As first developers got their Steam Deck dev kits, they started to share their impressions of Valve’s portable PC. And most reactions are positive, with games industry professionals praising the device’s performance.
According to Valve, dev kits of Steam Deck are “functionally identical” to what it will ship to customers. So here are the first impressions of developers who managed to test the portable console.
No More Robots founder Mike Rose tested a few games of the publisher, including Descenders, Here’s Yes, Your Grace, and Not Tonight 2. “Honestly a bit of a game-changer for me, might end up making my Switch a bit redundant outside of Nintendo first party,” he wrote.
Valve sent over a Steam Deck (thanks lovelies!!) so I’ve been going through our games and checking whether they work without any additional dev on our part
Descenders: Works flawlessly!
In fact it runs *incredibly* well. With full Ultra gfx on, I get around 50-60fps pic.twitter.com/RjT3Q233lX
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) September 21, 2021
And here’s a game we currently have in development (Not Tonight 2) already running near-perfectly — just need to deal with input and some resolution stuff
Honestly a bit of a game-changer for me, might end up making my Switch a bit redundant outside of Nintendo first party pic.twitter.com/xdXx5zFMjp
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) September 21, 2021
“[My friend] showed me our card games playing on it. They look great and play well, but I might want to make some hitbox enhancements for touchscreen play,” indie developer Jake Birkett noted.
A friend has already got a SteamDeck (come on @valvesoftware, where’s mine? I’m a legit indie dev with a track record). Anyway, they showed me our card games playing on it. They look great and play well, but I might want to make some hitbox enhancements for touchscreen play.
— Jake Birkett – Veteran Indie (@GreyAlien) September 22, 2021
One developer also launched The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Steam Deck, sharing his impressions on ResetEra: “It runs at native 1280×800, autodetects High settings via the launcher, and runs at 60fps. After having played Skyrim and the two expansions on Switch, this is a bit of a revelation seeing it run on a handheld device so smoothly.”
Positech Games founder Cliff Harris also praised Steam Deck’s performance, saying that sound was “really good” and the framerate in Democracy 4 was “perfect.”
First impressions are that this is really really cool. And Democracy 4 seems to run ok on it out-of-the-box, although the steam paddle-finger doodads work 1000x better than the thumbsticks for my game. The sound is REALLY good. Framerate is perfect. #democracy4 #steamdeck pic.twitter.com/AOenhHOuiQ
— cliffski (@cliffski) September 21, 2021
Valve opened requests for Steam Deck dev kits earlier this month. Last week, SteamDB creator Pavel Djundki also shared a few screenshots of the console’s interface.