for christmas but then the steam frame got announced and i was like HELL NAH and thew my quest 3 ideas out of the window. if everything falls into place il have my steam frame just intime for my birthday :D
gone will the days where i will be kicked from vrc lobbies for being a “Questie”. gone will be the days of my game crashing mid snuggle session, gone the days of having a lowkey mid game selection (apart from like metro awakening as if i was gonna get the quest 3 i would have 100% gotten that game)
cant wait to get ittttt (also i cant wait to play half life alyx on it)
Unless the price is ridiculously low, corporations are not buying thousands of anything without a support contract. Next day repairs/exchanges and priority support are a must when dealing with hardware at scale, and Valve is not going to offer that.
Dell/Lenovo/HP are already more expensive than consumer-grade hardware from Best Buy unless you are a very large customer. Companies pay for reliability, warranty and support.
It happened to the Playstation, though not for use as workstations usually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Although Valve apparently already takes anti-scalping measures with the Steam Deck, so maybe it could work out in that way (as in, each steam account gets a limited number of purchases, TOS against trying to bypass that limit, etc).
Those PlayStation supercomputers were wild. I don’t think it’s analogous to the various bits of Steam hardware coming out though, since Valve sells directly through Steam. You can’t order anything by the pallet.
The other thing to consider is that the PS3 was used for clustered computing primarily because of the Cell processor. I have no recollection of why the cell processor performed better on certain types of problems. PS3 wasn’t being used for Excel spreadsheets, it was used for niche academic use and that one Air Force supercomputer. The Steam hardware though uses pretty standard hardware, AMD processor and Radeon graphics card.
Considering the added friction of buying through Steam, i doubt it will have same draw.