Finalized Steam Deck Dev Kit Photos Show How Handheld Will Arrive To Customers
Whatever you think about Valve, Steam, and their effects on PC gaming, you have to admit that the Steam Deck is a pretty cool piece of kit. If nothing else, Valve deserves respect for trying to carve out a game-console-like niche within the world of PC gaming, without shipping a locked-down, totally-proprietary device. The Steam Deck runs a fairly-standard form of Linux, and supposedly you could even slap Windows on it, if you wanted to neuter its unique functionality.
If you, like this writer, are chomping at the bit for more Steam Deck news, Valve has posted a quick update showing the final prototype version of the hardware, known as the "Design Validation" stage, as well as a preliminary version of the packaging that it'll be wearing when it eventually shows up at your door. The photo set also includes a couple of pictures of the carrying case included for the two lower-end models.
There's not much to say about the packaging itself, although a cute companion cube from the game Portal makes an appearance on the "this side up" indicator. Examples of places to use the Steam Deck are printed on the underside of the lid in a number of languages—we spotted English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian at a glance. Comically, "on the toilet" is one of the most visible suggestions.
As Valve mentioned in its Steamworks Virtual Conference, Steam Deck development kits are just Steam Deck prototypes, with no additional hardware. Valve says it will be shipping the next wave of devkits out to developers "very soon," and that said devkits will be based on this DV model. After this design, only "minor" additional changes will be made before the final product ships to consumers.
