It seems that Valve may be looking into creating a handheld category with more devices like the upcoming Steam Deck. In a conversation with PC Gamer, Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer spoke about how the company intends to make more products in the line and hopes that other manufacturers will also follow suit with their own versions of it.
"We are hopeful that this category becomes an actual category where there are multiple choices within it. We intend to continue making devices in this product line,” he said “But we also think it makes sense for other people to fill this space. So, if we're right about that, then there will be more choices within the category, where other manufacturers are participating, making handheld PC gaming units themselves, and calling them something else."
RELATED: The Steam Deck Won’t Kill The Nintendo Switch
Coomer claims that while Valve is leading the way, it’s encouraging other manufacturers to join in on the category and create their own versions of the Steam Deck. There could be various permutations and combinations to this. While some manufacturers could focus on screen size, others could focus on battery life. A third could even use their own software, while another could revamp the controller scheme.
"Somebody might want to, for example, make a version of this highly tuned for long battery life and streaming games from another PC,” continued Coomer. “Which is a pretty interesting product. And, you know, it's just one version that we're not planning to do right away, that somebody else might want to… Lower cost, higher battery, very different architecturally, technically."
The Steam Deck started off as a mixture of some of Valve’s earlier projects, Steam Link and the Steam Controller to be precise. “At the time, we were like 'you know, we could just take the Steam Link hardware, put it in a Steam Controller, make the screen show the Link thing,'" said Valve designer Scott Dalton in an interview.
According to Dalton, Valve always wanted to create something like the Steam Deck, even way back in the early 2010’s. However, PC technology hadn't progressed to the point where they could run actual PC games on a handheld device locally.
NEXT: Steam Deck Might Be Great For Today's Games, But Can It Carry You Into The Future?