When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it"
Oct. 23, 2024Everyone wants to game on the go
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Valve’sSteam Deckis made up of the best qualities – it’s portable, powerful, and lets you play Elden Ring in bed. Valve’s staff unsurprisingly agrees that the Steam Deck rules. In fact, the system apparently started partly as an experiment to create a platform with all the things they wished for.
“The pitch of the Steam Deck was basically: ‘How do I play my Steam games away from my PC?’ That is the problem we were trying to solve,” Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat explained ina recent interviewwith Reviews.org. “And there are people [at Valve] who were like, ‘I just want that for me.’ The point wasn’t even to make a product out of it. It was just, let’s see if you can actually make something that I would want to use for that purpose.”
The designers also pushed back on the suggestion that the Steam Deck was intended to directly mirror the Nintendo Switch as something of a handheld alternative to PCs.
“Having been there during the early phases,” they say, “it was more like, ‘I’ve been playing this game on my PC, but I have to be in front of my PC to play it, and I would love to be able to play it on my commute. Or I would love to be able to play on a plane, or I would love to be able to play outside.'”
And now you can play outside with either the Steam Deck or this year’sSteam Deck OLED, the display on the latter being extra vibrant even under the sun. It’s nice when dreams come true.
Valve does not think the Steam Deck 2 will be possible “in the next couple of years.”
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Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.
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