It’s still early enough in the production process that it’s hard to say what lies ahead for the Steam Deck. From what I saw, the new portable gaming PC from Valve is flexible, surprisingly powerful, and affordable. It’s got potential.
If Valve can get the Deck into wide enough circulation, it’s got a chance to change the face of PC gaming. Again.
The Deck, which was first officially announced a couple of weeks ago, is a handheld PC that runs a new version of Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS. Out of the box, it features gamepad controls and two trackpads, built into either side of a 7-inch LCD touchscreen, but you can also hook it up to a monitor, mouse, and/or keyboard and treat it like an ultra-portable PC tower.
Valve invited me and others to try out the Steam Deck on Thursday afternoon, in an hour-long demo held at Valve’s offices in downtown Bellevue, Wash. We were told straight up that the units we were using were some of the first pre-production models of the 512 GB model of the Deck, and still had a few bugs that Valve hadn’t worked out.
The first thing to jump out at me about the Deck was how light it is. I’d been subconsciously expecting it to be a brick like an old ’90s portable system, but the Deck is only about 1.7 pounds, with most of that weight concentrated in the grips.
It’s also intuitive to play if you’ve spent any time at all with a controller. The D-pad on the Deck, the cross-shaped button on the upper left, is admittedly in a weird place, but the left track pad below the thumbstick is mapped by default to work like the D-pad typically would in games that use it. It still feels surprisingly natural.
The right track pad, on the other hand, can be used as a more fine-tuned version of the right thumbstick, and that took some getting used to. I don’t think it’ll ever replace the thumbstick entirely for me, but if you’re looking for precise actions out of the Steam Deck, you can, at least theoretically, use the trackpads. I can imagine using the right trackpad to line up more accurate shots in action games, for example.
Of the games I tried on the Deck, I was the most surprised by 2020’s Doom Eternal, which ran at 110 FPS without any problems. 2019’s Control worked just as well.
Conversely, however, Valve’s own Portal 2 ran smoothly but had some strange texture bugs as I moved around in-game, and the Microsoft-published Sunset Overdrive didn’t want to load its shaders at all. Game functionality on the Deck, at least at this early stage, is best treated on a case-by-case basis.
The Deck also has the same problem that Nintendo’s Switch does, in that not every game is designed or well-suited for a 7-inch screen. UI scaling can and probably will fix some of the problems with it, particularly as the Deck continues to mature, but a game that’s designed to look good on a TV in your living room is not going to cope well with being shrunk down to a fraction of that size.
With a game like the recently released The Ascent, where players’ characters are already relatively small, trying to play it on the Deck’s screen is like an interactive, violent Monet painting. You can’t really tell what’s going on.
That’s not Valve’s fault, of course, but it’s something that customers should watch out for. There are plenty of Switch games that you probably shouldn’t try to play in portable mode, due to poor UI scaling or the graphics not adapting well, i.e. Skyrim, and that’s going to be just as true for the Deck. Valve does say that the final version of the Deck will feature a built-in magnifier, however, which should smooth over some of those problems.
One of my other big takeaways from my time with the Deck was its versatility. Valve was sure to show that off at the event, with one station devoted to multiplayer via a couple of Bluetooth-connected Dual Shock 5 controllers, and another that displayed how the Deck works when it’s hooked up to a keyboard and monitor.
The Deck has a USB-C port on top of it that can be used to plug in off-the-shelf adaptors, or you can use Bluetooth-compatible wireless mice and keyboards. When it’s hooked up to a monitor, the Deck is made to automatically switch into desktop mode, where it runs an operating system that’s derived from Arch Linux.
Valve had a Deck set up with a monitor and wireless keyboard at its office that was running Blender, the VLC media player, Chromium, and Visual Studio Code, all at once. Booting up a game on top of all that didn’t cause a noticeable performance hit.
The Deck, Valve’s team members were sure to point out, is a PC, not any kind of console, and can be used like one. It’s also planned to ship in three models, priced at $399, $529, and $649, and the only serious difference between the three is the size of the built-in hard drive. Their internal specs are all the same, and you can expand its internal storage via an SD Card slot on the bottom of the unit.
That’s something I don’t think we’ve been talking about enough: anyone who buys the Deck is potentially getting a surprisingly powerful pre-built PC for as little as $399. Sure, the Deck primarily runs games, but at that price, it’s competitive with high-end Chromebooks. The Steam Deck could be huge for lower-income audiences, both as a game platform and as an affordable PC.
Its portability also opens up a lot of options for other niche audiences, such as tournament organizers. From the moment the Steam Deck was announced, it’s been attractive to people who regularly host events, such as this weekend’s Evolution Championship Series, as an easy way to carry around a dozen or more gaming setups.
The only drawback there is that the Steam Deck, at time of writing, doesn’t have any built-in anti-theft measures, like the Kensington security slot on the back of the Xbox Series X. Otherwise, the Deck would be a solid go-to option for fighting-game tournaments nationwide.
The Deck also has a lot of potential for tinkerers. Valve’s team was sure to mention to me that the Deck won’t have any lockdown measures installed on it that will prevent users from installing their own software on it, even if that means wiping its original operating system.
Now that I’ve played the Steam Deck, I’m doubling down on what I said before: the Deck is in no way a “Switch killer,” as a lot of people said on social media after the initial announcement. It looks like a Switch, but Valve isn’t even trying to target Nintendo’s audience. (Which is a shame, because I bet Half-Life Kart would move some units.)
If the Steam Deck is anything, it’s the next-generation PlayStation Vita.
The Vita, Sony’s successor to its popular PlayStation Portable, was a handheld video game unit that was discontinued in 2019. While its actual software library had some fans, the primary reason why people got Vitas was because they were and are very easy to hack, and very useful once you do.
By this point, users have turned Vitas into platforms for movie streaming, game emulation, e-readers, and more. The Steam Deck is cheap, versatile, and all but made for the same sort of homebrew exploration. It’s impressive enough on its own, but what I’m really interested in, now that I’ve seen it, is what the fans will do with it.
The Steam Deck is still scheduled to begin shipping in December. The first available models are planned to go to the Steam users who managed to put in a pre-order last month, on a first-come, first-served basis.
