Our Eyes are Glued to Valve Steam Deck Prototypes

Pierre-Loup Griffais Press members saw nearly a dozen Valve Steam Deck prototypes during the console’s East Asian launch event. These prototypes date back to mid-2019 and feature a wide range of design quirks that we would love to see in a next-generation portable console. Photos of the prototype Steam Decks were shared on Twitter by Pierre-Loup Griffis, a Valve’s Steam Deck coder. According to Griffiths, the earliest prototype models were made by hand before the project entered the early stages of mass production. As part of the Asia launch press event, we made the design lab into a showroom of development history. My favorite is the playable prototypes: bootable Deck family tree from mid-2019 to now, from a couple of hand-built units onto gradual mass production. Moreover, Sony Launches Lighter PS5 Model, Now Available for Gamers The early Steam Deck designs look like a Nintendo Switch combined with a Steam Controller. They’re relatively small and use two circular touchpads instead of square-shaped touchpads. Instead of a typical D-pad, they have four analog directional buttons and are completely flat—no hand grips. Valve added a bit of girth to the Steam Deck to improve ergonomics, increase hardware performance, and use more significant components. Early Steam Deck prototypes use slower CPUs than the final design, and their joysticks are tiny. The best part is that they all still boot, an exciting reminder of how far things have come since. This one has a Picasso APU, at about half of the GPU power of the last Deck. The flatter ergo was an exciting experiment that taught us about comfort. But we can’t get over how sleek some of these prototypes look. They’re reminiscent of the PS Vita and seem much more portable than the final Steam Deck design. That said, competing products like the Aya Neo use a sleek design language but fail to match the Steam Deck’s specs. Valve made an intelligent compromise when it adopted the big chunky Steam Deck design we know today. We hope that new technology allows Valve to get the best of both worlds in future Steam Deck models. A second-generation Steam Deck is in the cards, according to Valve. But a release date is unknown; we don’t expect a new Steam Deck to come anytime soon. Furthermore, Valve still hasn’t finished fulfilling orders for the first-gen Steam Deck—why would it rush into the second generation?