My Life As A Gamer: Valve Announces Steam Deck

Valve announced the Steam Deck yesterday. I'll let author David Stewart introduce this.

This is not Valve's first attempt at moving into the console space, and I'm going to focus on one thing that David points out here: Console is the Cold & Stupid option for videogames; you can come at it cold (no preparation/configuration fiddling) and stupid (no prior/outside knowledge required) and It Just Works. People who are used to tinkering with the hardware or dealing with software they can't run properly (if at all) forget this when moving from PC to Console, and this has been one of Valve's problems to date.

The impetus for mobile device development, on the other hand, is quite apparent. In Asia in particular, mobile far outstrips both console and PC in gaming revenue. Nintendo bridged the divide with the Switch, to its profit and the gaming world's benefit, and now Valve sees a viable business model to follow. I can't fault Gabe for going for it, and I do think this attempt is more likely to succeed than past ones because it is doing that model in a manner far more acceptable to console-prefering gamers than one may expect.

Yes, it is a full PC in its own right; see the link above and look at the hardware specs. Yes, this means you can treat it like any other PC if you like, but it is clear that the widget will be able to Just Work out of the box. Turn it on, log into your Steam account, get on with it already; if this is the case, then Steam Deck is a winner.

The issue will be that most console gamers are AAA slaves, so that cheapest option with its SSD having only 64 GB is a non-starter; you'll have to go to the mid-grade model to play Call of Duty: Warzone by itself due to the stupid file size obesity recent AAA games have suffered from. Existing consoles, including the Switch, satisfy this market well as it is so getting that market segment to buy into the Steam Deck will be a hard sell after over a year of bother in getting the newest Playstation and XBox models into the hands of those same prospective customers. Switch loyalists are likewise a hard sell for similar reasons, as Nintendo also does the Exclusivity audience lock-in thing.

So who will buy this? Existing Steam users that want a handheld device to continue their PC games while on the go, which is not a trivial segment but hardly one the size that Valve needs to make this worthwhile. Everyone else is a hard sell because they're already served well by existing offerings.

Therefore, as much as I like that this thing can run every MMO on the market, I think Valve is going to miss the mark again. Unless they can find some way to get console loyalists to buy the damn thing, this too will be a dud. There is only so much space in a marketplace, and this one is about filled.