Following on from the rumours earlier this year, Valve has officially announced the Steam Deck. The brand-new handheld gaming PC has been designed for gamers on the go who crave a little bit more oomph in their portable play.
Valve confirms that the Steam Deck functions similarly to the Nintendo Switch, but boasts the hardware capabilities of a full gaming PC. The handheld runs a new version of Valve's SteamOS modified to include a new console interface that allows users to navigate both the Steam store and personal Steam libraries.
If you're into small but powerful PCs, take a look at this bite-sized powerhouse below!
As far as straight specs are concerned, the Steam Deck is packing. The console has a 7-inch, 1280x800 resolution, 60hz LCD screen, 16 GBs of LPDDR5 RAM, and a custom AMD APU with 4-core, 8-thread CPU paired with 8 RDNA 2 compute units GPU. If that all sounds like nonsense to you, all you really need to know is this: it's a heck of a lot more powerful than the Switch, and can run most modern games well. Valve is aiming to deliver gamers the chance to access their entire Steam library on the go, which is obviously an ambitious undertaking.
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The Steam Deck is set to launch in December, and will cost £349 for the 64GB storage model. You can also pick up a 250GB SSD option for ££459, and 512GB SSD for £569.
It all sounds pretty damn impressive, right? There's no doubt that gamers everywhere are incredibly excited to get their hands on what could be the start of a new chapter of handheld gaming. The only issue at the moment? There are an awful lot of folk who are completely freaked out by the Steam Deck's... unconventional button placement. As you can see below, the console has two trackpads underneath the joysticks, while the D-pad/X/Y/A/B buttons live to the side of the joysticks.
While it certainly looks odd to me, the proof of the pudding is very much in the eating, and a number of hands-on previews from other websites insist that the Steam Deck doesn't feel weird to use at all, with PC Gamer noting the trackpads are a "godsend". I guess we'll see for ourselves in December.
