Valve recently announced the Steam Deck handheld gaming PC. Not to be confused with Elgato’s Stream Deck control board for streamers, the Valve Steam Deck is a fully decked out gaming PC on a Sega GameGear/Nintendo Switch like body but is powerful enough to play your PC games.
Interest on the handheld has been quite positive so far despite Valve’s relatively bad history with hardware like the SteamBox, SteamLink and Steam Controller all suffering relatively grim fates due to Valve’s poor handling of the products.
Still, the Steam Deck seems intuitive enough as it a self-contained gaming device. Based on SteamOS and powered by a supposed AMD Van Gogh Zen2+RDNA2 custom chip, the Steam Deck is looking to push pad based PC gaming whilst still allowing mouse-based controls with its touch pad controls.
While we do get the Nintendo Switch comparisons, barring piracy and emulation, the Steam Deck won’t be able to run Switch games natively but it will be able to run Windows if the user wants to. The SteamOS itself will be running games via Proton if they don’t have native Linux support and Valve is urging developers to ease anti-cheat software and services flagging Proton as an exploit.
That said, with GPUs and the Playstation 5 being the biggest example of history repeating itself, the Steam Deck seems to be continuing the trend with pre-order listings on eBay averaging around $1000 with the top listing going for $5000 but some even $2000.
While the current average is still a 200% markup, should the Steam Deck prove successful, resale prices could spike but given the novelty of the device and AMD’s limited production capability as of posting, scalping could also be an issue for the Valve Steam Deck.
