We've been hearing a lot about the expandable storage solutions that Valve has opted for its new Steam Deck handheld PC. A tiny slot for a micro SD card will give your Deck extra storage that's only limited by the SD card itself, and considering there are some cards with 1TB of storage, that's a lot more than you can find on even a PlayStation 5.
Of course, the question was always how well a game would run off the SD card. Valve has previously said that games will run fine off the SD card and even proven it on IGN's videos showcasing gameplay.
In the latest interview with IGN, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais details how the SD card can be used to provide your deck with a dynamically removable Steam library, letting you slot in dozens of games at a time. Right now, the only way to load games on an SD card is through the Deck itself, which means you’d have to download the game through Steam first, but that might not always be the case.
"I think that there's gonna be opportunities to build more software there,” said Griffais, “to get to a point where you can pre-load games on an SD card with a different device but we haven't really explored what could be done there. Right now everything is done from the device and it's a pretty good experience where you can just install the games the way you'd expect and load them up and it's just like if they were on internal storage.”
If there were some way to put games on an SD card that could be immediately read and installed on the Deck, that’d essentially be no different from a game cartridge, giving the Deck its own form of physical media. That’s important to some people, although one wonders just how much satisfaction you can get from “feeling” your games if they all fit onto a disc the size of your fingernail.