Sometimes Rumors Come True

Valve this morning revealed the Steam Deck, their new portable gaming PC. With full access to your Steam library, you’ll be able to install your games and get right to playing.

Powered by an AMD APU chip and with 16GBs of RAM, Valve promises you’ll be able to run modern games and run them well. The system features a wide variety of controls. Four face buttons, a d-pad, two thumbsticks, dual triggers and bumpers, 4 grip buttons, and 2 trackpads with customizable sensitivity for clicks should allow most games to shine. The 7 inch 1280×800 touch enabled screen even has a light sensor. It even has 6-axis gyro support.

Three models will be available for the Steam Deck. The default is $399 and features 64GBs of eMMC internal storage and comes with a carrying case. If you upgrade to $529 you’ll get a 256GB NVMe SSD promising faster storage and an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle. Those who want the most storage can pay $649 for a 512GB NVMe SSD promising even faster storage, premium anti-glare etched glass, an exclusive carrying case for this model, and an exclusive virtual keyboard theme. All three models will support microSD for additional storage.

Games are supposed to just work but Valve does have an option for developers to help optimize their games for the platform. A dock allowing for wired connection and display connection will release separately. This probably explains why rumors so often compared this to the Switch. External accessories connect via Bluetooth as well.

Reservations for Steam Deck start July 16th, at 10 AM PDT. Are you excited to check it out? Let us know what you think below.

Andrew Thornton

Andrew has been writing about video games for nearly twenty years, contributing to publications such as DarkStation, Games Are Fun, and the E-mpire Ltd. network. He enjoys most genres but is always pulled back to classic RPG's, with his favorite games ever including Suikoden II, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Phantasy Star IV. Don't worry though, he thinks new games are cool too, with more recent favorites like Hades, Rocket League, and Splatoon 2 stealing hundreds of hours of his life. When he isn't playing games he's often watching classic movies, catching a basketball game, or reading the first twenty pages of a book before getting busy and forgetting about it.