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Valve’s latest Steam Deck update introduces longer custom boot animations

Valve’s latest Steam Deck update introduces longer custom boot animations

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Users can now create videos up to 30 seconds in length to play when starting up the gaming handheld

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A Steam Deck on a white and orange background.
Valve’s latest beta Steam Deck update enables users to set longer custom startup videos on the handheld.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Valve released its latest Steam Deck beta update yesterday, which includes longer boot animations among the usual array of bug fixes and optimizations. Now, the maximum length of a boot sequence has been increased from 10 seconds to 30 seconds, opening up the possibility for users to create longer custom startups.

Some users discovered they could create their own sequences prior to any native support, which as Rock Paper Shotgun reports, have ranged from nostalgic:

To, well, whatever this is:

Rather than attempt to shut down this tinkering, Steam’s parent company Valve slapped on its seal of approval and made the process easier to do in a separate update for the Steam Deck handheld earlier this month. There’s even a dedicated subreddit and an online library where creators are posting videos for Steam Deck users to download freely, with a handful of 30-second-long sequences already available to use.

Trying it yourself appears fairly straightforward: users need to create a folder pathway on the Steam Deck (steamui / overrides / movies /) where the console will automatically look for video files to run at startup. If you wanted to find videos direct from the source then you may not have long to wait, as a data miner uncovered a JSON document that suggests Valve is planning to sell its own startup movies directly on the Steam Store.

Right now, the beta update needed to enable longer video sequences is only available to those testing features in the Steam Deck Beta and Preview channels. There’s no official release date for the public build right now, but you can opt yourself in for testing by heading into Settings > System > Steam Update Channel on the Steam Deck console.