- The Steam Deck is one of those incredible concepts
that you can't believe is possible,
yet here we are: the future in our hands.
- Almost ready. - It's a handheld console
that's capable of playing games you can find in Steam's catalog,
meaning you can play, basically, current-gen games,
like "God of War" and "Witcher 3" on the go.
And it's incredible to experience.
- The most powerful gaming handheld in the world.
- Let's be real.
You don't need a review to tell you that this thing
is going to be worth getting,
especially if you're already playing games on Steam.
But you may want to wait a bit, first, before buying because,
in our reporter Nathan Grayson's experience with the console,
it felt as though the system still has a couple of things
it needs to work out.
The battery life is not great,
essentially eating up half the battery in 30 minutes' time
when playing "God of War".
Suspending our games caused frame rates
to drop and cutscenes to glitch out when we resumed playing.
And some games couldn't even run on the system at all.
Nathan has a great write-up
of his experience with the Steam Deck,
so give it a read, if you're interested.
Link will be in the description below.
In the meantime, I'm sure there are several burning questions
you have about the console, so, why not ask the Steam Deck
developers these questions directly?
The following are some of the biggest questions
regarding the Steam Deck and future updates
that we directly asked Steam.
- We're looking at the Verified program as,
you know, this is a service to Deck users.
We have external partners that help us
with the verification process.
It was a little slow in the very beginning, as we were kind of
figuring out what the process would look like,
so, I can see where people would think,
"Oh, okay, anything with a green checkbox
is good and, everything else,
I should, you know, be cautious about or avoid".
That hasn't been our experience.
I think customers, once they get it and they start,
you know, kind of trying stuff out from their library,
they're going to find that so many of their games work really,
really well, regardless of their verification status.
We don't want anybody to think that, you know,
this set of games that get the green checkbox, that's it.
It really isn't.
We're hoping to get as many there as possible, but, yeah,
it's really going to be up to the users to kind of decide
how, you know, what their threshold is.
We don't want developers to design
specifically for this device.
We want developers to design PC games for the PC.
We want this device to play all those games.
The work's on us to make that happen.
- Yeah.
There is some value, you know, in having the specs
be this fixed quantity that devs won't have to worry
about, you know, changing on them.
If a game developer is going to do some work
to target their game on Deck,
we'd way rather it's less like porting work
or behind-the-scenes engineering work and more work
that will just make their game better for Steam, as a whole.
And, so far, that's in line with what we've been seeing.
Like we have hundreds of dev kids out there
and the conversations with devs have rarely been about,
"Oh, how do we get this game to work"
or "How do we optimize performance
so that it will run correctly," and more about "Oh, okay,
how do we add control support to our Launcher,
so, now, you can go through the whole, you know,
onboarding process from your couch"?
Our thinking was basically that we wanted to be
at around two hours for a game that was taking full advantage
of the capabilities of the device,
in terms of compute,
and, you know, we think we got there.
In terms of improving that in the future,
I think there's a vary of things we're looking at.
A lot of the components we've selected
going into the Deck have had,
you know, special care put into them,
to make sure they can go into low power states.
There's kind of a big trade-off
between battery volume and weight,
so it's directly at odds with the portability aspect,
which makes it a little bit tricky.
I don't expect things to change drastically there,
but we're adding more options into the mix
to let people make different sorts of trade-offs
to manage their battery life better.
The integrated FPS limiter, variable shading,
and more knobs there that people can use
to tweak their battery life.
But it's definitely something that we'll keep looking at
and, you know, see what we can get over time.
We've worked a lot on the thumbstick of the Steam Deck
and the main thing that we're doing there
is that we're using kind of the state-of-the-art part
that is in the most common controllers that you see,
you know, on different platforms,
as opposed to a more, you know, compact or reduced version,
both for ergonomics, but it helps reliability a ton as well.
In addition, the thumbstick is on a standalone module,
so that it can be easily replaced as well.
So, there's a lot of considerations there
that interact together,
but, at the core of it, the main drivers of the design
and where it ended up are compatibility with,
you know, the Steam catalog and the PC gaming catalog,
as a whole, and that means a few different things.
One is having enough controls
and a vary of controls that you can,
you know, play everything in the back catalog,
even ranging from, you know, very old games,
games that don't have gamepad support.
We experimented a lot with smaller screen sizes,
but we found that, for a lot of the content,
you need to have a certain amount of legibility
for UI elements,
for these kind of like PC strategy games with big HUDs.
But also, just having enough power
to let you play the latest games,
which also, you know, feeds back into the size of the device
and the amount of heat that we can dissipate.
- We have found that that reaction,
of kind of seeing it and saying, "Oh, that seems large,"
you know, compared to some other things,
when users tend to actually pick up the device
and play it, they kind of go,
"Oh, actually, this is pretty comfortable.
I see what the ergonomic story is here
and why it's designed this way".
I mean, there's certainly no wasted space,
if you've watched any of the teardown videos.
Yeah, there's not a lot in there we could fudge with.
- We're going to be releasing Proton 7 point 0,
that includes support for Easy Anti-Cheat, for the first time.
We're pretty excited about that and we think
there are some great games that people are looking forward
to playing that are going to become playable or verified
in the wake of that ahead of launch, so, super exciting.
There's still tons of work to be done there
and we're in touch with all the developers
and the partners there.
We want to make sure Deck's a great platform for their game
without them being uncomfortable with,
you know, the security or anything else,
so, it's something we're going to continue to work
on post-launch as well.
- I feel like we have a little time there before,
you know, we're able to get to the majority of the catalog.
We don't have any solid projections right now.
We are going to make as many as we possibly can, of course.
We're hoping to ramp up throughout this year,
to a level at which people will be able to go order a Deck
and, you know, have it shipped
and, you know, receive it a day or two later.
That first round of customers, on the 25th,
we'll be shipping quickly to them,
but supply chain issues are a very real thing.
- To be clear, people can still get in line.
- Absolutely. - And that's going to be,
you know, up until we're in stock,
since it's all going through Steam,
it's been used as, also, a way to make sure
that people do get their unit, eventually,
as opposed to the uncertainly of having to refresh a store
and being constantly told out of stock.
So, you can make sure you have a place in line
and, at some point, it'll come up.