Steam Pal? Steam Deck!
We all saw it coming, now it's here. Well not quite yet... but I reserved one.
Valve has been making great contributions to Linux and helping adoption, this
is just another great example of that with whatever the heck this thing is!
I did back the Steam Controller when it originally came out, but I have been
slacking in terms of supporting it.
Steam Deck will at least give me an incentive to make sure that controller
support will come and be solid. It's something I have promised before...
and broke many times. I'm sorry, it's not high up on the list of demanded
features. But now I've got real incentive to make our PC games play really
well with the control setup of at least one piece of hardware.
We cannot really link against Steam Input. It's a GPL thing. However we'll
target SDL2's input stuff heavily for Steam releases and their client will
just gracefully deal with that. I suggest you do the same.
But besides this, the biggest news to me were those that Valve was working with
the anti-cheat devs to get the Proton situation fixed.
This will MASSIVELY help adoption of Steam on Linux. What more excuses could
possibly throw at this issue now? "It just doesn't feel right?" come on now!
I am not going to even comment about the specs, they're more than enough
for a totally decent hardware target. The other portable system (Switch)
has some beautiful games on it, as well as some not-so beautiful ones -
but I'd overall say that this is more or less a case of difficult ports.
The Steam Deck obviously blows those out of the water, no contest.
The biggest pro for me, which is also why I did not get a Switch, is
because I am done with building game libraries. I like the PC and how it's
a platform that moves along, and so do my games with it. That's also why
I got an Xbox Series X - I don't want to rebuy videogames.
I guess I'm excited because this seems like a sensible hardware target too.
There's lots of things to be excited about I think.
- Marco