Valve already has big ideas for the next generation of Steam Deck machines

“It’s something that, personally as a gamer, I’ve wanted for a long time, right? As soon as you start playing PC games, you’re like, okay, I want something that gives me the full fidelity of experience with really great inputs that I can use in the mobile space. The first time, I think I wanted something like this was back in the 1990s, you know, when I was first playing PC games.”

Gabe Newell is, I think it’s fair to say, very excited about the Steam Deck. After a short delay and much, much excitement, the portable PC is finally here and it’s quite possibly Valve’s most exciting piece of hardware to date. Or more exciting than one of the last notable ones, at least – the much-heralded Steam Machines which caused much excitement upon their announcement in 2013 but never really gained a foothold with Valve moved to assure people the platform wasn’t entirely dead just three years after the machines came out in 2015.

The amount of interest in Steam Deck is in stark contrast to the shrug that met the Steam Machines back then, but it’s not really so different in its approach – indeed, the Deck’s simply an extension of the work done with the introduction of Big Picture mode that laid the groundwork for the Machines, and a further, more focussed repositioning of PC gaming away from the desktop.

“I think of everything we try to do as a sort of block,” Newell says of how Steam Machines informed the Deck. “You’re building the wall and you have to build a bunch of the components as you go along. The Steam Controller has had a big impact on our thinking on input technologies and I think one of the big takeaways from the Steam Machine is we came to the conclusion that if we want to push these kinds of initiatives, we really need to do it in-house where we can solve all the problems that we see as being of greatest significance both to gamers and to software developers.”