The Steam Deck Gets a Lot of Stuff Right

I’m always looking for both big and small ways that you can recapture your computers. One of the main reasons I love the Steam Deck is that it cuts almost all of the BS out of running a gaming computer.

(For folks who don’t know, Steam is the largest online store for PC games. It’s owned by a private company, Valve Software. They occasionally make their own games, but they also take between 10 and 30% of every dollar spent on their platform. The company famously makes more money per employee than pretty much any other company you can think of. It’s a juggernaut in games.)

At a basic level, the Steam Deck is just a PC shaped like a Nintendo Switch, running Linux on a custom AMD processor with a lowish-resolution screen and a decent battery. It’s packaged with a web of software that lets people play Windows games on Linux. And the secret is in that software, which gets out of the user’s way and handles all the complicated business so that playing a game is as easy as tapping a big green Play button. SteamOS is built for controller input and handles all of the system and driver updates automatically. It also optimizes game settings so they run well on the hardware, lets you know if a game won’t run well on the Deck, maps gamepad controls, and more. It turns the notoriously fiddly experience of playing PC games into an easy, console-like experience.

Contrast that with the experience you have running a similar handheld device on Windows. We’ll start with software updates. You’ll quickly learn that games update in the store where you bought them, Windows updates in Windows update, the drivers for your hardware are in yet another app, and your vendor probably wants you to update their software yet another place. All this updating is complicated by the fact that your main interface with Windows is a small, 7- or 8-inch touchscreen, and that the Windows UI isn’t built for touch, much less on such a small, low-resolution screen. It’s a frustrating, fiddly experience and the only upside is that you can more easily play games from other stores or that use DRM or anti-cheat that blocks Linux users.

The Steam Deck’s simplicity comes at the expense of it’s single-purpose nature. While you can shut down the SteamOS user interface and swap over to a traditional Linux desktop to run a browser or productivity software, the hardware really isn’t designed for that. Its screen is too low resolution for work and the machine just sports a single USB-c port, so connecting an external monitor or other peripherals requires an external dock. (The low-resolution screen stinks for working, but it’s ideal for playing games on the go. Fewer pixels means the GPU in the machine uses less power, which extends the device’s battery life.)

The Steam Deck isn’t a new idea. There have been low-volume handhelds running similar hardware out of China for more than a decade, and more mainstream fast-follows from Asus, Lenovo, Acer, MSI and more since the Steam Deck launched. Even though Valve’s a private company and doesn’t really report Steam Deck sales, we do know that none of those other handhelds have penetrated the market like the Steam Deck. The closest we have to real numbers is a vague “multiple millions” number from November 2023, and we’ve seen a minor hardware refresh since then.

How does that stack up to other handhelds from laptop juggernauts like Asus and Lenovo? According to my industry sources, “multiple millions” of Steam Decks sold likely means that the Steam Deck is outselling every other machine in the nascent category combined.

Why is the Steam Deck successful? Price helps—Valve is shipping lower end hardware and isn’t paying Microsoft to pre-install Windows. I’d argue that Valve’s imprimatur has an even bigger impact. The Steam Deck is on the Steam homepage every single day, where it’s seen by millions of potential customers. It’s almost always near the top of the Steam top sales charts (presumably based on dollars sold, not units shipped). But I’d argue that the extreme focus on usability—getting people into games with as little hassle as possible—is an even bigger part of their success.

But Valve hasn’t been able to harness their promotional power to push hardware in the past. After all, this isn’t Valve’s first attempt at hardware. It’s shipped everything from game controllers and streaming boxes to VR headsets and even whole gaming PCs, and none of them saw the same level of success as the Deck.

A big argument in favor of usability as the key is that users are actively working to create versions of SteamOS that run on more generalized hardware than the Deck itself. Because Valve’s work on SteamOS is all open source, it’s a matter of adaptation rather than reverse engineering to add support for other hardware to the platform. This is showing up in Linux distros like Bazzite, which runs on general purpose PCs as well as AMD-powered handhelds from other vendors. Where SteamOS only includes drivers for the hardware inside the Steam Deck, Bazzite supports GPUs from other vendors and also bundles in tools that make it easier to play your games from other PC games stores—Epic, Battle.net, GOG, and even indie stores like Itch.io and Humble.

And of course, Valve announced they’re making SteamOS available to other hardware vendors too. They have committed to shipping a version of SteamOS that runs on more general hardware later this year and the other hardware vendors are already onboard. Lenovo is shipping SteamOS hardware later this year.

Lessons to Learn

SteamOS feels good and different in today’s otherwise enshittified ecosystems because Valve’s goals and our goals as users happen to align perfectly. I want to play games and Valve wants to sell more more games. It’s in their best interest to make playing PC games more accessible—in all senses of the word. At a starting price of $400, the Steam Deck is cheap compared most starter gaming PCs, but the experience for players is quite good. Its low-resolution screen and hardware configuration align favorably with the current console generation, which means developers were already building games that could comfortably run on that hardware. There isn’t a ton of required work to get most games that run well on the Xbox or PS5 to also run well on the Steam Deck. At the same time, the Steam Deck also condenses much of the backend work of running a computer into one bi-weekly update that happens automatically when you reboot the machine. And Valve’s rewarded for this hard work with a hefty cut of every sale that’s made on Steam.

What are the lessons to learn here?

Set a goal and be relentless about focusing on that goal. The goal Valve had with the Deck was to expand and extend the PC gaming market. They designed a cheap machine, built software that made it the single simplest place to play PC games, and marketed it to their core audience. They were able to do this because it’s a small company and there aren’t 50 different stakeholders diluting the impact of every product they ship.

Microsoft could have made this machine and it would only play Xbox games and use their cloud streaming service, but it would also have apps for video streaming services (that sucked compared to the ones on your phone and TV), ads that get in the way of you actually playing games, and you’d probably need to subscribe to GamePass to make the machine usable. If Google made it, they’d use some framework an engineer was hyped about and pass the cost of porting games to it to developers, which would prevent anyone from ever releasing software for it. If Netflix built it, they’d spend a ridiculous amount of money on new games, and kill 95% of them all at the second milestone because someone in the decision tree “didn’t get it”.

Minimize work to maintain the machine. This is the place Windows fails the hardest. The open nature of the Windows platform means that each vendor—the PC builder, the chip and peripheral providers, the game vendor, and Microsoft itself—wants to own their own interface for providing updates to their drivers and software so they can market other products to you. Unfortunately, those applications are often really poorly made—either they’re slow and unwieldy, are confusing or difficult to use, or just plain suck. But even if they didn’t suck, having to use multiple applications to update the software your computer needs to run is a bad solution for everyone.

Advertising the limits of your product is a feature. There’s no ambiguity on the Steam Deck support page that’s on every single game. If a game passes their certification tests, it gets a green badge and is labeled Supported. If it won’t run, it gets an Unsupported badge. And if there are a handful of problems, the page lists it as Mostly Supported and gives an explicit list of the problems encountered in testing. There’s no attempt to trick a customer into buying something that won’t give them a good experience, because if they did, the customer will just refund the purchase.

What’s Next?

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’re going to talk about why email is broken, why none of the big companies are trying to fix it, and how you can make email more tolerable, because at this point, we’re stuck with it. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider subscribing and share it with a friend!