Valve On Growing Army Of Steam Deck Rivals: The More The Merrier
If Valve is sweating the increased competition in the handheld PC gaming space that it played a huge role in popularizing with the Steam Deck, the company isn't showing it. And if taking Valve at its word, it welcomes all newcomers to the space with open arms. This is made evident in a blog post titled, "Steam Annual Summary: 2023," in which Valve touches on a number of subjects, including the rise of Steam Deck rivals.
"The more the merrier," Valve states while giving a shout out to several competing models, including the ASUS ROG Ally, OneXPlayer OneXFly, and Ayaneo Air. From Valve's vantage point, its rivals also introduced "amazing hardware last year," noting that "several other companies have sized the same opportunity to serve users with high-powered on-the-go gaming PCs."
"All these choices provide users with a bunch of options and price points for portable PC gaming, and reward the investments game devs are making to support better gamepad input and smaller screen sizes. We hope to see even more of these handheld PCs in 2024," Valve states.
While such an outlook would be somewhat unusual in certain categories and situations—remember when LG threw shade at Samsung's OLED TVs?—it's not all that surprising to see Valve welcome more competition. After all, Valve's bread and butter is its digital distribution platform, and the more hardware devices there are to tap into it, the more it stands to gain.
We've also seen Valve take a similar stance in the past, albeit with less success than the Steam Deck. Notable, its Steam Machines initiative was an effort to get OEMs and hardware vendors to build out small form factor gaming PCs that ran on SteamOS. Valve's own Steam Machine served as the blueprint, similar to how Microsoft approached (and continues to approach) its 2-in-1 Surface lineup.
The Steam Deck is seeing much more success, somewhat following in the footsteps of the Nintendo Switch, but for PC games. And just as Nintendo is planning a Switch successor, Valve has mentioned on multiple occasions that there are plans to launch future iterations of the Steam Deck.
While we're still waiting for a Steam Deck 2, Valve did release a Steam Deck OLED last year. In addition to the display panel upgrade (7.4-inch OLED versus 7-inch LCD), the OLED model also sports a die-shrunk SoC, twice the amount of storage on the top model (1TB versus 512GB), a beefier battery with up to 50% longer run time, and an upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E (from Wi-Fi 5).
It will be interesting to see what developments take place as we get deeper into 2024. In particular, we're curious to see what kind of impact Intel's Meteor Lake platform has on the landscape, with Intel and its partners like MSI taking notice of the handheld segment.
