I Want to Believe In the Steam Deck
But I’ve been burned by Valve before.
Today, Valve announced its upcoming portable gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Physically, it’s reminiscent of the Nintendo Switch, but inside it runs a new version of SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system Valve designed for its games. The idea is that gamers will be able to play their library anywhere.
I just wish I could believe it.
What Valve claims it’s doing is nothing short of herculean. The dedicated site for the device promises that “Steam Deck runs the latest AAA games” and, realizing how lofty that promise sounds, reassures, “and runs them really well.”
Right off the bat, this feels like the kind of promise that needs qualifications. For example, one recent AAA game, Cyberpunk 2077, doesn’t even run well on the consoles it was (allegedly) designed for. That’s more a failure on the part of developer CD Project Red than it is on the console, but it highlights an important fact: even in ideal circumstances, where you know years in advance what hardware a game will be running on, optimizing performance is complicated.
Running a game on a platform it wasn’t designed for, however, is never the ideal circumstance. When Valve tried before to make SteamOS, it didn’t go well, in no small part because it required effort on…
