Valve has continuously improved the handheld since launch. Many improvements have been made to hardware and software in recent months. For the future, software, battery and display are at the top of the wish list, faster hardware is not.
Combining Linux as the basis for the operating system and mobile hardware into a handheld for PC games was a bold move. It has paid off for Valve: The interest in the Steam Deck is great, after almost a year it is still a topic of discussion – for example in the ComputerBase forum, where there is now a good 97 pages of a thread for exchanging experiences.
The system owes its success to numerous hardware and software optimizations, in particular via Valve's Proton compatibility layer, which allows Windows games to be played under Linux. Most recently, further improvements in version 7.0-5 increased the number of games that are fully compatible with the Steam Deck to over 2,500, and twice as many are playable. Valve carries out the test itself, in the best case a game is certified as “Steam Deck Verified”.
Battery is fixed better
Steam deck designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke to The Verge about future plans for the handheld. Optimizations were last made to the battery. This is glued by Valve, which makes the exchange – in contrast to other components – more difficult. According to Griffais, glue is needed to fix the battery. On the one hand, it needs some space to be able to expand, on the other hand, as a heavy component, it must not move back and forth.
In new revisions of the Steam Deck, the glue was applied in a different way. This should make it easier to detach the battery. In addition, additional foam was introduced to dampen the fan noise – depending on the model, interference noises could occur. It was already announced in June that Valve is also choosing from different models for the built-in SSD. Much more is not changed in the hardware. At the moment, “most efforts are being made on the software side”.
The hardware remains
For future generations of the Steam Deck, Yang and Griffais want further improvements in the battery and display areas. Longer runtimes and, for example, an OLED display that visibly improves the picture quality on the Nintendo Switch would also be useful based on test reports, because upgrades are often requested.
In terms of performance, however, the two designers see no need for action. The efficiency of the AMD SoC specially developed for the Steam Deck is said to be between 8 and 12 watts so good that it will “perhaps only be reached in a few generations” with commercially available notebook components. An upgrade only makes sense if there are “significant” improvements.
Keeping the performance constant also offers other advantages, explain the two Valve employees. This would make it easier for customers to assess what performance they are getting, while developers can also better adapt to the Steam Deck during development. In addition: In comparison, the sales figures for the Valve handheld are low. Although the one million unit mark is said to have been broken in October, Nintendo has sold over 140 million switches.
Focus on Steam Deck
In the foreseeable future, the focus will be on further development the steam deck. Valve would like to continue to pursue the Steam Box and the Steam Controller, but there is a lack of resources to accompany these projects in parallel. One is open to cooperation with third parties, said Yang and Griffais.