With the release of its new Steam Deck, Valve will try once more to make gaming hardware happen. Will it finally be able to make it work?
In the world of software— gaming especially— there are few companies that have seen the success of Valve. From reinventing the FPS genre with Half-Life, dominating the free-to-play world with Team Fortress 2, creating iconic puzzlers like Portal, or running one of the most popular MOBAs in DOTA 2, the company makes massive-selling hits. And that’s not even factoring in Steam, its digital distribution platform that literally changed the way people buy and play games on their PCs. With an estimated valuation of over $10 billion, according to Bloomberg, Valve can seemingly do no wrong in the software space. So why is it continually trying (and failing) to make hardware happen? Let’s delve into the company history as we get ready for its latest effort. On Deck Today sees the release of Valve’s new device, the Steam Deck. With a $399 base price (the highest-end version will run you $649), it promises to let you play PC games on a portable machine around the same size as a Nintendo Switch, but with significantly beefier specs. The core unit ships with an AMD APU with a four-core, eight-thread Zen 2 CPU and an AMD RDNA 2 GPU, so although it’s not on par with the bleeding edge of home PCs, it’s easily the most powerful portable on the market. Battery life is “between 2 and 8 hours,” but a forthcoming software update has the potential to extend that. The big draw here is interoperability. Having a portable console that plays all of the same titles in your Steam library—games that only have to be bought once to be played on PC or the Steam Deck—isn’t something that anybody has managed to pull off yet. While the system won’t be able to offer 100% cross-play for every title, developers are certainly incentivized to work with the company to make it easy. Valve has also created a “compatibility program” that lets players see, at a glance, which games in their existing library will run on the Steam Deck. At press time,345 games had been “verified” by the program, including Portal 2, Hades, and Deathloop.
