Valve Says Devs Should "Keep Steam Deck In Mind," But Not Design Specifically For It

thegamer.com:

Valve is slowly delivering the first wave of Steam Decks to eager customers. This includes Valve CEO Gabe Newell hand-delivering Decks to customers in the Seattle area near the company’s headquarters, much to the surprise and delight of eager gamers everywhere. It’s a little too much to expect Santa Newell to show up to everyone’s house to deliver their Decks, so the rest of us will just have to wait until March for normal shipping times.

But while we wait, Valve is making sure to keep the Deck at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts by talking about it as much as possible. This includes Deck engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and designer Jake Rodkin in a conversation with Rock Paper Shotgun about what they think game developers should do to make games for the Deck.

Related: Steam Deck: How To Check If Your Games Are Compatible

When asked if devs should make a game specifically for the Deck, Griffais seemed cool to the idea. “I think we hope that developers keep Steam Deck in mind when thinking about what the startup experience will be when you load a game on Steam on the Deck versus on a PC,” he said. “But the best thing about the Steam Deck, I think, is that it can play your Steam library. And it's like a new window through which you can see Steam, more so than it’s a unique platform.”

Rodkin, meanwhile, offered the Deck as more an optimization for game developers, especially when it comes to the Deck's varied control options. “If we expect that people do any work, it'll be work that just makes their game better on Steam as a whole. And not just for Steam Deck: things like controller support or accessibility on smaller screens, or lower specced PCs. But it should be a thing that increases the depth adaptability of their