It is also available for reservation again, and those who wish to purchase it can do so via the company website. If Valve can get most of Steam's popular games running on the Deck without paying a per-device Windows license fee, the company could make out like a bandit-or, at the very least, keep the Deck's launch prices down.Steam Deck handheld gaming console, which was launched on February 25, has now started shipping to those who had made a reservation earlier and have now completed the purchase. Valve has already sunk years of work and tons of cash into its Steam Proton initiative, which combines a Wine compatibility layer and appropriate drivers to boot Windows games inside of Linux. Last year, Valve even went to the trouble of sending Xbox head Phil Spencer his own prerelease Steam Deck.) Yet Valve still likes the idea of gaming PCs that can run games from its Steam storefront without needing Windows.
(At press time, Microsoft has committed to Steam simul-launches for most of Microsoft's major Xbox games. At the time, Microsoft's public statements and development efforts suggested that a "closed garden" might come to Windows-which, among other things, would threaten Valve's ability to freely sell games on millions of PCs.įast-forward a full decade, and Valve has a much cozier relationship with Microsoft's gaming division. In 2012, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell lambasted Microsoft's increasingly draconian approach to software installation on Windows. Both concepts arose from the same premise: make the massive ecosystem of Steam games work on non-Windows machines-and without requiring that Steam game devs patch or update their existing code.
That separates the Deck from " Steam Machines," i.e., desktop gaming PCs that Valve consulted on but didn't produce. The Steam Deck is Valve's first stab at creating its own PC form factor.
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