When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it"

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Valve's Steam Deck is made up of the best qualities – it's portable, powerful, and lets you play Elden Ring in bed. Valve's staff unsurprisingly agrees that the Steam Deck rules. In fact, the system apparently started partly as an experiment to create a platform with all the things they wished for. 

"The pitch of the Steam Deck was basically: 'How do I play my Steam games away from my PC?' That is the problem we were trying to solve," Steam Deck designers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat explained in a recent interview with Reviews.org. "And there are people [at Valve] who were like, 'I just want that for me.' The point wasn't even to make a product out of it. It was just, let's see if you can actually make something that I would want to use for that purpose."

The designers also pushed back on the suggestion that the Steam Deck was intended to directly mirror the Nintendo Switch as something of a handheld alternative to PCs. 

"Having been there during the early phases," they say, "it was more like, 'I've been playing this game on my PC, but I have to be in front of my PC to play it, and I would love to be able to play it on my commute. Or I would love to be able to play on a plane, or I would love to be able to play outside.'" 

And now you can play outside with either the Steam Deck or this year's Steam Deck OLED , the display on the latter being extra vibrant even under the sun. It's nice when dreams come true. 

Valve does not think the Steam Deck 2 will be possible "in the next couple of years."