ON DECK

When we previously visited Valve, two years ago, it was to talk about Half-Life: Alyx and what seemed like a total shift of focus for the company towards VR. But at the end of a conversation with hardware engineer Jeremy Selan, who had worked on Valve’s Index headset, we were left with this tease: “We have really exciting things on our trajectory to help expand the places you can play your Steam games that are not VR-related. We’re not talking about those today, but there are more things coming.” We now know, of course, exactly what he meant. Indeed, we have one of those things in our hands.

At first glance, Steam Deck seems to sit right at the opposite end of the spectrum to Valve’s VR efforts. Where that technology wants to seal you in with your games, Deck is a handheld device that invites you to take games out into the world. And while the former offers a specific set of experiences crafted exclusively for its capabilities, this project is all about giving players access to as many games as possible – the 60,000-plus games in the Steam catalogue, just for starters.

However, speaking to a variety of Valve employees, the point is underlined repeatedly: Deck is not an about-face by any means. Its development overlapped with work on Index and (in fact, it turns out that a Deck design was being finalised, just out of sight, during our 2020 visit), and the company is already thinking about how the project could benefit future work on VR. This is how Valve functions, it seems, particularly in its hardware division: every project contributing towards the next and building on the prior work, even if the similarities between them aren’t immediately, a software engineer who has been on the Deck project since its inception. “As we crystallise all that into this product, we make more of these tools that are going to get leveraged along the way.”