7mo ago

New Teslas might lose Steam

www.theverge.com New Teslas might lose Steam

Have you played Steam in your Tesla lately?

60 comments

Why is a car capable of playing games in the first place. I understand it’s not going to allow people to play while they drive but still. That just seems like an odd/bad idea.
- It's just a computer... Why not? As long as it cannot be running while the car is driving I don't particularly see an issue.
  Would be great if I could fire up a game while waiting in cell parking at the airport for my family that comes into town for example. Gotta remember that this isn't new. We had minivans with built in n64s and shit before.
  
  And don’t forget, depending on the charger, you could need to burn 15 to 45 min filling you battery up on a trip. The games and videos are primarily there to make the charging experience suck less.
  
  Why not bring a Steam Deck or Switch along? Or just play on the phone in your pocket? Are people really spending so much time in their cars that it really needs conveniences like that?
  
  As long as it cannot be running while the car is driving
  This is Tesla... So only as long as the state enforces it...
  
  That’s a fair point. I honestly had not thought about the “waiting for” aspect.
- Why a bad idea? Why an odd idea? It's a powerful computer with a decent size monitor in a place where sometimes people have to sit and wait. What am I missing because seems like a logical / good idea to me?
  
  Honestly I actually had not thought about people sitting around waiting to charge. In my area there are tons of chargers, grocery store, Costco, the mall, movie theaters. My experience had been that people would charge while doing other things. Thanks for the insight into a good use for it.
  
  Why can’t it wait until you get home? We took ashtrays out of cars, so why would we put another addictive and distracting thing in there?
  I play games too, but I also recognize that they can overwhelm some people.
- Electric cars have a very legit use case for this… extended charge times. The video games and streaming apps are so you can kill time.
  Telsa’s have pretty fast charge times, but even those are slower than a gasoline fill up. Moreover, if you get cursed with charging at a non-Telsa station, you could be there for quite a bit.
  
  A lot of people camp in them too.
  
  Honestly I actually had not thought about people sitting around waiting to charge. In my area there are tons of chargers, grocery store, Costco, the mall, movie theaters. My experience had been that people would charge while doing other things. Thanks for the insight into a good use for it.
- People are so used to megacorporations controlling what specific software they can run on their general-purpose computers that they are now... in favor of it? Every day it seems more and more the case that Apple's anti-sideloading propaganda is successful.
  
  I don't want a general-purpose computer in my car. I want a screen to do the federally-mandated backup camera and physical buttons for everything else.
- As someone without an electric car, i always assumed it was for something to do while charging.
- The cars already have decent GPUs to process the camera data for driving assistance features, so someone at the company probably just thought it would be neat to do something with that computing power when it's not being used for driving.
- Wasn't it marketed as something to do while the car charges originally?
  
  Ah yes, run the battery down while charging.
  Yes, I know the scale is vastly different between driving charge and game lmaying charge, but it still sounds like revving your engine wile filling with gas.
- Because Elon is a child.
  
  Do you mean to suggest that videogames are for children? I don't really see where you're coming from here.
- I never wait around while the car is charging (generally only charge at home), but this has been useful for waiting to board a ferry, actually being in the car on a ferry, and waiting for road closures to clear.
  I also do have a steam deck, and this is basically the same thing but with a bigger screen.
- Probably similar to why you can make the turn indicator make fart noises or have the car "dance" by flashing lights and opening doors and such. The hardware is there so why not. Utterly pointless features but atleast it's something the competition isn't doing I guess.
  Tho I must admit that it was quite funny when I once heard a guy lock the doors on his Tesla and instead of the generick "click click" it said "quack" instead.
- Nothing wrong with a little Cuphead while I'm speeding intoxicated through a school zone at 2:35 PM.
  Edit: looks at her downvotes
  Did... Did no one understand this was sarcasm?
- So you can play a racing game in your car, while letting the autopilot kill you.
  And so that the manufacturer can sell you a new car, so that you can play newer games.

TIL: Tesla is not powered by batteries. It's powered by steam. Lol.
- Or coal. Usually coal.
  
  Well howdya think they make the steam?

Geewiz I bought my my car to play Steam game!! /s
- Perhaps not exclusively so, but it could've convinced some to choose a Tesla over other EV's.
  I guess Musk hadn't yet fired enough people after closing their entire charging station division.

"lose steam"
In which way?
(For those that didn't get it, the joke is a double entendre.)
- I found an article about it that has some details, you might find it interesting.
  
  They're probably not interested in reading the article, but in case they care to read the title of the article you shared: New Teslas might lose Steam
- It's literally the fist sentence of the article:
  Tesla might be dropping Steam support

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tesla’s message alerts the customer that the company is “updating the gaming computer” in the Model X and says it’s “no longer capable of playing Steam games.” The message ends with a button for the customer to confirm they will proceed with the delivery.
And we’re not seeing any signs that the automaker plans to remove Steam from current owners’ vehicles through a software update.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had hyped Steam as a selling point, advertising the new GPU as powerful with the ability to play top-tier games like Cyberpunk 2077.
Initial 2021 models were not installed with sufficient RAM to support the advertised games, so Steam was not included.
There’s speculation that Tesla might be backtracking on powerful gaming hardware in new Model S and X vehicles.
Musk has been busy squeezing the company through hot-headed layoffs in an effort to make the company “absolutely hard core.” Tesla scaled back on what a new low-cost vehicle will look like and is going all in on building a robotaxi, which means games like The Witcher are no longer a priority.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Oh no... anyway.
Whether my car can play games has no bearing on whether I'd buy that car. So, this is a nothingburger.

60 comments