A WHOLE NEWELL WORLD

Valve president GABE NEWELL has big plans for the Steam Deck

- GABE NEWELL

There’s hardly a figure that looms larger over PC gaming than Valve president Gabe Newell. The company’s games are some of the most influential ever made; Steam has come to dominate the entire industry; and now he’s hoping to make a whole new breakthrough in handheld gaming. So, fresh from our Steam Deck review, we sat down to ask him about what made the device possible, his ambitions for the future, and, er, NFTs.

It feels like Steam OS is the secret sauce of the Steam Deck that we haven’t seen in a portable PC before. Are you still planning to release it publicly? Or is there any worry that the next portable system would simply take that and become a Steam Deck copycat?

No, actually, we hope they do. I mean, in order to get here, we had to follow a fairly lengthy process. And all of the steps along the way, whether it was Steam Machines, or Link, or the controller, or the work we’ve done building products in-house with Index and so on, has enabled us to get to the point that we can build Steam Deck. It’s just more [about] timing than anything to release Steam OS, and to enable other people to build related products.

When you debuted the Steam Deck, you spoke about hoping that it was the beginning of a new ecosystem for portable PCs. What do you hope to see from other hardware companies, if the Steam Deck is a hit?