Is Valve’s handheld PC ready to change the world?

By Alex Spencer

When we previously visited Valve, two years ago, it was to talk about Half-Life: Alyx and what seemed like a total shift of focus for the company towards VR. But at the end of a conversation with hardware engineer Jeremy Selan, who had worked on Valve’s Index headset, we were left with this tease: “We have really exciting things on our trajectory to help expand the places you can play your Steam games that are not VR-related. We’re not talking about those today, but there are more things coming.” We now know, of course, exactly what he meant.Indeed, we have one of those things in our hands.

At first glance, Steam Deck seems to sit right at the opposite end of the spectrum to Valve’s VR efforts. Where that technology wants to seal you in with your games, Deck is a handheld device that invites you to take games out into the world. And while the former offers a specific set of experiences crafted exclusively for its capabilities, this project is all about giving players access to as many games as possible – the 60,000-plus games in the Steam catalogue, just for starters.

However, speaking to a variety of Valve employees, the point is underlined repeatedly: Deck is not an about-face by any means. Its development overlapped with work on Index and Alyx (in fact, it turns out that a Deck design was being finalised, just out of sight, during our 2020 visit), and the company is already thinking about how the project could benefit future work on VR. This is how Valve functions, it seems, particularly in its hardware division: every project contributing towards the next and building on the prior work, even if the similarities between them aren’t immediately apparent. “Deck is built on all these bricks that we’ve been working on for the past ten years, around both hardware and software,” says Pierre-Loup Griffais, a software engineer who has been on the Deck project since its inception. “As we crystallise all that into this product, we make more of these tools that are going to get leveraged along the way.”

Deck borrows the odd bit of tech know-how from Index and Valve’s collaboration on HTC Vive, but chiefly it takes the lessons of how to build and sell hardware in-house – something Valve realised was important after its struggles getting Steam Machines off the ground in the mid 2010s. Product designer Greg Coomer, a 25-year Valve veteran, puts Deck in a clear lineage with these prebuilt mini-PCs along with the (also discontinued) streaming device Steam Link – and perhaps some other products that never saw the light of day. “We’ve shipped, and have experimented with, several products along the way that really extended the reach of Steam. And by that I mean not just to new customers but really the reach of how customers are able to use the platform to bring their games to more places and play them more often and more easily,” Coomer says. “A handheld version of Steam was always a thing that we thought was obviously a good idea.”

Deck’s most immediately obvious predecessor, though, is the Steam Controller. One of the company’s first prototypes for that piece of hardware had a screen at the centre, we’re told, and there’s a strong family resemblance between the final product and the assortment of inputs here. Along with the usual sticks, face buttons and D-pad you would expect, Deck’s surface is dominated by two trackpads featuring the same haptic feedback as their Controller predecessors. On the underside, beneath the triggers and shoulder bumpers, you’ll find four back grip buttons, doubling down on Controller’s two. There’s even a gyroscope for motion control, if you’re so inclined.