Valve are taking no risks on the Steam Deck and stick drift
Fewer reasons to hit the Deck
Controller stick drift has been big news for the past several years, leading to lawsuits against manufacturers. It's a persistent issue on Nintendo Switch's Joy Con's - my own Switch suffers from it. In a short post on IGN today, Valve said they didn't want to take any risks with stick drift for their just-announced Steam Deck.
IGN asked Valve about stick drift as part of their ongoing Steam Deck reveal. In response, designer John Ikeda said that they've chosen parts with reliability in mind. "We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right?" said Ikeda. "We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either."
Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat also underlined that they've done a lot of reliability testing on the machine. "I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it's going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this," he said.
Company-likes-own-product shocker, but it's useful to see a manufacturer sticking their hand in the air and say that they don't think they're going to have a particularly common hardware issue.
The Steam Deck was announced last week and has us all aflutter. It's a handheld gaming PC with Steam built-in, and it'll run almost everything a regular PC would. That includes games with mods. You can stick Windows on there, and other game stores even.
Personally, I'm ambivalent. I placed my £4 pre-order for the full fat version, but I can't decide if it's perfect or terrible. Yes, I want to play Hades while lying on my couch and without having to buy it again on the Switch. But no, I don't particularly want to play a AAA experience designed for a big screen on a heavy, 7-inch, 720p display with a 2 hour battery life. Also it looks like a Game Gear.