In brief: Details regarding Valve’s recently announced Steam Deck handheld gaming system continue to trickle out, and its mostly good news. In a recent sit-down with IGN, Valve’s hardware team said they believe that the entire Steam library, even the latest games released this past year, will scale down to meet their 800p, 30Hz target quiet well.
“We haven’t really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn’t handle, at least yet,” said Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais.
The team said they were also intentional about not integrating local storage directly onto the motherboard for repairability sake. As such, the standard M.2 NVMe SSD can be swapped out should yours go bad, or if you want to upgrade to a larger capacity drive. It’s a task that isn’t really intended for inexperienced users, however, and it’s unclear how it might impact the device’s warranty.
The Steam Deck can be configured with up to 512GB of speedy internal storage, and all models include a microSD expansion slot. Games will load faster from internal storage, but they will still be perfectly playable directly from a memory card.
Valve is currently accepting reservations for the Steam Deck, but you’ll be waiting a while before you get it if you’re just now getting in line. The mid-tier and high-end models have an expected order availability date of Q2 2022, while the most affordable variant is listed as “after Q2 2022.”