Everything You Need To Know About The Steam Deck, Valve’s New Nintendo Switch Clone

The Steam Deck brings Nintendo’s hybrid console concept to PC gamers.

Credit: Valve

Valve announced the Steam Deck Thursday, a brand new handheld PC gaming device that looks an awful lot like the Nintendo Switch.

There are some key differences, however, ranging from price-tag to what sort of games each system can play. That’s an easy one: The Steam Deck can play your entire Steam Library, but it can’t play Mario Kart 8 or The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

In fact, the Steam Deck can play your entire Epic Game Store library also since you can install Windows on the device. In fact, you could install Windows and run Xbox Game Pass titles, effectively transforming your Steam Deck into a portable Xbox.

Another big difference between the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck? The gamepads. Not only do they not detach, they feature track pads beneath the thumbsticks, and have four customizable buttons on the back. The track pads allow you to play games that are traditionally designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard—a concept Valve tested out on its Steam controller.

Of course, you can also hook up tons of peripherals like a mouse and keyboard or a monitor or TV to the Steam Deck, making it a hybrid in more way than one—not just portable or docked, but as a fully-functional workstation.

Steam Deck

Credit: Valve

The screen itself is a 7” touchscreen that outputs at a surprisingly measly 1280 x 800 resolution, not much different from the Nintendo Switch OLED model, which is slightly larger than the original 6.2” Nintendo Switch. Also like the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck will have gyro features allowing you to tilt or shake the handheld to control some games.

The Steam Deck will feature a Fast Resume system that works similar to the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Pressing the power button will put the device into sleep and automatically pause whatever game you’re playing (obviously multiplayer won’t work this way). Press the power button a second time to wake the device up and hop right back into your game.

40Wh Battery

According to Valve: “Steam Deck’s onboard 40 watt-hour battery provides several hours of play time for most games. For lighter use cases like game streaming, smaller 2D games, or web browsing, you can expect to get the maximum battery life of approximately 7-8 hours.”

That’s not bad, though it obviously won’t last on long trips without a charger or a battery pack.

Steam Deck

Credit: Valve

Hardware Specs

(For a full list of specs go here).

Models

Three Steam Deck models will be available to order:

I would definitely opt for the 256GB or higher storage option not only for the size of the drive but for the faster speeds that should make load-times much shorter. All three models will have a Micro-SD slot so you can expand your storage further.

Pre-Orders

Valve opens up its reservation system for the Steam Deck tomorrow, July 16th at 1 pm ET / 10 PT. Only people who have purchased a game on Steam prior to June 2021 will be eligible for the first 48 hours and you’ll need to put down a $5 deposit in order to reserve, with the rest due when orders process. This is Valve’s attempt to combat scalpers. Hopefully it works better than we’ve seen for other systems like the PS5 and various GPUs.

Go here to reserve a Steam Deck.

Release Date

Right now the Steam Deck’s release date is just December 2021. A more precise date has not yet been announced. We will update this post when a release date is revealed.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook. You can support my work on Patreon or Substack, and subscribe to my YouTube channel here.