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Steam Deck: can Valve’s portable PC succeed where Steam Machines failed?
T he timing could hardly have been better. A little over a week after the underwhelming announcement of Nintendo’s new OLED Switch model (better screen, bigger stand, and, well, that’s your lot), along came Steam Deck – a significantly more powerful handheld console a few wags determined was the real Switch Pro. The process for reserving units may have turned into a bit of a mess, with some Steam users told their accounts were too new (did the past decade or so really mean that little, Valve?) while others were informed they’d made too many purchases before their deposit had been taken. Yet these obvious signs of servers being overrun would probably have been music to the platform holder’s ears: a leak of the queue sizes suggested 100,000 reservations were made in about two hours.
Boasting around two teraflops of power, its performance compares favourably to PS4