Yesterday Rock Paper Shotgun pulled off The Verge and did an interview with Valve’s – yup, you guessed it – Pierre-Loup Griffais and Lawrence Yang. They got together to discuss the Deck’s one-year anniversary, what their reaction was to the community’s ideas, and what the company’s future plans are.

Here’s some interesting tidbits that I wanted to highlight:

Overall Impressions and Stats

  • Griffais is surprised at the “variety of use cases” and comments “it’s been great to see”
  • Yang: “of the people who’ve purchased a Steam Deck, 42% of them end up spending the majority of their Steam gaming time on Steam Deck – preferring it over their other devices”

Plans for the Future

  • Valve is trying to “add functionality and update features in a way that make the Steam ecosystem better as a whole” and Yang brings up the Deck UI being the default BPM on desktop as an example
  • Griffais: “a significant portion of the feedback we see is in line with things that we’re already working on, or were planning to work on.” Things like HDR and ray-tracing, for example
  • Griffais: “we don’t have many big compatibility holes remaining” regarding anti-cheat and media codecs

Fixing Problems

  • “fruitful” relationships with game developers allows Valve to evaluate a game before it’s released, which can sometimes lead to “ID’ing” and fixing of technical issues. Supposedly this would otherwise “have affected native Windows and console versions,” and, of course, the Deck. A couple of examples RPS brings out is the stuttering fix for Elden Ring and the constant fixing of FFXIV’s launcher
  • Valve are attentive to “compatibility problems.” An example would be the SteamOS 3.4.6 update that not only enabled ray-tracing for DOOM Eternal, but fixed “graphical corruption issues” with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and “several upcoming titles”

Verified

The Future with Steam Deck 2 and Game Optimization

  • Valve doesn’t seem too worried about new games becoming increasingly demanding on hardware: Griffais says “it’ll depend on how developers approach it.” He believes the Deck has the potential to be “a solid target throughout the generation,” but comments that the game developers’ optimization work will be more difficult than “typical Deck UX tweaks”
  • Griffais: “there are benefits to game developers doing this [optimization] work. If high-end current-gen titles are able to scale to Deck and be a great experience, it also enables smoother performance on a wider variety of PCs, and improve the the experience for the whole playerbase”
  • Yang: “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years”

Since we’re on the topic, what are your thoughts on the Steam Deck so far? Have you been enjoying it over the past year?