Valve’s Steam Deck: all the news about the new gaming handheld

Sony has broken its streak beautifully bringing its biggest games to PC. The Last of Us just arrived on Steam and 67% of user reviews are negative. Beyond crashes and excessive VRAM use, it’s not Steam Deck Verified and doesn’t run well there, despite game creator Neil Druckmann’s tweet last December suggesting it would “grace” the portable.

Guess that’s why Sony didn’t send journalists review codes until today!

Sure, you could download Dolphin for free any number of ways — but this one should make it that much easier for, say, Steam Deck owners to experience. (While saying nothing of the sort, the announcement comes with a low-resolution 16:10 screenshot to tease such possibilities.)

ETA: Q2 2023. Price: free.

It got a little buried in my story about how the Steam Deck is on sale for the first time ever, so just want to make sure you see! You can use them with your desktop too when you launch Big Picture Mode.

Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells PC Gamer that a new screen is not exactly a “drop-in” or “incremental” upgrade. Is he hinting we won’t see a mid-cycle refresh like Nintendo did when it introduced the Nintendo Switch OLED?

Valve’s Steam Deck designers told me months ago that screen and battery are the pain points they’d most like to address in an eventual sequel.

I almost wish I’d waited before buying JSAUX’s excellent transparent heatsink backplate for my Steam Deck...because it now comes in better colors, too! Oh BTW: don’t do the RGB mod yet.

All it took was RGB LEDs.

(And a JSAUX transparent backplate, and a M0 microcontroller, and competent soldering skills, and 1-3W drain on the Deck’s battery... instructions here.)

Steam’s new Big Picture Mode has made it to the stable ring at last, giving you a way more responsive way to select PC games from your couch, touchscreen, or with a Windows portable like the Ayaneo 2 I’m trying right now. It basically gives you the Steam Deck UI on your PC.

PCGamesN has already deleted its story (and tweet) but just to be clear, the GDC survey in question was from an entire year ago, before the Deck even went on sale.

GDC’s new survey just came out last week. While it doesn’t ask about the Deck, a majority of developers say PC is the platform they’re most interested in — just like they did last year.

Why re-download a game on Steam Deck if you’ve already got it installed on another PC? Valve has been asking itself that question, too! SteamDB noticed it’s working on a feature where you can transfer games directly over LAN, saving time and/or your data cap.

Steam’s existing vestigial backup feature didn’t work well with Deck; can’t wait to do this instead.

I warned you yesterday after I heard a few horror stories and got stuck on the boot screen myself, but Valve has now pushed two fixes to the supposedly Stable ring — 3.4.1 and 3.4.2. They revert and defer the SD card pathing change that was tripping up people with emulators and symlinks, fix “regression causing games to crash due to missing dependencies”, and fix hardware acceleration for remote play.

Since Valve is putting 3.4.3 into preview rather than just shipping it, it seems the flurry of fixes is done for now.

The highlights for me: a new horizontal performance overlay that uses the wasted space when you’re running games at 16:9, a fix for weird fan behavior, and the ability to manually eject (read: unmount) SD cards to be extra safe before you yank ‘em. But there’s way more, too.

I wonder if the weird adaptive backlight glitch is why my Duck Game starts stuttering after a few full rounds of play.

Update: I might wait a day to download this one. Valve already had to revert one SD card pathing change and I’m seeing owners complain of missing dual-boot partitions and getting stuck on the boot screen. My Deck sat on that screen for 30 min before I worked up the courage for a hard reset. Seems OK now.

Another good reason to check your email today!

And if you’re curious about what’s next for the Deck, check out my interview with two of its lead developers.

Behold: the RestDeck. “The design is very human, very easy to use,” says creator Andrew_HL2.

While that phrasing made me chuckle quite a bit, particularly once I gazed upon its full set of appendages, I would have killed for something like this after the electric scooter accident that sent me to the hospital and savaged my hands and wrists. Something like this could be even handier for those with more permanent conditions.

Files here ($6.99); you can peruse the full instruction manual before you take the plunge.