Tesla drops Steam gaming support inside its vehicles

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 169 points –
Tesla drops Steam gaming support inside its vehicles
electrek.co
54

Gaming. In the car. 😐

Yeah, you've never had to wait around for something in your car?

Honestly, not long enough to be able to whip out a game. The closest is picking someone up at the airport, but I usually get there a few min after the flight lands.

So yeah, it's not something I've really felt I needed. I've brought my Steam Deck with me a handful of times, but never actually used it.

Fair enough. I don't think I'd really use it that much either but Steam has pretty great cloud saves and such so I might play a couple of rounds of Balatro or something while I waited and pick it up again back home on the couch on the Steam deck.

It’s honestly a smart idea, especially when waiting around at a charger while on a road trip or something.

You should probably take a brief walk instead. Regular, actual brakes are important to reduce fatalities.

There already are games in the vehicle. They're just all pretty lightweight. The newer GPUs have a lot more power for the newer Autopilot and FSD processing.

They can only be used while parked, and help kill time when waiting for people or while charging if you are on a slower charger or have a longer charge time between segments.

can only be used while parked.

This clears things up. I imagined gaming occurring while driving which is a problem for obvious crazy and ethical reasons. Silly me.

What throws me off now is the apparent waiting that occurs. I'm interested in EVs, but I didn't imagine the amount waiting. I presumed this was only for road trips. But... based on the comments I've seen... people just seem to spend a lot of time waiting in their cars for all sorts of reasons? The kind of waiting where gaming apparently makes sense? πŸ€·πŸ½β€β™‚οΈ

Waiting when picking someone up, waiting when charging, waiting because you couldn’t go inside with them (at least during Covid), waiting because they had to use the bathroom and tou don’t know how long it’s gonna take, waiting for an employee to bring you stuff (β€œcurbside” pickup), waiting because you had to show up early in order to get a parking spot but the place isn’t open, lots of things

I have a modern car (2022) but not a Tesla, and I can only use the Google voice assistant while I'm driving, I'm not allowed to type

Yeah, my vehicle has a small screen with GPS that works the same way. Locking it down while driving is the way to go in preventing accidents and deaths. Tesla though... they seem to be pioneers when it comes enabling distracted drivers. For a moment, I thought they were allowing gaming while auto drive functions were enabled.

You probably wait in your car a lot more than you realize. I pick up friends to go various places as I'm usually the designated driver, I'm often waiting out in the parking lot for people to come out. It may only be a few minutes, but a lot of the regular built in games (not steam) will load up in just a minute or so and occupy that time.

Or waiting at the cell phone lot to pick people up from the airport.

Charging waiting is likely the most common, but unlike what most non-EV drivers seem to think most of those stops are only about 15 minutes on a road trip. You aren't charging up fully each time, you just charge up for the next leg, and a buffer, and the car calculates it all for you. Otherwise you really should have a home charging solution, it's cheaper and you always have a full charge you don't need to think about. If for some reason you need to fully charge at a supercharger, that can take longer. Just like your phone can charge to 50-70% super quickly and the rest is slow, the car battery is similar, just much larger capacity. So that can take a while longer. The longest I've ever had to charge though for a nearly full battery from about 20% was 40 minutes. And that was because I was going to a very remote area, away from major highways with no charging infrastructure, so I made sure I had enough to make it back.

Most people probably would just play on their phones, but the in car games just provide an alternative. Just like Netflix and the other streaming services in the car. They're there for those waiting times, however infrequent they may be.

When you add it all up, it makes more sense. I honestly think i spend little time in vehicles compared to most people though--a side effect of working remotely most of the time. And even when I do wait, I typically read a book, check out Lemmy, Duolingo, etc. I can see why some folks might want to play a game on the screen. Provided that it only ever works while parked, it makes sense.

Yeah it only works when parked. You can't even shift into drive without closing the games.

On the newer vehicles with a screen in the rear seats, the games may work when driving. I don't have one of those to know for sure, but I think those allow at least things like Netflix in the back for child entertainment.

Have you seen the dashboard on a Tesla? It's a big tablet and that's it. Many of the basic controls you might need easy access to are hidden behind touchscreen menus. They need to pump it with features to prevent people from thinking too much about it

You can play Need For Speed or Gran Turismo.

While the car was in park. Never when the car was in drive, as it flat didn't work.

I mean, for passengers I think it could be cool, I doubt anyone sane would say use it while you yourself are driving.

I think you might be over estimating the number of sane drivers.

Was Steam getting to woke for musk, or did a contract negotiation fail?

It was just that he already used it for the hype and now it no longer gets any attention just requires people to maintain it.

I mean my expectations of Elon is so low I am like "good job for not doing the stupid thing Elon!" where I normally would be like "Duh ofcourse"

The absurdity of this headline makes "You wouldn't download a car" seem like a not-so-distant future PSA/ad campaign.

Yeah, with 3D printing, I can mostly download a 3D printer. If that tech gets good enough, I could conceivably download everything except the battery (FPGA for control logic).

I would totally love to download a car.

Drops as in adds, or as in removes?

Removed in new vehicles.

Quote from the article

Tesla is updating the gaming computer in your Model X and your vehicle is no longer capable of playing Steam games. All other entertainment and app functionalities are unaffected.

You ignored the sentences on either side of that:

However, we now learn that Tesla is dropping the feature. The automaker wrote to people taking delivery of new Model S and Model X vehicles:

Tesla is updating the gaming computer in your Model X and your vehicle is no longer capable of playing Steam games. All other entertainment and app functionalities are unaffected.

It doesn’t sound like current owners are affected by the change.

Notice the phrasing of New vehicles and writing to people expecting delivery of them, not current owners.

Anyway, who's dumb enough to buy a car that can spy on you ?

Good luck finding a new one that doesn't.

That's why dumb cars are superior

Yeah, but you can't keep buying second hand cars. Some brand really needs to start making dumb electric cars (it at least allow you to replace/upgrade the computer easily).

There's a company in Los Angeles that will convert any ICE into an EV. Those are likely to be dumb EVs if you want the option now.

And that costs a fortune compared to what a mass produced new car with a basic open source stack would cost if someone built it.

Yup. I'm looking into buying an EV, which naturally leads me to looking into disabling all the smart crap.

I just need it to go from A to B, and play audio from my phone on the way. That's it. I don't need weather reports, cameras, auto pilot, etc, I just need a pedal and an aux jack or something to connect to speakers. Oh, and the speakers are optional, I can bring my own.

As are smart TVs.
If only there were 50" pc monitors for cheap.

The down votes on this comment really show how stupid people here are.

Evey modern car can and does. Lawmakers currently sit on their hands regarding that.

This just seems like a piss in the cherrios move. Like it wasn't hurting anyone?

Most likely they just don't want to continue having to support it at all going forwards.

Tech debt is a big issue with codebases as time goes on. Steam isn't necessary, and usage likely wasn't very high, so the time to maintain updating it was likely determined to not be worth it. So you end support where it's at with the currently deployed user base and let it die naturally.

The host OS needs to do very little to maintain Steam compatibility. Most is done by Steam itself.

That doesn't have any bearing on whether Tesla wants to officially support it on more vehicles.

If something breaks, people will blame Tesla first, even if they changed absolutely nothing. The average person has very little technical knowledge and essentially thinks of all of their electronics as a magic box that just works, until it doesn't. They don't care about the how, the why, or the who, they just care about whether it works or not. And if it doesn't, the first person they blame is whoever makes the box, even if they have nothing to do with the software the person was using.

If something breaks, people will blame Tesla first

Like when Tesla remove a feature they sold their cars with?

They're removing it before these cars are delivered. So not actually sold yet. Hence the notification to those buyers.