All Hands on (Steam) Deck

Aside from mine (for now), but you need not be hands-on with Steam Deck to know something important is happening.

Like all Twitter power users, my timeline is basically a carefully-cultivated barometer of sorts for aspects of popular culture most relevant or interesting to me. In the past week it’s been much more uniform than usual by merit of revolving around only 4 topics in any great depth:

1. Steam Deck

2. Elden Ring

3. Euphoria

4. War

I’ll be staying firm in my lane and leave the bigger topics to more qualified voices (and no, I’m not referring to the apparently shocking season finale of Euphoria - can’t help you there, I’m not quite the correct demographic for the show). Luckily, the roll out of Valve’s Steam Deck, and the runaway success of FromSoftware’s latest will-crusher Elden Ring very much are in my lane. 

An admission as we begin: I haven’t actually used a Steam Deck yet, but not for lack of trying. Despite finally submitting my pre-order a mere 4 hours after the orders opened, I’m dumped in the Q2 delivery window. The pre-order logjam is a reflection of how much PC gaming is centered in Valve’s Steam platform - I, like so many others, am the proud owner of a Steam library thousands of titles deep. An efficient and flexible way to access this content made the otherwise irrational decision to spend upwards of $650 on a traveling computer that is not quite a laptop seem almost sensible. 

Valve co-founder, president, and overall gaming luminary Gabe Newell certainly thinks so, and is obviously pretty proud of his creation given accounts that he is hand-delivering units. Gabe is one of those folks I really recommend folks listen to when he speaks, and his recent interview about Steam Deck and the state of the industry is no exception. His expectedly cynical take on NFTs and current applications of blockchain technology should not come as a surprise given previously announced platform policies on Steam, whereas the fact that he believes the Steam Deck will have the same impact on PC gaming as the iPhone had for mobile computing might be.

A bold claim to be sure, but not completely without merit. For those of you who have been following along here (thank you!) a recurrent theme I address is the power of flexibility and accessibility in gaming as one of the single most potent factors driving its proliferation. The rise of gaming is not merely a factor related to any given technology (even iPhones), it's that gaming content can increasingly be consumed on a wide range of platforms in doses where it can be weaved into everyday life outside of dedicated play sessions. This is obviously the principal power of mobile gaming, but is also demonstrated in various “quality of life” improvements in console/PC gaming (cloud gaming, cross-platform, quick resumes, variable difficulties, etc.).

I’m old enough to remember when launching a PC game required extensive editing of autoexec.bat or config.sys, and maybe the formatting of a boot disk or two. Not only has PC gaming never been terribly user-friendly, up until the release of Windows 95 it was damn-near hostile. The iPhone and App Store not only provided an avenue for games to land in the hands of millions of consumers, the touchscreen provided an intuitive mimetic interface for playing the games - no specialized knowledge of controllers/joysticks/etc. required. The Steam Deck could present a similar step-change to PC gaming - immediate and convenient access to an expansive gaming ecosystem, no boot disks required, which demands only about as much specialized knowledge as needed to operate the already wildly popular Nintendo Switch. 

The parallels between the devices are obvious, and stage set for comparison from the get-go. Steam Deck was released shortly after the (arguably disappointing) reveal of the newest Switch OLED, which didn’t offer the processing updates many were hoping for in lieu of a better screen and overall form-factor for portable play. The computation muscle the Steam Deck boasts is just what many were hoping for in the new Switch, thereby putting Valve in a position to dunk on the defacto king of portable/handheld gaming. Intentional or not, the dunking continues on even now - Nintendo has mainly been in the news for plans to shut down their 3DS and Wii U eShops (much to the disappointment of game preservationists), whereas a retro-game emulation has already emerged as a killer app for the Steam Deck.

The most important and comparable virtue between the Switch and Steam Deck are that they provide an avenue for gaming enthusiasts to rethink how we might play games otherwise tethered to specific spaces in the household. Modern PC gaming, though just a hair friendlier than those early DOS-days referenced above, still requires fairly specialized equipment - most notably, expensive high-end PCs to render bleeding-edge graphics and physics. Experiencing these games are therefore tethered to the location of the PC, not entirely unlike how traditional console gaming is often tethered to the living room. Nintendo endeavored to provide better flexibility by merit of allowing for similar game play experiences for the Switch on the “big screen” in the living room (via the Switch dock) vs. on the go. Fellow gaming iconoclast Valve is essentially duplicating the same philosophy for the PC ecosystem.  

Somewhere out in the world, a PC-gaming elitist is feeling an icy chill down their spine as I describe this shift as an important step in casual consumption of PC gaming content. We use the term “casual” and “mobile” interchangeably, whereas in reality “casual” refers to a design philosophy and “mobile” the method of consumption. Because “casual” refers to relaxed expectations on the player (most notably via length of engagement in any given play session), “mobile” play is almost always “casual” but “casual” need not always be “mobile” (for one of the earliest and best examples, think about the inclusion of Solitaire in Windows going back to version 3.0). What is often mistaken and demonstrably not true is that “casual” means easy/basic games - it’s how the relationship between the player and game can be expressed, and the Steam Deck is an important step to allowing for a more casual relationship with one of the most expansive yet occasionally inhospitable gaming ecosystems that currently exists.

I believe Gabe alluded to similar influences between the Steam Deck and iPhone because both were technologies that shifted how we interacted-with and fit certain technologies and tasks into our everyday lives. Gaming as an industry has been changing in fundamental ways to both 1. Ease in new players and 2. Retain existing fans aging into lifestyles not always amenable to the requirements video gaming demanded for engagement. Devices such as Steam Deck and others allowing for a more “casual” relationship with gaming are demonstrative of both of these shifts. When you hear the tired marketing pitch that “everyone is a gamer,” it’s not a claim that folks seem themselves any differently so much as a reflection of the fact that gaming will not be an exceptional activity, but merely something people do, every day, when and where convenient to do so.