![]() ![]() The 1280x800 touch screen has the responsiveness you'd expect from any new smartphone, and a Steam and Quick Access buttons give easy access for navigating the Deck's UI and on-the-fly options like battery and game performance metrics. Additionally though, there are four buttons on the back side of the Deck for your middle and ring fingers that are mappable. ![]() The Deck sports two touch pads that also act as buttons, enabling players to adequately emulate a mouse, and standard console controller-like dual analog setup that everyone is used to. Overall, the Deck feels solid and built to last. A standard Nintendo Switch feels absolutely dainty in comparison. Showing the Steam Deck to people, the first impression is typically "wow, that's big." The second impression after you let someone handle it is "oh, that's light." While the Steam Deck is a bit of a chonky boi, it does fit well with medium to large-sized hands and is comfortable to hold for long periods of time. All three models have the same computing power, though the base model has the smaller and slower 64 GB eMMC storage. Our review unit was the mid-tier model with a 256GB NVMe SSD for storage and a microSD slot for expansion. After playing games for a while, you kind of forget about the hardware itself despite the impressive technical feat it's pulling off, and it fades into the background, putting game performance and play at the forefront. It meets high expectations in such an effortless, mundane way that it just surprises on initial use. It's that turnkey, "it just works" quality that truly does make Steam Deck feel a bit magical. Setting up your Steam Deck for play is a matter of turning it on, signing into your Steam account, and downloading games. From there, you can just start playing the latest triple-A games with impressive performance for a mobile PC. Katsuhiro Harada, Tekken game director talks Steam Deck (via Valve)Īnd for game developers and players, the Steam Deck is something that-for the most part-just works out of the box. This makes porting (if you can even call it that) games to Steam Deck relatively effortless. While Steam Deck runs on the Linux-based SteamOS 3.0, it runs the Microsoft Windows compatibility layer Proton that enables the hardware to run non-Linux Windows games. Developers who've gotten their hands on the Steam Deck early can attest to this. One of the most appealing aspects of Steam Deck from a game development angle is that there's not much additional game development that has to go into getting your game running on a Steam Deck, if any at all. Steam Deck's aggressive pricing combined with its ease of use for game developers and players are just a couple factors that point to Steam Deck being a legitimate long-term business. There are handheld gaming PCs out there, but where Steam Deck pricing opens at $399, the existing handheld PC options are 2x-3x more expensive, often with poorer performance. It's not difficult to imagine that Valve really has met its stated goal of creating a new category of hardware here: the handheld gaming PC. With Steam Deck, the company seems to have found a balance between its desire to continuously improve a product or service in front of an audience while still providing a level of finish that won't make customers feel like they're part of an expensive beta test. That program fizzled out, but Valve was still committed to making open source hardware using an open-source OS, and now we have the Deck.īut even compared to Valve's collaboration on the HTC Vive-especially the first version of Vive-the Steam Deck is easily the most polished hardware Valve has released to date. Skeptical game developers compared the Deck to the Valve's "Steam Machines" effort, in which the company partnered with third-party hardware makers to facilitate a line of out-of-the-box Steam-friendly PCs that were meant to act more like consumer-friendly plug-and-play game consoles. When Valve originally announced the Steam Deck last summer, the exciting concept was tempered by Valve's spotty history with game hardware.
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