Valve's Steam Deck

I agree, I also don't think the Steam Deck is a direct competition to the Switch. Sure, there may be overlaps but in general, Nintendo always went for it's own customer base. I think the Steam Deck targets existing PC enthusiast with a large existing Steam library who also want some mobile gaming option way more than the more Nintendo oriented Switch crowd.

So I think the two can exist in parallel rather well. But we'll have ot wait and see how it all plays out in the end.

As for Valve abandoning this after a while. Well, the fear is understandable, Valve already had a bunch of hardware failures but they did get better with time. The Steam controller found its niche and with the Index, they did a pretty good job on the VR market. It'll all boil down to how successful this first iteration is.

Apparently preorder numbers were very high, however, I'd imagine there are a lot of people like me, who put their name in the cue but will wait and see how the initial rollout and the first reviews turn out before making a final decision.

I for one really hope it'll be successful. A nice portable "chill on the ouch" PC with most of my Steam library at hand would be great. And Even if the hardware limits performance a little, I have literally hundreds of games in my library, mostly older ones, which I could still want to give a go on this thing.

Well, that's the 1 million dollar question really.

Natively, it will run on SteamOS, which is Linux based. So it will only run games that run under Linux (with Proton). You can see a database for games that run with Proton/Linux here.

I could also imagine that - if the Steam Deck is successful - more developers might want to ensure that their games run on Linux/Proton but it's too early to tell.

Valve did say that you can theoretically wipe the thing and install any OS you like (like Windows for example) but there won't be much support from Valve if something doesn't work and we'll have to see how the device does with drivers, etc. so making that happen could be a bit of hassle and also impact performance. Again, we'll only know once people tested it in the real world.

Another thing to consider is that the hardware, while quite impressive for a mobile device, is not a high end pc. It should run most current titles fine in the 720p resolution that the internal display allows but in terms of future games with higher hardware demand we'll have to see how that goes. Also, if you want to use this with a docking station and a larger monitor, don't expect to run current gen titles in 1080p resolution with high detail settings and 60+ frames per second or anything like that. While this kind of external connection is supported in principle, I expect the hardware will hit it's limits quickly at resolutions higher than 720p. For strictly mobile gaming though, it seems like a reasonable setup to me.

I mean, it should be like a regular PC as far as I know. So you could probably set up a dual boot or something like that I guess?

But since the resources on that system are not particularly vast, I doubt you'd want to do that.

Anyway, this is all still pretty speculative. We'll really have to wait until actual tech geeks have it in their hands and try some stuff out before we get real data on what works and how well it works.