Steam Deck: Valve Explains How it Learned from Past Mistakes

[Music] we started uh as a software gaming company and then steam software company we wanted to make steam uh libraries for people more valuable wanted to make their games more valuable wanted to make them possible to play in more places at more times and so we actually did start out by working with other companies and seeing what we could make happen through partnerships but it became clear you know we started prototyping and more and more we started just creating devices to solve problems for customers ourselves and bringing them to market and really steam deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work you know steam link has proven really valuable in just establishing what it means to stream games from pcs the steam controller was really valuable it just taught us a lot about what's necessary and valuable to a customer so all those earlier products really feel like they've informed this one earlier instantiations of prototypes that we built in-house didn't really have the capability that steam deck has to play the latest aaa games at really their default full fidelity settings and really doing that with the you know the cpu and gpu power that is here just wasn't wasn't quite possible before so we prototyped it had that idea and this is the moment where we felt like doing it with this you know in a battery-powered package in this form factor was finally possible prior today to to right now like every everything would have either been underpowered or unwieldy uh and only now has the technology gotten to a point where or does fit and it's actually a really similar uh story to our vr story as well like vr is something that valve had always been interested in for a while but it was only until what five six years ago that computers got good enough that they could be performant and people wouldn't get sick while they're in vr so it's a it's a really similar hardware story where we have the idea that technology wasn't quite there yet until it was and then now we're able to make this thing from those early stages we realized it was kind of part partially a hardware problem and partially a software problem so we started looking at you know how do we what what parts of this puzzle do we need to fill in and i mean i think very early on we were talking with hardware partners wondering if you know they were going to fill some part of this and more and more just became kind of clear like the more of this we're doing internally the more we can kind of make a complete package and so we slowly started spinning that up we've thought from the beginning that we should really run our hardware business in a similar way to what we do in software and that really is to treat it as a carrier of i mean conceptually just of value so we update all of our hardware uh pieces you know this this is sort of obvious because it's a pc that steam deck is something that of course will receive all the updates that we make to steam on any platform we'll show up here but in the past you know a controller or a streaming device isn't something that you would necessarily think should receive regular software updates but treating each device that we've shipped so far as a as a vehicle that we can update and add more value to over time uh it's definitely something that helped inform our understanding like we wouldn't have learned as much from shipping uh you know the controller or or steam link or even steam machines as we as we did by treating them all like a service and and delivering more value over time back when we were first working on the steam controller and the steam link we had we were both working on those at the same time but the very early versions of the steam controller had a small screen in the middle of it with the idea that it would be a programmable screen which eventually became you know we realized we could do all the same sort of sorts of things on the touch pads themselves at the time we were like you know we could just take steam link hardware put it in a steam controller and make the screen show the link thing and you know of course there's all these other technical hurdles at the time and everything and we knew we wanted to actually be able to run things locally on the device but there was like that that far back we were actually talking about that sort of thing as like that could be a thing um and so we started prototyping eventually yeah we did head down all these paths and everything and it's only recently that we've kind of crossed this sort of tipping point where the actual hardware to run full-blown pc games in this sort of form factor has really gotten the point where we felt like it was really there i mean when we say culmination we really mean like it's not only the culmination of like the hardware that we built but also the experience that our team members uh gained while making hardware products so uh yeah like i said the speakers are taken directly from all of our audio work with the index over ear speakers all the controllers i mean we've made controllers now for a while from the steam controller to the index controller now to this pioneering a bunch of stuff with capacitive touch and track pads and gyros and haptics like all of it is stuff that we've done before and we're just drawing on all that uh prior experience to to make this device as good as we can make it on the software side there's been a bunch of things that have just been an active development for a long time now uh many years so like you know between the the input part of it the streaming part the um the proton part of it like all bringing all those things together where they all again started hitting these crucial sort of inflection points of like okay they're finally there where this can all actually work um it kind of took a little while to to get all of the pieces fully in the same place but you know we've sort of seen it on the horizon for a while and we've been just actively working towards it so it's pretty exciting to see it all finally coming together yeah [Music] it was really important for us uh to be able to talk directly to developers and say hey look the steam deck runs your game and you don't have to port there was always kind of this classic chicken and egg problem with this steam machine of the content being there of like you know we were trying to get into oh games on linux but then you know you had to have this this crucial amount to actually get over this hump but then without the user base and everything and you get into this bad cycle and uh you know i think proton was what that led us to down this path of proton where now there's all these games that actually run and so you you've sort of crossed over that hump and you're on the good side of it and it's like okay things just run here now and everything's happy right so um it was a sort of a thing we had to figure out and work out how to get there steam machines was a really good idea the operating system wasn't quite there that the number of games that you could play on the system wasn't quite there and really we've looked at a lot of what we learned as boxes that we needed to check if we were ever going to talk to customers again about that category and so we didn't really want to bring this device to customers until we felt it was ready and that all those boxes were checked essentially but definitely doing that you know i don't think we would have made as much progress on steam deck if we hadn't had that experience and just seeing that the games are running well and at full performance really is the thing that we're trying to focus on stories from us about how hey everything is going to be fine wouldn't wouldn't suffice so we didn't want to really come out and tell a story like that until this device was far enough along that all those problems we could put aside and just show people the device running like you said we're not just a software company we're a company that makes games or a company that makes software and we run steam and we're a company that makes hardware and by having all of those people under the same roof talking to each other collaborating it just makes all of the products much [Music] better you

Channel: IGN

Views: 275,476

Keywords: Electronic Arts, IGN, Interview, Mac, Nuclear Monkey Software, PC, PS3, Portal 2, Shooter, Valve, Xbox 360, steam deck, steam machine, steam controller, gabe newell, valve, valve software, steamos, steam software, linux, steam linux, steam deck linux, steam deck os, steam link, ign first

Id: tjIstaOdELE

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021