The Steam Workshop will remember the mods you have installed, the Steam Cloud will keep your saves synced, Steam Achievements are tracked across your profile as usual, Steam’s extensive controller customization (even in games without official controller support) is fully accessible whether you’re playing handheld or docked, Steam Remote Play will let you stream games from another computer to the Deck or vice versa, and so on and so forth. It’s easier to both search out specific games and navigate more generally, and is far closer in polish to a modern console UI than its predecessor.Įverything you’d expect from Steam is already here too. Big Picture Mode is still completely serviceable for what it needs to do, but I was struck by just how much more approachable the Steam Deck UI felt to use by comparison. That saves Valve time and effort during development, and it means it could be easier for the Steam team to justify the work spent on certain improvements or changes if those hours are doing double duty. That means where Big Picture Mode didn’t get all of Steam’s recent improvements because development couldn’t necessarily be easily shared between the two versions, the Steam Deck will naturally be able to inherit everything – and features Valve develops for the Deck will also go toward improving Steam in return. Spofford told me that “the main thing to understand is the operating system of is just Steam.” It’s been given a facelift to work better with a controller just like Big Picture, but unlike Big Picture it’s not some branched product when it comes to Valve’s backend it’s the same Steam with a different look.
It hasn’t changed visually pretty much at all, and it turns out that clunky feeling may have also been shared by Valve while working on it behind the scenes as well. But while Big Picture mode certainly makes navigating your library easier from the couch, it’s become somewhat dated and clunky since its introduction nearly a decade ago. This isn’t Valve’s first attempt to make PC gaming more accessible on controllers, with the Steam Link and Steam Big Picture mode providing a similarly console-esque interface when playing away from your desktop. To that end, the UI here is all brand new for the Deck. “They're going to have shorter game sessions and want to really get into the action quickly, so it was super important for us that you can find a game immediately – and that's games in your library, but also games that you might want to know about, things that are new to the store.”
“We really started from this idea of like, we know that people are going to be taking this device different places, they're probably going to be playing with it in different ways,” Valve designer Tucker Spofford told me.
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