Aperture Desk Job is Steam Deck’s first-party touch that Xbox Series X was missing

polygon.com:

I went to bed last night thinking about what a new Valve game built for the Steam Deck would look like. That’s almost entirely because I had just read a Gabe Newell interview in Edge magazine, where they asked him about Valve developing a first-party game to show off the portable hardware, and he said Valve thought about it but decided to put its resources elsewhere — like making Dota and Counter-Strike work better on the device.

So I was a little surprised this morning to see Valve announce Aperture Desk Job, a free game/tech demo thing set in the Portal universe. There’s enough wiggle room here that I’m not so worried about Newell’s comments being misleading — Valve refers to it as a “short” rather than a game, for one. But it got me thinking about the value of having a custom first-party release alongside the launch of new hardware.

Go back a few decades, and it was almost unthinkable not to have one. There’s no world in which the Nintendo 64 didn’t launch with Super Mario 64, or Saturn with Virtua Fighter. That started to change with PlayStation and a move away from console mascots, but most consoles still typically showed up with a custom launch game that helped show off the hardware and justify the purchase.

In recent years, though, the idea of a console has started to change — especially at Microsoft, which constantly talks about its strategy of turning consoles into access points rather than isolated boxes. When Microsoft delayed Halo Infinite and ended up launching Xbox Series X without a centerpiece first-party game, it was disappointing, but it also sort of felt like that went hand-in-hand with Microsoft’s strategy about not needing clear-cut hardware generations.

Ever since Valve announced the Steam Deck, I