Steam Deck won’t have Nintendo Switch-like drift, says Valve

Steam Deck won't have Nintendo Switch-like migrate, says Valve

(Image credit: Valve)

Valve's Steam Deck looks a lot like a Nintendo Switch at a glance, which may cause nasty flashbacks for anybody who has had to deal with the dreaded 'Joy-Con drift' issue that became so severe it resulted in several lawsuits. In brusque, deposition of the counterpart stick leads to 'phantom movements' where players motility without any user presses.

Apparently, Valve has considered this problem when designing the Steam Deck, and was quite clear that reliability was a prime business organisation when asked about the potential for problems by IGN.

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"We've washed a ton of testing on reliability, on all fronts really – and all inputs and different environmental factors and all that kind of stuff," said hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat. "I mean, manifestly every part volition fail at some point, but we think people volition be very satisfied and happy with this," he added.

Designer John Ikeda backed this up, calculation that Valve "purposely picked something that nosotros knew the performance of" considering "we didn't want to take a adventure on that."

"I'm sure our customers didn't want us to accept a hazard on that either," he added.

Of course, nobody wants their hardware to fail, simply Valve would actually exist in a far worse position than Nintendo if the Steam Deck's analogue sticks were prone to drifting, or another kind of controller breakage.

While the Nintendo Switch lets you just disconnect a faulty Joy-Con and attach a fresh i in its identify, the Steam Deck is a single unit of measurement more akin to the Switch Low-cal: if repairs were required on a stick, the whole unit would need to be shipped back to Valve. Add in the fact that, for now, the Steam Deck is not a mass-marketplace product with plenty of spare parts to go around, and y'all tin see why Valve wanted to ensure this problem was mitigated as much as possible ahead of release.

A more pressing consequence for Valve is ensuring complete compatibility with Steam OS and its Proton software. In item, at that place's a concern that games with anti-cheat software currently don't work via Proton, and that includes big names similar Destiny 2, Apex Legends and PUBG.

Information technology'due south unsurprising, therefore, that Valve is working hard to set this problem ahead of units arriving in early adopters' hands in December. "For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions past working straight with the vendors," the company writes.

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Freelance correspondent Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are establish all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably observe him tackling his e'er-growing games backlog. Or, more likely, playing Spelunky for the millionth time.