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The portable Steam Deck won’t have its own exclusive games, Valve has confirmed.
In a meaty set of FAQs (opens in new tab) aimed at developers, Valve reaffirms that its Steam Deck is designed and intended to simply be a portable PC and not a completely separate platform. “No, that doesn’t make much sense to us,” Valve’s answer reads. “It’s a PC and it should just play games like a PC.”
We already knew Steam Deck won’t be compatible with every one of the Steam catalog’s zillion games, but it wasn’t completely clear whether it would ever have any exclusive games. It’s not a huge surprise that it won’t, but it’s good to have a concrete answer on the matter regardless.
In another section of the FAQ page, Valve says Steam Deck’s gyro controls will be used on a wide variety of games and calls on developers to consider the feature for their games. “They offer finer precision for people that are used to gamepad inputs, but also take the mouse paradigm from the desktop into a portable form factor,” Valve wrote. “We recommend trying out this style of input for anyone shipping a game that has player control of a camera or a cursor and seeing if it makes sense for your game.”
Steam Deck units were originally set to start shipping out this December, but a recent delay moved that window out of this year altogether. It’s now due to launch in February.
While you wait for your pre-order to arrive, you can read our Steam Deck hands-on preview to get an early taste of what the handheld is all about.
