Ahead of the official announcement that the Steam Deck would be arriving in Australia, I had the chance to talk to Steam Deck Designers Lawrence Yang and Jay Shaw as well as Hardware Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat about the arrival, why it took so long and what it means for the future.
Obviously, my first question had to be about why the Steam Deck took so long to come to Australia and why now was the right time. It was fairly clear that the team wanted to get this right from day one including bringing the same line-up that’s available in other parts of the world.
“Australia was always on our list and had to make sure from a certification standpoint and the answer is really boring. It just took until now to get everything lined up, so we needed to have logistics and shipping and a third-party logistics partner and all of that lined up before we could ship officially here. and now we can. If it could have been sooner, it would have been sooner” said Yang.
Naturally, I next wanted to know about if the intention was to always sell it through Steam as previously Valve has partnered with retailers such as EB Games to bring products such as the Valve Index to Australia and it was pretty clear that the team wanted to do this correctly the first time for future hardware.
@shannongrixti The Steam Deck is finally coming to Australia and here’s a quick look at the gorgeous 1TB OLED model #SteamDeck #SteamDeckAustralia #SteamDeckOLED #Tech #Steam #Valve
“We wanted to be able to sell it through Steam. And part of that is that we’re hoping that the investment we put into the infrastructure would allow us to sell future hardware in Australia much faster. We just want to do it once and do it correctly and pave the way for future things.” said Aldehayyat.
“Now that Australia is part of our hardware shipping regions, now that we’re all set up, it’ll be for all of our future hardware as well.” continued Yang.
Australia has been known to have some differences when it comes to selling product at retail so I wanted to know why it did take so long to come dow nunder.
“it’s not super exciting or novel. It’s mostly like we had some financial due diligence to do just to make sure that from a duties and tax and everything standpoint that we’re set up to be able to legally operate and sell hardware here. And then once that was done, it’s finding a partner to warehouse, receive, ship, take returns, ship to all of our other, like between our factory and the customer, and get all that set up and tested.” said Yang.
“And even more boring details, like the warehouse, the partner that we found here, is like their system is set up slightly differently. So we had some work on our side to plumb things through so that if you order on Steam, it’ll go through and the order shows up in the right way. Not super exciting.” continued Yang.
Whilst we’ve seen a huge influx of PC handhelds since the Steam Deck released some years ago, the one thing that still stands above is the overall user experience and how good games run as well as the battery life which is still well ahead so I wanted to know a little bit more about that.
“I think the biggest thing is the tight relationship the hardware and the software guys have. We do a lot of testing and optimising and also our relationship with AMD. Since we have a custom chip, we have a lot of levers we can pull and a lot of very specific changes we can ask for. We really do own the entire stack all the way down to the firmware, to the software, which is something I think is unique about Valve and Steam Deck, but kind of hard to emulate, for sure.
The hardware is also still being improved as well with Valve continually pushing out updates that bring major improvements to the hardware, for instance the upcoming 3.6 update that will improve the battery life of Steam Deck LCD by 10-15%.
“We are continuously investing in, even, like, first-generation Steam Deck LCD. So we’re constantly pushing software updates, firmware updates, all the improvements that we’re able to get out of the old OLED, we always try to port it back to the LCD. So we have SteamOS 3.6 coming out soon. It’s going to have, depending on this game and depending on this scenario, like 10 to 15% extra battery life for LCD. said Aldehayyat
And there’s also more changes coming up that I think it’s a little too early to speak about, but I think battery life is not something we feel like we’ll ever be done with. We’re going to constantly be trying to improve that because we think it’s going to carry forward to future models also.” continued Aldehayyat.
I wanted to ask about other launchers on Steam Deck as that launchers like Xbox Game Pass feel like the only reason that people may be tempted away from the Steam Deck.
” So Game Pass is interesting. We have a good relationship with Microsoft and they took steps to make sure that Xbox Game Pass via web is as good an experience as they could make it.They made tutorials and stuff for that. We really want people to be able to treat a Steam Deck like a PC. And so we offer the desktop side. We add features so that you can add games to Steam and you take advantage of Proton, so you can run Windows executables through Proton. So we do what we can to stay out of the way and let people do what they need to do. I think that’s where we are right now.” said yang.
Lastly, I wanted to know how far and wide the vision is for Steam Deck, as Valve has released a lot of hardware in the past that has released to varying degrees of success, but we haven’t often seen follow-up iterations, and it’s very clear that this is different.
“We’re working on future generations of this. Steam Deck is kind of the culmination of everything we learned making hardware up to that point with Steam Controller, Steam Machines, Valve Index and Steam Link And so we took all of those things that we learned and said, OK, here’s Steam Deck as one package. And in the same token, we’re going to take the learnings we have from Steam Deck and move it forward to future new hardware as well. So we have things that we’re not talking about today.” said Yang.
The Steam Deck is launching in Australia in November starting at $649 for the 256GB LCD version with the OLED 512GB version costing $899 and the 1TB OLED version costing $1,049. You can find out more information HERE.
