Gabe Newell says gamers have never had a great mobile option



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Valve announced its handheld gaming machine for PC earlier this month, and interviews and details on the Steam Deck have been unfolding ever since. Among them, thanks to another IGN interview, are some of the origins of Steam Deck. Chairman and Co-Founder Gabe Newell said the Deck started out as a “natural conversation” about how Valve would contribute to PC gaming in the future, and also featured some of the early names from the drawing board. Deck.

They start by asking Newell how the conversations around the Steam Deck began. This isn’t Valve’s first foray into hardware, of course. Our Valve Index review calls their VR headset the gold standard, but earlier efforts like the Steam Controller and Steam Machine have not gained in longevity in PC gaming. Given that, you might think Valve would be a bit wary of the hardware’s continued efforts. This is not the case, Newell says. They are still talking about adding to the PC game as a whole.

“A lot of times the conversations we have internally are about ‘What can we do? How do we add something to the PC gaming community?’” Says Newell. “So it wasn’t such a strange conversation. We’re still talking about mobile gaming platforms and the tradeoffs that we think exist for ourselves as gamers and game developers.”

Beyond that, Newell believes gamers have always been looking for a serious competitor for portable PC gaming. “I think a lot of gamers always thought that there wasn’t some great mobile gaming hardware that we could use,” Newell says, referring to touch controls as not being ideal for FPS games and to the “owner management” of other portable devices.

“It’s like any gamer. Someone walks in and says ‘this is actually the kind of gaming experience where you can take the best games in the world and run them in a mobile environment.’ We’ve all known this forever. If you had asked gamers 20 years ago, they would have said the same. We’re sort of at the point where enabling technologies have advanced and mobile gaming hardware has reached the point where we can really do it. ”

As with the other early days of the Steam Deck, naturally other names were in the hat before Deck won. “Steam Buddy,” Newell said, and also “Steam Pal,” as we said earlier.

“Very early on we had some pretty terrifying prototypes, so we gave them proper names like ‘Ugly Baby’ and things like that,” adds Pierre-Loup Griffais, Valve developer. “They weren’t great. We didn’t go, as far as the name suggests.”

I don’t know, maybe they should have called Kojima and talked about the Steam BB, eh?

We’ve learned a lot more about the Steam Deck in recent weeks. Valve says they are taking no risk on stick drift with the Deck and that it will support the installation of other game stores and game mods. Ubisoft, which has not introduced any new games on Steam for the past few years has said it will consider bringing games to the Steam Deck if it’s important.

Pre-orders for the laptop have already opened on Steam for the three different models.



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