It’s been a month since Valve started shipping its sought-after handheld system, Steam Deck, and to celebrate, the company wants you to know exactly how far the system – and its games – have come, including updates on its Deck Verified program and ongoing efforts with Microsoft to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to the mobile platform, too.
“We started shipping Steam Deck just one month ago, and it’s been a huge thrill seeing it out in the wild in players’ hands,” Valve explained in a new blog. An accompanying video can be viewed below, too:
“One of our favourite things about that is finally getting to hear from you about your experience using Steam Deck. This first month has given us a chance to start collecting your feedback as we continue our work to make Deck better in the months and years to come.”
The update confirmed that now over 2000 games have been checked and confirmed as Deck Verified or Playable, with Valve promising that it’s “going to continue charging through the Steam catalogue” whilst “listening carefully to customer feedback in this space[…] to make sure the Deck Verified program is doing its job”.
The team is also working to improve the Steam Store and make it “more responsive and snappier”, whilst the fight to get anti-cheat technology onto the Deck – making more titles available – continues, too.
The update also refers to recent changes to a new Microsoft Edge for Linux beta that now permits the browser to run Xbox Cloud Gaming and stream Game Pass games on Steam Deck, and also touched on new “ways to improve battery life for Steam Deck”.
“We find that depending on what you’re doing, you can expect between 2 and 8 hours of gameplay, but if you want to optimise for battery life even further there are additional options. In the past month, we added the ability to reduce your framerate allll the way down to 15 fps (this setting works great for visual novels, puzzles and a lot of simulation games). And for those who love to tinker, we’ve made TDP (processor power), GPU Clock control, and FSR (screen scaling) settings available to optimize power even further,” Valve explained.
The company also recently revealed it is “ramping up Steam Deck shipments” now we are into the second quarter of the year.
“Welcome to Q2! We’ve just sent out the first set of order emails to Q2 reservers (in order of reservation time),” the Valve team tweeted earlier this week. “Starting today we’re ramping up Steam Deck shipments and will be sending more order availability emails every week. Sometimes even twice a week!”
