Q&A GABE NEWELL
It’s about all the “issues” and “opportunities” that only become apparent once a product is in thousands of hands. About the contributions of a community willing to tinker, to figure out the best controller settings, and to solve compatibility problems on developers’ behalf. And, of course, the simple matter of discovering where people choose to spend their money.
“We thought the entry price was going to be the critical factor [for Deck’s success] but it turns out that far and away the most popular SKU is the most expensive one,” Newell says. “That’s an example of us being a little surprised by what our customers are telling us. They’re basically saying, ‘We would like an even more expensive version of this’, in terms of horsepower capabilities or whatever. You know, that’s why we always love to get something out there and ship it. Because we learn a lot from that, and it helps frame our thinking for Deck 2.”
Newell says this last bit so casually that we have to make sure we’ve heard correctly – there are already plans for a successor? “Oh, yeah. Very much so.”
If two years ago we were left with a tantalising suggestion of what might be next, this time Valve’s vision for the future seems fairly unambiguous.
Newell anticipates Deck opening up a new market, talking about it as “a permanent addition to the PC gaming ecosystem”. And he’s inviting competition: “We hope that other hardware vendors in the PC space take advantage of the work we’ve done on the software side to build similar and related devices.” Newell already knows where he wants to take things. “The first step is to let you play the great games that exist today. The second iterations are going to be more about: what are the capabilities that mobile gives us, above and beyond what you would get in a traditional desktop or laptop gaming environment?” He gives the example of computer vision, a technology with which Valve is experimenting for VR but which could be implemented in a future iteration of Deck. Of course, given how the company’s hardware team operates, the sharing is a two-way street. “One of the things [Deck] represents is battery-capable, high-performance horsepower that eventually you could use in VR applications as well,” Newell says. “You can take the PC and build something that is much more transportable. We’re not really there yet, but this is a stepping stone.”
That’s exactly what our early experiences with Deck feel like: a stepping stone to what’s next. To a more robust and feature-complete version of itself, as Valve learns from early adopters. To an eventual successor launching, if everything goes to Newell’s plan, into a marketplace of handheld PC hardware. To whatever the future of Valve is beyond the current horizon. All those things that remain, for now, just out of sight.
The top-end models of Steam Deck cost significantly more, but the 64GB base model is selling for £349. Was the device’s development aimed at a particular price point?
There are huge advantages to operating in the PC space in terms of price performance – you have so many competitors for so many components. We had pretty rigid notions of what price points we wanted to hit, and then sort of back-solved from that. And, you know, these are pretty painful price points to actually hit.
It’ll be interesting, a couple years down the road, to decide whether or not that was as important as we thought it was. Nobody gets hurt by having a great price for the device – other than, certainly, our margins.
We’ve talked about the role Deck plays in Valve’s larger strategy for hardware development, and where it might lead, but when we spoke in E344 you suggested that part of Steam Machines’ difficulties involved you treating early adopters as part of your roadmap. How have you avoided making that mistake again with Deck?
I do think we’re putting something out there that will make customers go, “Fuck yeah – this is awesome”, but we do need to be thinking longer-term. You know – about how we’re going to continue to evolve [our hardware efforts].
Does that mean that customers are going to accept something that’s any less awesome, because it’s part of the technology R&D roadmap we have, that stretches out in a bunch of different directions? No, they’re not going to say, “Oh, I’ll take your crappy product, because it makes sense for some technology roadmap”. The product itself has to kick ass. And I think it certainly does.
demonstrate hardware capabilities – did you consider developing anything similar to accompany Deck?
Yeah. I mean, we looked at it – it’s just a question of resources and time. We decided to spend more of our resources on our existing games like Dota and Counter-Strike and thinking of ways to make them better on this device. We just felt like that was more bang for our buck than building a sort of gamelet.
So we’ve gone through the benefits of Deck for Valve, and for the player – to what extent did you take game developers into account?
That was one of the very important stages internally – the developer reactions. We would go out and show people the concept and they’d say, “That sounds great”. Then we’d give them a device and they’d say, “Oh my god – I had our game up and running in a day. This is amazing compared to any other mobile gaming platform, where I’d have to invest a huge amount of time and energy. Here’s something where everything I built just works”.
The response very early on was super-enthusiastic, and really gave us the confidence that we were building something that was a useful tool. That enthusiasm was from two sources. First: “This makes my long-term life better, because when I think of mobile, I get sad” [laughs]. And then: “I want one of these myself, as a game player who happens to be a game developer. Why hasn’t somebody built one of these before?” And that helps us make some of the big commitments. We’ve ordered a lot of really expensive parts, right? There are these purchase orders that show up on my desk saying, ‘We’re going to go buy $50 million of this’. And I’m like, “Can I talk to [Unity CEO] John Riccitiello again?” And he says, “Oh, fuck yeah, go for it, you should totally do this”. OK, we’re gonna go spend a ton of money!