You've basically described a worse Steam Deck, and would likely have a hard time beating the price of a Steam Deck by enough to be worth the sacrifices.

Particularly intentionally making it unable to patch games. It's not like cartridge or pre-internet era disc games were bug free, just in that era you were stuck with whatever bugs the game shipped with forever. Games popular enough to get additional production runs were often patched, but those who bought an early version didn't get whatever changes the new one brought unless they went out and purchased a new one. Games that didn't sell well enough, perhaps at least in part because of the bugs they shipped with (E.T.? Superman 64?) never got patched.

The best case scenario back then was something like Morrowind on Xbox, where the game was popular enough to warrant the expansions being ported over from PC and released as a compilation with an updated version of the base game that included a workaround for the game-breaking issue experienced on the original release. We still had to buy the patch, but at least it came along with a lot of new content so it didn't feel like rebuying the same game.

> ...but those who bought an early version didn't get whatever changes the new one brought unless they went out and purchased a new one.

And for certain groups (e.g., speedrunners), this was incredibly important. The example I'm most familiar with is Metroid Prime 1, where so many tricks and sequence breaks are only possible in the original NSTC release.

One could make an argument that having to seek out rare early releases to participate in the top tier of speedrunning is not a good thing. It's not like updates changing runs destroys a game's community, see the recently popular "Only Up" for a great example. One of the models used for a substantial part of the structure you climb was apparently not appropriately licensed and the updated route after it was replaced was significantly shorter. People kept playing, the same names stayed at the top of the leaderboard, the world went on.

That said, this also isn't inherently a problem either.

Steam has a feature to allow delivery of different versions of a title. It's intended mostly for test releases, but some games use it to allow players to downgrade to specific versions for mod compatibility (Kerbal Space Program) or to deliver a different tweaked version for specific use cases (Truck Simulator VR port). This sort of thing could be used in the same way to support the speedrun community.

Also there are games which have restored rare bugs intentionally to support speedrunning. If the bug was unlikely to affect someone playing normally and is important to the speedrunning community there's no reason it necessarily needs to be patched.

I don’t know. Unlike a Steam Deck, the lack of a screen or battery or large internal storage helps reduce costs - and the appeal to collectors comes from having physical media with a complete game.

The Steam Deck has no physical media. Xbox and PlayStation Physical Media is a joke with extremely buggy and often incomplete builds. Switch cartridges are much closer to ideal… but the Switch has well-known compromises. Performance could be far superior on a stationary non-handheld, you wouldn’t need to develop assuming Joy-Cons…

It would almost be marketable as being the machine for archivists and collectors; with a focus solely on what they appreciate (complete games, physical media, no gimmicks.)

> I don’t know. Unlike a Steam Deck, the lack of a screen or battery or large internal storage helps reduce costs

iFixit's teardown of the Steam Deck resulted in them concluding that at least the base model was likely being sold either at cost or slightly below cost. Valve can do that because they have the ability to use it as a loss leader that drives game sales. A niche market product that doesn't take a cut of game sales as described would have to make enough money on its own to justify its existence, while also not having anywhere close to the volume so even the same parts would cost more.

It might be possible to beat the overall price by a small amount, but my point was that the overall value offered is very hard to beat.

> and the appeal to collectors comes from having physical media with a complete game.

Again I point back at the number of physical-only games that had revisions, and the number beyond that which likely would have had revisions if they got another production run. Just because it ships on read-only media doesn't mean it's complete.

Also the idea that collectors need physical media just feels gatekeepy to me. Over my lifetime I've probably put multiple man-weeks in to collecting, validating, and organizing digital media of all varieties, from classic console ROMs to TV shows and movies to modern video games. My collection certainly isn't something the copyright owners approve of in many cases, but it will live on as long as I care to maintain it without any fear of tampering while simultaneously having all the convenience of digital media.

If you want to have a shelf full of physical objects to display or enjoy the physical actions of swapping carts or discs that's perfectly fine, but those preferences only describe a subset of collectors not all.

> The Steam Deck has no physical media.

It has a SD card slot on which games can be installed and they will appear in your library when the card is inserted, behaving basically like a Switch.

No one distributes games for the Steam Deck or any other modern PC platform on physical media, but there's no technical reason they couldn't if there was a market that was worth the trouble.

> Xbox and PlayStation Physical Media is a joke with extremely buggy and often incomplete builds.

I'm 100% with you here. I don't care about physical media myself, but I do not understand why they even bother with the garbage that's been released in the last generation or two. Unexpected bugs are one thing, but if the game is not expected to be playable from the disc at all what was even the point of wasting all that plastic?

> It would almost be marketable as being the machine for archivists and collectors; with a focus solely on what they appreciate (complete games, physical media, no gimmicks.)

Again with the assumption that all collectors and even archivists want physical media. TBH I feel like archivists would prefer digital media, it's a lot easier to store long term without worrying about original media bitrot, loss, accidental or intentional damage, etc. My stack of Xbox discs will all become unreadable eventually. Even if they were placed in climate controlled storage, they have an expiration date. The disc drive that was supposed to read them failed years ago. My digital copies of those discs however are able to be put on my NAS where they're protected from hardware failure by RAID, from bitrot by ZFS, and from physical destruction by being mirrored to a backup server elsewhere in the country. They will be readable and verified weekly to be perfect for as long as I care to maintain this collection.

There is no doubt that many digital distribution platforms introduce their own new problems for collecting and archival, but these are not inherent flaws of digital distribution. They are simply implementation choices.

If you purchase a new musical release on CD and I purchase the same release on iTunes or whatever other platforms offer DRM-free lossless downloads we'll both have the exact same content, just yours will be tied to a physical token by default where mine won't. Both can be collected, both can be archived, both can have their content backed up in a way that is verifiably perfect, but one is less convenient to use or back up in exchange for a nostalgic experience that some enjoy.

There is no technical reason a gaming platform designed for enthusiasts couldn't offer games in a way that was archival-friendly. Obviously there are legal reasons such a thing doesn't exist right now, but at one point the same was true for music so its not impossible. Either way it's not a black and white line of digital versus physical, it's all about how the system is implemented on both sides.

There are now two disgraced video game hucksters who tried what you are proposing: the Coleco Chameleon and the Intellivision Amico.

Surprisingly, the rotting corporate corpse of a company that is the modern Atari managed to release their version, the stupendously called Atari VCS. However, no one cares about it, with Atari’s 50th anniversary collection the only thing of note that company has licensed. Not made. Licensed.

I don't know if it would be a hit. I was convinced that Ouya would have been vaguely similar in that it would allow smaller devs into the market by having it as an alternative to the big three. Instead it was plagued by all manner of technical issues and incredibly poor handling of the whole project and died in next to now time.

I guess there are things like the Colour Maximite 2 that allows for decent speed Basic interpretation. https://micromite.org/shop/maximites/colour-maximite/colour-...

I’m not sure if it fits your use case but the Evercade VS is essentially this. Evercade carts are SD flash mapped to a Game Boy pin out (the first 8 pins are the same as an SD card). It’s both easy to read carts as well as get a flash cart for running arbitrary ARM code.

Blaze changed the way the Evercade EXP reads carts, however, and it seems like the console no longer reads carts, or at least doesn’t after the first time.