Gabe Newell Sees Steam Deck as Having an Impact Like the iPhone on PC Gaming

ign.com:

The Steam Deck is officially released today, and as the portable gaming PC begins shipping out to some buyers, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell sees the new handheld having an impact on the PC space akin to how Apple's iPhone impacted the mobile phone industry. Relatedly, he says demand has been "a lot higher than we expected."

Speaking to IGN in an interview about the Steam Deck's launch and the future, Newell was asked how long the Steam Deck had been in the works and whether the concept predated the Nintendo Switch. Newell's response was interesting, noting how the idea of playing your favorite PC games on the go has been something the space has wanted for decades, long before Nintendo launched its hybrid gaming system.

"I think every gamer has wanted this for a really long time. Right? I mean, anytime you start playing PC games, about a month after you do it, you say, 'Where's my mobile version of this?' Right? I mean, projects that try and do this go back all the way to the 1990s, so what's really different this time is we finally reached the point where you have the [performance] per watt that really lets you do this."

Newell continued to note that the PC space craved the idea, yet the technology was never there, even using an example of what the mobile phone industry went through nearly 15 years ago when Apple released the first generation of the iPhone.

"There's software and input challenges you have to go solve, but it's like one of those things. There was before and after the iPhone. Right? Up until then, you'd use a Blackberry for these very application-specific things, but in terms of a general mobile computing device, that was the transition point," Newell said. "Right now, we've reached the point where you have a