Valve wants to improve its portable PC by giving it stronger components, allowing the Steam Deck to become an even more robust machine.
“That’s the great thing about the PC market, right? It just continues. A year from now, AMD is going to have better parts. All the component suppliers will either expand supply capacity, expand performance, or reduce costs. So, we’re going to ride that as hard as we can,” Gabe Newell, Valve’s president, told IGN in a new interview. He added that the company was surprised how the most popular model was the most expensive, 650-dollar version!
“We don’t expect it to [increase in price]. Part of what you do with pricing is make a promise to customers. I don’t see us changing. The most significant thing on the pricing side is that far more people are buying the most expensive SKU than we expected. That tells us that we should continue to look at higher-end offerings as well, but we wouldn’t expect to be adjusting the SKU pricing. […]
Clearly, given the actual behaviour of people ordering the device, what they’re saying is, “Can you put more stuff in? Can you give us more storage? Can you give us more performance?” The signal right now is “Can you give us more?” not “Can you make it cheaper?” Newell added.
He told PCGamer that Valve has no plans to create a Steam Pass, a subscription service similarly to Microsoft’s Game Pass: “I don’t think it’s something that we think we need to do ourselves, building a subscription service at this time, but for their customers, it’s a popular option, and we’d be more than happy to work with them to get that on Steam.” In other words, he doesn’t rule out Microsoft offering it on their platform. It happened before: in 2020, EA Play joined Steam.
The Steam Deck isn’t ready for Game Pass just yet. Yesterday, on February 25, Valve and AMD were working to finalize driver compatibility for installing Windows on it. Shortly, we might get the chance to not only use the Linux-based SteamOS but use a dual boot method to put Windows 11 on it and access Game Pass content that way.
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