I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

I think Valve should really make the current „Betas“-Feature more prominent, and rename it to „Versions“ or something. It should* be pretty easy for Firaxis to just offer an old, cross-play enabled version there, while updating the regular version more frequently on PC. That would make disabling such features unnecessary.

I’ve seen only a few developers actually making use of „Beta“s in that way, but I think it would be very useful in cases like this.

* there could, of course, be other technical issues preventing them from doing that, which only their developers know of

Edit: They’ve actually added a console-compatible “Beta” yesterday.

Sorry, I’m not sure if I’m getting your point. I don’t think anyone’s asking anyone to leave their favorite genre for innovation’s sake. I just think these games show, that customers are totally ready to spend money on innovative games, even if they’re certainly rarer than less innovative titles. So I find it hard calling consumers risk adverse, in general.

I think they’re just adverse to games which aren’t fun, which could arguably be more common with more innovative titles, but, seeing Ubisoft’s downfall over the past few years, I’d argue that samey, “safe” games seem to be very low the average consumer’s fun scale as well.

I think that isn‘t really the case though, is it?

Sure, there are those, who just play the latest Call Of Duty each year. But the success of very innovative games like Balatro, Papers Please, Vampire Survivors or even Breath of the Wild shows, that many consumers crave innovation, if it turns out to be fun innovation.

This also shows that these games can be found and appreciated, even if they‘re made by totally unknown people or studios.

Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.

Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.

This is very speculative, but along the things they’ve learned for VR they‘re mentioning APUs and wireless streaming. This might hint towards a standalone device which can also be connected to a PC.

It‘s possible to use VR headsets with the Steam Deck. It‘s just far too weak for a pleasant experience.

It‘s worth noting though, that, according to this interview (37:30), Valve is probably working on a new VR HMD which will make use of the things they‘ve learned from developing the Deck. So I‘d guess there‘s a standalone headset coming from them at some point in the future.