VR can also handle Steam Deck, says Gabe Newell -apkrig
IGN magazine published a complete interview with Gab Newell about the Steam Deck handheld, from which we have so far read only short quotations. The video is almost half an hour long and President Valve devotes a large part of it to the equipment being prepared. The questions and answers were very relaxed, and Newell had to explain several times that he might look at the matter differently as a player and differently as president of the large company behind the facility. It was said, for example, that Valve does not set any goal, after which they would call the device successful, but at the same time Newell thinks that it has the potential to attract millions of players. He also mentioned that he plays Dot 2 on the Steam Deck and suggested that the greatest strength of the whole facility is its openness.
Newell was not afraid to mention that players can install, for example, Epic Games Store on their devices. “That’s something I’d like to hear as a player,” Newell said, noting that he certainly wouldn’t like it as a player if someone denied him something on the gaming computer. Just like a mobile gaming PC, Gabe Newell looks at Steam Deck and believes that the device will be able to do everything that players are used to with regard to certain compromises. According to President Valve, this also includes the connection of a virtual reality headset. Although Newell was not entirely specific in this regard, he mentioned Oculus Quest, which offers a connection to a computer via cable and now wirelessly for both generations of devices.
It may sound like an exaggerated promise, given the Steam Deck’s hardware, but the fact remains that in addition to very demanding games, such as Flight Simulator in VR, there are a lot of smaller, much less hardware-intensive pieces. For all of them we can name for example Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, we can definitely include Skyrim in VR, or the shooter Pavlov VR. However, a connection with a headset may be enough for someone, for example, only with regard to the possibility of watching a movie in VR, or holding a meeting in virtual reality. The possibilities of use will certainly be limited, but it is still an indication of where the potential of portable PCs could reach thanks to the development of hardware and technology.
After all, as Newell claims in the introduction, the idea for the Steam Deck came naturally because current hardware allows for relatively high performance while maintaining a compact size, and believes that the idea of portable gaming must please everyone. Newell says that if someone had come up with such an idea twenty years ago, the acceptance would have been just as enthusiastic, but this was simply not possible at the beginning of the millennium, which is not the case today. The only thing players repeatedly raise as a concern is the operation of competitive multiplayer games, which use their own anti-cheat tools to protect against fraud. These may not work on the SteamOS Linux kernel, and you may need to install Windows to play these games.
