When Valve announced the Steam Deck, it was a surprise. We’ve seen Valve come out with new hardware in the past with the Steam Machine, but the Steam Deck instantly became popular. It’s a portable gaming handheld PC that offered a similar design to the Nintendo Switch. However, unlike the Nintendo Switch, players could access PC games. In addition, any PC digital storefront is available, so there’s a massive library of games available. Likewise, you have the power of a gaming PC in more or less a footprint of the Nintendo Switch.
Of course, if you play on the PC platform, you know the hardware is quick to come and go. New iterations come out such as better CPUs, and graphics cards. That translates to more power to play games at better resolutions or framerates. Although, when it comes to PC games available right now, Valve has a tough time finding anything that doesn’t meet their standards. Now it’s impossible to play every game, so there could be the oddball title that sticks out. Although, it looks like Valve is a firm believer that the Steam Deck will last for a long time. That’s according to developer Pierre-Loup Griffais who spoke on the Steam Deck with publication IGN.
“Everything that’s been coming out this year has been running without issues. I think this is largely a factor of industry trends. If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30Hz target really well. If people start heavily favoring image quality, then we might be in a position where we might have trade offs, but we haven’t really seen that yet.”
Pierre-Loup Griffais
According to Pierre-Loup Griffis, it looks like future video games should run well on the Steam Deck. We could see some compromises being made down the road, but nothing that would prevent a player from having the ability to actually play the game. Still, no device will last forever, and improvements along with revisions are bound to be made. If the Steam Deck proves to be a success, it looks like Valve is up for making new generations. The Steam Deck designer, Greg Coomer, also spoke with IGN. According to Greg, Valve could follow up with a new Steam Deck model. Similarly, other manufacturers could also bring out their own hardware iteration.
The SteamOS 3 is free, and it allows manufacturers to create products much like the Steam Deck. Thus, it could open up a new barrage of gaming devices into the marketplace. Although, the big issue right now is just seeing how much of a success the Steam Deck ends up being. While Valve is not having any problems with pre-orders, the real test of the popularity of this device will come when it’s readily available in consumer’s hands.
