The Steam Deck already promises to revolutionize PC video games, but we should not expect to discover titles designed for the hybrid console, warns Valve.
Officially released for a few days, the Steam Deck is slowly starting to make its way into the players’ living room. Compatible with most PC games available on the platform (with the exception of virtual reality titles), Valve’s next-gen machine intends this year reconcile consoles and PC, by offering one of the largest catalogs on the market, without asking players to go back to the checkout. An ambitious bet, but which the company wanted to temporize: even with its arrival on console, Valve will not develop titles specifically designed for the Steam Deck.
PC first
Concretely, if more and more games from the Steam catalog promise to be optimized for the Deck, they will never be directly designed with this in mind. In an interview for the media Rock Paper ShotgunSteam Deck engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and designer Jake Rodkin ruled out the idea of a catalog of console-exclusive games: “The best thing regarding the Steam Deck in my opinion is that it can play content from your Steam library. It’s like a new window through which you can enjoy your games, but we didn’t imagine it as a full-fledged platform”.
However, the next games that will join the Steam catalog will have every interest in being optimized for the Deckon pain of being cut off from part of their audience, recalls Pierre-Loup Griffais: “We obviously hope that developers will keep the Steam Deck in mind when designing the ingame experience of their games, so that it can be loaded from a PC as well as a Deck”.
Thought like a extension of a computer rather than a console, the Steam Deck will take into account existing game libraries, but also backups thanks to the Steam Cloud system. It is therefore logical that Valve prefers to bet on a single ecosystem rather than on several media.
