Full Steam Ahead

Hands-on with the STEAM DECK, Valve’s attempt to make your Steam library portable.

- Wes Fenlon

Pictures of the Steam Deck couldn’t prepare me for seeing it in person. After working on the Steam Deck in secret for years, Valve invited us to its offices to be among the first to test out the handheld gaming PC, before game developers have even gotten their hands on it. And wow, is it big. This is the full tower PC case of videogame handhelds.

Once I actually picked up the Steam Deck, though, the size didn’t seem to matter much. At 1.47 pounds it isn’t too heavy to hold comfortably. It’s wide, but the inputs are close enough to reach naturally. The button arrangement may look a little odd, but it fits how you grip the device. The Stream Deck is as big as it needed to be to pack in all the features Valve thought it should contain (which is basically everything, minus the CD drive).

Somehow it all fits in an 11.7-inch wide tablet. Spending a couple of hours with the Stream Deck was convincing: it’s not the first Frankensteined mash-up of PC and Game Boy, but it’s easily the most polished and premium I’ve seen.

With Steam Machines, Valve tried and failed to sell PC gaming in the living room. But PC gaming anywhere? That’s a harder pitch to ignore. And once I started using it, I could almost forget that the games I was playing were never designed for a portable machine.

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