Steam Deck Reveal

Valve, the software company that pioneered digital retail over twenty years ago with its “Steam” store, and won countless awards over the years with their own games like Half Life, Team Fortress, Portal, and Left 4 Dead, revealed something today that took me by complete surprise: a handheld gaming PC called the Steam Deck.

Technical: The Steam Deck is most easily compared to the Nintendo Switch, with some major differences revealed under closer inspection. For starters, this is a fully functional, portable, handheld gaming PC, not a console. Next, the handles that house the analog sticks, d-pad, face buttons, and other controls flanking the 7″ screen are not removable. The d-pad on the left and face buttons on the right are horizontally lined up with the analog sticks, unlike most controls that are diagonally offset from each other. The Steam Deck also has four more buttons on the back of the handles, two on each side, and features two touch sensitive panels, one under each of the left and right controls. Like the Switch, the Steam Deck has a touch sensitive screen, gyroscope sensors, stereo speakers, and a headset jack, but unlike the Switch, the Steam Deck also has a built-in microphone array.

DavPoint: The Steam Deck has a 7-inch, 1280×800 resolution, 60hz LCD screen, a custom AMD APU featuring a 4-core, 8-thread CPU paired with 8 RDNA 2 compute units for the GPU, and 16 GBs of LPDDR5 RAM.

-IGN First

Like the Switch, the Steam Deck can be played as is, or can be docked and connected to an external monitor. Valve is developing a dock of their own, to be sold separately, but stated that other USB-C type docks should work. As it is a PC, the Steam Deck will support keyboards, mice, gamepads, and other peripherals via USB and Bluetooth (5.0). It can allow multiple controllers to be paired simultaneously for shared/split-screen gaming.

The Steam Deck runs on Valve’s proprietary “SteamOS” but can be customized with other operating systems if desired. Customers of Steam will be familiar with the Steam user interface, and naturally the Steam Deck will provide access to their Steam game libraries, or they can use other digital storefronts. The internal memory cannot be upgraded, only external memory via Micro SD cards. There will be three variations available that share the same performance, differing only by internal storage capacity.

DavPoint: The Steam Deck will be available for preorder on Friday, July 16th, starting at 10 am PDT. Choose between: 64GB (eMMC) for $399, 256GB (NVMe SSD) for $529, or 512GB (NVMe SSD) for $649.

Steam Deck Preorder Link

My Impressions: I was blown away by this reveal. Other companies like Alienware have worked on similar designs, but to my knowledge, none have made it past the prototype stage or become available. For now, I’m relying on IGN’s exclusive hands-on coverage for their impressions on performance and ergonomics. If the Steam Deck works the way it sounds, it could be a great compliment (or introduction) to PC gaming. As for use cases, this has the potential to be more portable (and cheaper) than a gaming laptop, and when it’s docked, could be a decent, low-end gaming tower replacement. Like I mentioned in my impressions of the Xbox Cloud Gaming service, being able to pause on one platform and resume on the other, and back again, would be a dream! The Steam Deck can suspend one game in a “quick resume” state, and Valve suggests they are working on linking cloud saves between platforms, which would make the process even more seamless.

It remains to be seen how compatible with Windows (games and apps) this newer version of SteamOS will be, as even though it’s possible to replace the OS, an install of 64GB would eat up most of the (base model’s) memory. For that matter, considering that some games are ~100GB on their own, I anticipate needing multiple SD cards. It’s entertaining to me, thinking of playing PC games on what would be essentially “cartridges,” swapping out games on different SD cards as needed, or (assuming it works), forgoing memory cards altogether and using a Steam branded device to stream Xbox games! Stay tuned for more impressions from DavPoint!