AYANEO NEXT LITE Is a New Gaming Handheld That’s Pre-Installed with SteamOS

[Tsing]

AYANEO has announced the NEXT LITE, a new gaming handheld that comes pre-installed with SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based, open-source operating system. Pricing hasn't been disclosed by the company yet, but the standard AYANEO NEXT, which counts an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U and Radeon Vega 8 GPU among its specifications, features an MSRP of $1,315, according to the AYANEO store.

See full article...

 

[Grimlakin]

So it costs 4x as much as a steam deck. Uhhhh.. ok

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I wonder how much of that was overhead for licensing from Valve. Anyhow, I'm glad Valve managed to cut a deal with someone as it was something they've mentioned interest in doing.

 

[Grimlakin]

I wonder how much of that was overhead for licensing from Valve. Anyhow, I'm glad Valve managed to cut a deal with someone as it was something they've mentioned interest in doing.

I know some of it has to be... but still that's a lot of overhead. I suspect they don't expect a high volume of sales so the prices are higher to pay for the manufacturing startup and a turn to profitability in a shorter window. Just don't know that they will see the actual sales for that to make sense.

 

[Denpepe]

I wonder how much of that was overhead for licensing from Valve. Anyhow, I'm glad Valve managed to cut a deal with someone as it was something they've mentioned interest in doing.

I dont find their price surprising or weird at all, all their handhelds cost a pretty penny but also sport higher end speccs then some of the competition.

 

[Brian_B]

I have a feeling Valve is getting $0 from this - since SteamOS is Open Source and you can still freely download v2.0 - I bet that's what these guys are doing. Note: Steam Deck runs 3.0, but you can only get the Steam Deck image of 3.0... they may be using that but it would take some engineering to get it out of the image and reapply it. I'm no lawyer but the EULA for downloading the image doesn't seem to state it has to be explicitly used with a Steam Deck, so ... maybe?

Not sure how this will stack up to Steam Deck hardware - this is a year old APU with an 8c/16t Zen 3 + 8c Vega and DDR4, Steam Deck runs 4c/8t Zen2 with 8c Navi GPU cores on LPDDR5.

So better CPU, probably worse GPU - so probably worse gaming performance.

 

[Denpepe]

I have a feeling Valve is getting $0 from this

They get revenue from game sales, that should be plenty. Not too mention that having more consoles out there can only improve adoption of linux gaming.

 

[DrezKill]

So it costs 4x as much as a steam deck. Uhhhh.. ok

AYA's products have always been really expensive. Too expensive if you ask me.

I wonder how much of that was overhead for licensing from Valve. Anyhow, I'm glad Valve managed to cut a deal with someone as it was something they've mentioned interest in doing.

SteamOS is just Valve's customized version of Arch Linux. Does anyone even need to pay Valve to ship their products with SteamOS? I didn't think there would be any licensing costs for it. Any user can grab and use SteamOS for free, and I figured the same would go for companies wanting to ship products with SteamOS.

I have a feeling Valve is getting $0 from this - since SteamOS is Open Source and you can still freely download v2.0

Yeah see, exactly what I was thinking.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

SteamOS is just Valve's customized version of Arch Linux. Does anyone even need to pay Valve to ship their products with SteamOS? I didn't think there would be any licensing costs for it. Any user can grab and use SteamOS for free, and I figured the same would go for companies wanting to ship products with SteamOS.

The devil's in the details and I honestly don't know but I remember we had an article a while back regarding one of those potential next Steamdeck specs and it had a quote from its designers saying that Valve was interested in licensing the Steam Deck OS out to other manufacturers but I don't know if this is one of those or something else. Good point though.

 

[Grimlakin]

I am betting it has more to do with support and certification.