After the failure of the Steam Machines, Valve returns to consoles with SteamDeck. Building on the hybrid console model that popularized the Nintendo Switch, its new console will offer handheld gameplay and the ability to be played connected to a larger screen and with a controller via a dock.
Valve wanted to enter the console market with the so-called Steam Machines, with which it offered a Linux-based operating system with its official support, to manufacturers that promised to offer PCs with certain minimum specifications in order to sell PCs made for gaming . The reality is that no matter how many intentions they had, being based on Linux greatly limited the catalog they could access: but many years have passed and Valve wants to return to the market.
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What you need to know about Steam Deck
There will be three Steam Deck models arriving in December:
- The € 419 model that has a 64GB eMMC memory.
- A mid-range € 549 model with a 256GB NVMe SSD.
- The most premium model for € 679 of 512 GB NVMe SSD.
Reservations can now be made from the Steam Deck page on SteamBut they will prioritize accounts that have made a purchase before June this year to ensure they go to legitimate players. They only allow you to buy one per person.
We already commented that one of the great impediments of Steam Machines was that they were based on Linux and companies were not encouraged to port Windows games, and at most you were left with some indie games and titles that large companies could afford to port. But in recent years, Steam has wanted to bring Linux gaming closer and easier thanks to Steam Proton, a system that includes Wine and DXVK to make playing a Steam game on Linux as easy as playing on a PC. With this they make the player not have to update anything. Although Steam Proton is not perfect and does not work in competitive multiplayer games that use anticheats systems through a Windows dependent system kernel, such as Valorant, Destiny 2 or Rust.
Now that you have Steam Proton, a large number of Steam games will be available on the Steam Deck with ease. This together with portability makes the Steam Deck one of the most popular gadgets of next year, since portability was a very attractive addition to the Nintendo Switch. It will not be a closed gadget, since it will allow us to install the software we want, and connect it with the hardware that interests us.
Steam Deck has a new processor jointly developed by AMD and optimized for portable devices with AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, and has 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Its screen is a 7 ”1280 x 800px LCD, something close to the OLED switch announced a few days ago. It has integrated gyroscopic movement sensors, which can be used in games to improve aim and control, an improvement that many players who have tried it appreciate.
