President at Valve Gabe Newell believes the Steam Deck will have the same impact on the games industry which the iPhone had on the mobile phone market. The executive said that sales of the handheld console have gotten off to a strong start, noting how demand has been “a lot higher than expected.”
The news comes from a recent interview in which Newell talks to IGN about the past, present, and future of the Steam Deck. His comments are both insightful and surprising.
When it comes to the origins of the Steam Deck, Newell traced these back to the earliest days of gaming. "I think every gamer has wanted this for a really long time,” he remarked. “I mean, anytime you start playing PC games, about a month after you do it, you say ‘where's my mobile version of this?' Right? I mean, projects that try to do this go back all the way to the 1990s.” The executive went on to say that “what's really different this time is we finally reached the point where you have the power per watt that really lets you do this."
The most interesting of his comments concern where he sees the handheld console going in the future. Newell seems to think the Steam Deck is going to become the next iPhone. "There was before and after the iPhone,” he noted. “In terms of a general mobile computing device, that was the transition point.” He continued, saying that “right now, we've reached the point where you have a mobile gaming device that can pretty much do anything and it only gets better from here on out for PC gamers."
While there were comparable devices at the time, the iPhone forever changed how people spend their spare time, revolutionizing the mobile phone market in the process. Newell believes the same will be said about the Steam Deck at some point in the very near future. We already have the Switch. But we now have the Steam Deck.
Newell said that when its innovations are finally applied across the games industry, the release of the Steam Deck will come to be seen as a major turning point. “We're shipping our hardware, but I think some of the key problems that we're solving are going to apply generally to lots of hardware manufacturers in the PC space.” He said that “I think that this is a permanent extension of the PC gaming marketplace into these kinds of solutions."
Steam Deck launched to favorable reviews across the board on February 25, 2022. The handheld console was in fact so well received that Valve has apparently put together plans for a more powerful version. Newell apparently has so much faith in his creation that he has even been spotted personally delivering the Steam Deck in Seattle.