I’ve had a blast with this device for the past few weeks. Even though Valve has more work to do, it has also brought to light how much more successful Valve’s previous projects could have been had Proton been at this current state back in 2015.
The Steam Deck is an impressive piece of kit and a great value at $400 for the performance that you get in my humble opinion (thanks in no small part to the impressive APU and 16GB of new LPDDR5 Ram), but the true heart of this project has been the success and unbelievable progress of Valve’s Proton compatibility layer over the past few years.
One of the main criticisms of the failed “Steam Machines” was that the SteamOS (2.0) Linux Debian-based distro had very poor compatibility with the existing Steam game catalog. Since only a select handful of games would play on the Linux machines, the value just wasn’t there for consumers back in 2015. Valve then pivoted to streaming (via Steam Link hardware and then later an App) as a solution to bring PC games to your living room, but of course, this meant that you had to already possess a decent gaming PC.
Fast forward to now, and the Steam Deck’s impressive game catalog compatibility has been made possible thanks to all the community work that has gone into the improvement of the Proton compatibility layer since the launch of the old Steam Machines. Valve’s Proton compatibility layer (itself a vertically integrated fork of Wine via Linux) has since gone on to be completely integrated into the Steam Client (under the Steam Play functionality). The Steam Deck is the benefactor of this constant game compatibility improvement for Linux, but the trickledown improvements haven’t stopped there.
1) I’ve since pulled the newer Proton versions into an older Steam Machine pc which finally allows it to have game compatibility parity with the current Steam Deck (sans performance differences due to the Steam Machine’s older hardware/specs). Achieving this required the installation of “bubblewrap” via the Linux desktop of the Steam Machine’s instance of SteamOS 2.0 (based on the Debian Linux distro) to get the versions of Proton above 5.0 to work.
2) Using the old Steam Link hardware, the Steam Deck can wirelessly “dock” with any TV and be used as either a controller itself while you stream to the display, or as a wireless streaming system while you use a paired controller. This has been great for streaming RPG’s or any game that wouldn’t be impacted by latency.
As a side note/observation, I’ve seen the Steam Controllers skyrocket in price since the release of the Steam Deck as well. Perhaps it’s time for Valve to take a stab at a Steam Controller 2.0 lol