Nintendo Switch 'killer'? Meet the Steam Deck

Valve is after Nintendo‘s cash cow. Valve today announced a new handheld gaming system that will no doubt put pressure on the Switch, which recently got an OLED upgrade.

The Steam Deck is essentially a compact PC that runs a custom version of SteamOS to give a console-like experience and can play your entire Steam library. It’s built on Proton, a version of Linux that runs both Windows and Linux games and applications, so there’s a good chance it might be able to run the Game Pass app for PC without any issues.

Valve’s Steam Deck features dual analog sticks on either side of the 7-inch, 1,280 x 600 LCD touchscreen, plus a D-pad on the left and face buttons on the right. It also boasts two capacitive trackpads, allowing you to play games designed to be played with a mouse, and a six-axis gyroscope for motion controls.

Steam Deck hands-on video by IGN

Just below the touch-sensitive pads, you’ll find the dedicated Steam and Menu buttons, as well as dual speakers for stereo sound. Up top, you get four trigger buttons, while on the back, there are four customizable buttons on the grip — two on each side.

The Steam Deck will arrive in three different models, all of which have the same custom AMD APU inside with 16GB DDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of NVMe SSD storage for the top-of-the-line version. There shouldn’t be a power difference between the variants, but paying extra for additional and faster storage could be worth the money, since most modern games these days eat up a lot of storage.

The internal storage can’t be upgraded, but there’s an SD card slot to expand your storage space. And you can play games through the SD slot if you don’t mind them loading a bit slower than off the internal SSD.

So, how much does the Steam Deck cost?

$399 for the 64GB SSD version
$529 for the 256GB NVMe SSD version
$649 for the 512GB NVMe SSD version

Introducing Steam Deck: powerful, portable PC gaming starting at $399. Designed by Valve, powered by Steam. Shipping December 2021.

Learn more at https://t.co/ZOTx3KUCVK and reserve yours tomorrow. #SteamDeck pic.twitter.com/jcgbaKfT9c
— Steam (@Steam) July 15, 2021

You have plans of buying one?

Hopefully, retailers in the Philippines will offer the Steam Deck to their customers, but there’s no official word on that yet.

Learn About This Author

Ramon Lopez

Reviews editor: Ramon "Monch" Lopez has 16 years of professional experience creating and editing content for print and digital publications such as Yahoo. He headed the gadgets-merchandising division of one of the Philippines’ largest retail operators somewhere in between.