Steam Deck: Everything We Know About Valve's Switch-Like PC Handheld
It missed its initial late 2021 release window (COVID… what are you going to do?), but Valve's first attempt at making a portable gaming device is nearly here. The Linux-powered Steam Deck can be reductively summarized as what the Nintendo Switch could be for PC gaming, but there's a lot more that the creators of Steam are planning to introduce with this new platform.
Valve has a somewhat spotty record when it comes to gaming hardware, from its attempts to revolutionize PC gaming to its successes with VR, but the Steam Deck is a drastically different proposition to anything it's produced before. It's a way to take your entire PC games library with you on the go, with some smart design decisions that could see it fulfill its lofty promises.
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Now Playing: Steam Deck Take A Look at the Inside Trailer
The Steam Deck is a portable, handheld PC that will ship with Valve's own SteamOS (built on top of Linux). The device is billed as an entirely open platform, letting players install games outside of the Steam ecosystem, run additional PC software alongside them, or just replace the entire OS with Windows if they like. Valve is hoping that most (not all) games will work just fine on SteamOS when the Steam Deck launches, with a lot of work going into improving Proton--a compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux without native support, and without (too many) issues.
The handheld looks like a beefier Nintendo Switch, with two analog sticks and two arrays of face buttons on each side. Below the
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