So Valve dropped the Steam Deck on us this week and I have already burned an embarrassing amount of time thinking about it instead of doing actual work. If you missed it: it's a handheld PC, comes in three flavors ($399 for 64GB eMMC, $529 for 256GB NVMe, $649 for 512GB NVMe with an anti-glare etched glass screen and a fancy carrying case), runs a custom AMD chip with Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 7-inch touchscreen. It boots into SteamOS 3.0, which is Arch-based now instead of whatever Debian mess the old SteamOS was, and it leans on Proton to run your existing Windows library instead of demanding native Linux ports of everything.
I tried to preorder one. I did not get one, or at least I don't think I did — more on that in a second.
Preorders opened Friday at 10am Pacific, which is 1pm my time, and I had it in my calendar like it was a concert ticket. Valve tied priority to your Steam account having purchase history before a cutoff date, presumably to keep bots and scalpers from vacuuming up the first batch and reselling them at triple price on eBay by dinner. Good idea in theory. In practice the reservation page still buckled a little and by the time I actually got my $5 deposit through, the confirmation email just said I was "reserved," with zero indication of which batch or what the actual ship window would be. People online were reporting the whole first wave sold out inside about an hour. So who knows, I might be looking at a Q2 2022 delivery for all I know right now. Valve's original line was "targeting December," which even in the moment felt like the kind of promise you write down and then quietly forget you wrote down.
I want to be clear that I'm skeptical of the base model. Sixty-four gigs on eMMC storage in 2021 is rough when a lot of modern games alone eat 60-100GB, and eMMC is noticeably slower than the NVMe in the two pricier tiers for load times. I ponied up for the $529 one. If I'm going to carry this thing around instead of my Switch, I want it to actually load a game before I lose interest and put it back down.
Speaking of the Switch: Nintendo showed off the Switch OLED model a couple weeks back, and it's funny putting the two announcements next to each other. Nintendo's upgrade is basically just a nicer screen (7-inch OLED, still 720p, still the same guts otherwise) for $349. Valve's thing is a genuinely different category of device wearing a similar shape. One is an iterative refresh of a five-year-old console. The other is Valve trying to convince PC gamers that "PC gaming, but in your hands on the couch" is a real product category and not just a niche filled by weird janky imports.
And on that note: I still have a GPD Win 2 sitting in a drawer, and I want to say something nice about it, but that thing ran hot enough to fry an egg if you tried to play anything more demanding than a SNES emulator, and the keyboard was so cramped my thumbs would cramp after twenty minutes. I bought it in 2019 out of pure impatience because nobody with real money behind them was making this kind of device properly. Valve has actual money and actual game compatibility leverage, which is the whole difference. Proton has gotten scary good over the last year or two, way better than I expected back when it launched, so I'm cautiously optimistic that most of my library will just work without me having to mess with Wine configs like it's 2011 again.
Still, "cautiously optimistic" is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence. Valve Hardware has a spotty track record (Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Controller was a cult object more than a bestseller) and shipping a whole custom Linux-based handheld to a mass audience by December, in the middle of a chip shortage nobody's fully solved, seems like a lot to promise. I want this thing to be great. I've wanted a good PC handheld since the OQO days, and that was fifteen years ago. Ask me again once mine actually shows up.