If you, like me, believe that playing games on a tiny screen is inherently superior to playing them on a big screen – even though it is not – you’ve probably spent the day ogling Valve’s new OLED Steam Deck, with its sleek new HDR screen, faster downloads, and substantially increased battery life. And if not, well, you’re likely the kind of person this thing is actually for: somebody who waited for the Steam Deck to exit beta.
The Steam Deck, Valve’s obsidian slab that contains the guts of a PC at least good enough to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 30+ frames per second, released at the start of 2022. It was solid! Straight out of the box, Valve got the most important part right: running fairly high-end games on a portable device with minimal muss or fuss. But the Steam Deck was also the first generation of a new piece of hardware, and in this day and age, that means it functioned as a glorified beta test. As I wrote at the time in my review for The Washington Post:
“My enthusiasm has been buried under an avalanche of asterisks. The aforementioned God of War session, for example, ended after just 30 minutes because the Steam Deck’s battery — a bit less than half-charged at the time — promptly died. In other cases, using a Nintendo Switch-like suspend feature caused framerates to drop and cut-scenes to glitch out when I resumed playing. Some games ran or controlled poorly; others did not run at all. Throughout the review period, Valve issued regular updates and repeatedly promised many issues would be gone by launch, but I can only review what I experienced, and what I experienced felt like the future’s beta test.”
I think the lion’s share of people who bought the vanilla Steam Deck knew they were purchasing a device that would be perfected in the future – though even by that standard, the original Steam Deck felt a bit rushed. And while that part kinda sucks, I do want to call attention to the fact that, as far as hardware betas go, Valve at least did it right. Updates immediately flowed like lava from an itsy bitsy volcano: Within just a few months, Valve had boosted battery life, quieted down the Steam Deck’s banshee-like fans (thank god), and added numerous features and interface tweaks. For a while it felt like there was a new update every day; with a premium price tag – at least, as far as handhelds go – came premium service.
But software updates can only go so far where hardware is concerned, so the Steam Deck OLED was inevitable. The screen has always been one of the Deck’s biggest weaknesses – not awful by any means, but definitely a rung down from what you’d expect from such a device – so of course it needed an upgrade. Battery was similarly always going to be an achilles heel without some kind of hardware intervention, making that part of the OLED a no-brainer as well. Other tweaks like better haptics, redesigned trackpads, and joysticks with deeper divots for your fingers are the kinds of things that I sure wish had been present in the original, but I imagine they’re the end result of lots and lots of feedback. And the new option to buy a translucent version of the Deck? One that looks incredibly sick? For just $30 extra? Fuck Valve for doing that to me, personally.
Basically, Valve has taken the same route as Nintendo with the OLED Switch, all the way down to its decision not to give its portable dynamo a performance boost just yet. And this time, at least, it seems like the Steam Deck won’t be bundled with eventual buyer’s remorse. Valve product designer Lawrence Yang told The Verge to think of this as the final version of the Steam Deck 1, and Valve will only release the Steam Deck 2 once it can produce a “generational improvement especially in performance.” That, he said, should happen in the “next couple of years.”
In the meantime, the Steam Deck is about as good as it’s gonna get. If you’ve got hundreds of dollars laying around (as somebody who just started an independent media company and absolutely does not: lol), it’s worth the money. These days my vanilla Steam Deck is one of my most used gaming devices. This year alone I’ve played almost all of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on it. But also, I’m a weird pervert who thinks games are just better when I can play them in bed or on the toilet (and pretty much nowhere else). I hope, for your sake, that you are not like me.
