Today is the day, Valve's gaming handheld finally goes on sale in Australia and we spoke to the designers at MIGW 2024.
It took a couple of years but the Steam Deck is officially available today for players in Australia. The reason? Well why don't we let designers Lawrence Yang, Jay Shaw and Yazan Aldehayyat explain.
Gianni sat down with Valve's handheld makers in Melbourne to learn how player behaviour has changed with the launch of the portable computer, what to expect from the next generation hardware, and what they are working on next.
You can add order a Steam Deck in Australia today , head to the Steam website to grab yours now.
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SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Courtney Smith, Adam Christou and Chris Button. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Hello and welcome to Lightmap SIFTER's interview podcast my name is Gianni Di Giovanni. Yes today is the day, you might have been waiting for a long time for this but the Steam Deck is officially available in Australia including that fancy white limited edition model.
It all goes on sale locally after being sort of a grey market import for a number of years a couple of the SIFTER team already have them in their hot little hands and today you can get yours, and at Melbourne International Games Week I had the honour to sit down with three of the designers of the Steam Deck, Jay Shaw, Lawerence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat to find exactly what took so long.
Jay Shaw: A great question. Lawrence, why don't you take this one?
Lawrence Yang: I'll take, uh, yeah.
Gianni Di Giovanni: A good question indeed, but before we jump into that lets find out what's been making the news this week on Walkthrough SIFTER's weekly news podcast.
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Gianni Di Giovanni: What's taken so long?
Lawrence Yang: Um, very boring answer, but that's just how long it took to line everything up. So, uh, from the beginning we wanted to ship in Australia. We got certified and everything got ready for it, but, uh, doing the financial due diligence and then setting up all the logistics, like finding a 3PL partner and place the warehouse and like lining up all the shipping and everything. It just took that long to get everything sorted and tested. And now we're finally able to ship here. And yeah, that's, that's it. That's just what took so long. What's good though, is now that we've done it, any future hardware products will be able to ship because we've already done all of the legwork and got the infrastructure in place.
Yazan Aldehayyat: I don't think, I was going to point out that, um, unlike previous valve hardware, like the steam, the index, for example, we're not going through a distributor. So we are going to get sell directly, uh, ship directly to customer, to people, get units back. So that was part of why it took so much longer is because we didn't want to take the easier route of the distributor. We just wanted to have a direct relationship with customers here.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Okay. So what have you learned about how players play games since the steam deck has been out? What's changed and what is that sort of like, uh, you know, in terms of player demographics, what are they playing? All of that sort of thing. What have you learned from this time?
Yazan Aldehayyat: Um, we, we, well, after the Steam Dck, we, they're playing more games now they're playing for more time. And I think that makes sense, right? Like the fact that you could play in anywhere. Let's you play more games, like let's you get, make a dent in your back catalogue. But I also like to point out that if you actually look at the top games on the steam deck and the top games on Steam, there's a lot of overlap there. So it's not like they're playing special games or whatever. It's just like, if you have a good game, it's going to do well on steam, it's going to do well on a steam deck. Uh, in some ways people are just kind of using a steam deck in a way to extend the amount of time they're able to play their favourite games.
Lawrence Yang: Yeah.
Jay Shaw: And we've all got our own kind of personal, uh, a lot of times we'll talk internally about, oh, this game is really, really, really good on deck. This is like our favourite deck game right now. But I think that has a lot to do with, you know, this is a game that I can play in, you know, bite-sized chunks. Uh, when I'm just, I want to like hop on the bus or I'm in a, you know, I've got 20 minutes. I want to play this game for 20 minutes. That's a lot of times what'll, you know, we see a lot of people doing that kind of play, but also, I don't know. A lot of people are hanging out playing hours of, you know, Elden Ring and Cyberpunk.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Um, I'm really curious. You've got one of the biggest player bases in the world. You often do surveys and look at what people are hardware wise were playing. And I'm just interested over the last couple of years with the steam deck and all those sorts of things, knowing that they kind of extending what they're doing. But what are players behaviour doing over the last, is there any interesting trends or anything like that you can kind of share or, you know, how people sticking back to the things they've loved 10 years ago? How does it all kind of work?
Lawrence Yang: Uh, well, anecdotally, yeah, people are going back into their back catalogue a lot more and playing games that they bought a long time ago, but never touched just because now they have a way to play away from their computer. Um, also anecdotally, like, at least for me, having a deck is really been great because like, even though I have a nice PC where I can play PC games, I just don't want to sit at a computer again after I've been sitting at a computer all day at work. So now, now I'm able to play games on the couch and, uh, it's just great. I also have two young kids. The other thing we've heard anecdotally is like, I'm, I'm a dad and I like to play games and now I can play games again. Yeah. Yassan's a new dad too. Yes.
Yazan Aldehayyat: Yes. I'm still the, I'm not quite at the be able to play video game anytime I want phase, but I'm more on the catch up on sleep phase still, but hopefully soon, hopefully soon. Yeah.
Jay Shaw: But yeah, as far as actual, you know, when we, when we do, because we have what you're referring to as the hardware survey, um, where we kind of learn how people play, um, it is as diverse as you could possibly imagine. I mean, it's everything from, you know, there are tons of steam users who have top of the line, you know, 4090 rigs and all that type of stuff. And, you know, they're not going anywhere. They seem to be going really strong and like they're, you know, they're, they're playing state of the art stuff. And then, you know, we have people kind of in the middle all the way down to, you know, folks playing on much, much older hardware. Um, and it's, you know, it's, it's really, really spread out. I mean, that's one of the nice things about steam is that, you know, you can, whatever you've got to play on, there's something for you to play for sure.
Lawrence Yang: Yeah. We, we have seen like, uh, for the most part, people who buy a steam deck already have a PC and already have a steam account. So they're just extending their existing library and have a new place to play it. We did run some numbers a while back about like how, how, like the time split between like your PC and your steam deck. And we saw something like 40% of people who got a steam deck ended up spending more time on their steam deck playing video game, playing PC games than, than on their desktop, which we thought was kind of interesting. So it's like, the reason we wanted to make a steam deck was to, to make customers happy, give them more ways to play their PC games in the way that they want to. And we found that it's, it's been sticky. Like people have found that the steam deck has been giving them more reasons, more ways to play games in different places. That's a success in our minds.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Um, I mean, it's interesting. You had an earlier experiment where you're doing steam machines. Uh, you had third party partners and all that sort of thing. Um, tell me why you brought it in house for this one here and, and, and what that sort of gives you and allows you to sort of iterate on.
Lawrence Yang: Yeah. So, um, yeah, so steam deck, uh, is, we like to call it, it's like the culmination of all of our hardware experience over the years. So, uh, we made steam controller that was designed and manufactured by us. Steam machines, we, we worked with third party partners and then we provided software, learned a lot from that one. Uh, and then HTC Vive, we partnered with HTC and then Valve Index we made ourselves and also manufactured. So through this line, we've learned a lot about, um, ergonomics, controllers, input, displays, um, like chip design, all of, all of the things that led to steam deck being able to happen. And one thing that we learned along the way is that when we can make it ourselves, you know, it's just, it unlocks a lot of doors. It makes a lot of things easier at the same time as making them harder. But once you own the full stack from the, from the steam client to the operating system, to the firmware, to the hardware, uh, we can be much more nimble and considered and intentional about the decisions we make at a product, at a product level. And instead of, for instance, waiting for someone else to make a change or talking to them. So that was like, Hey, we'd really like to make this feature, but it means you have to do this other thing to support it. You know, it just slows things down. And then sometimes it makes it impossible. So the more that we did it in-house, uh, we think the better product we will be able to make. I
Yazan Aldehayyat: mean, the nimble thing is really the crucial part. I would say that the, the biggest thing about having a valve on the entire stack was being able to prototype and iterate really quickly. I mean, um, we wanted to ship Steam. I mean, I think we've mentioned this before, but steam deck was not something that we decided on and what shipped a year later, two years later, we were really are working on it for probably five years. And, uh, through that journey, there's probably like 10 different prototypes that some companies would call release candidates to production kind of a thing. Uh, and we wouldn't have been able to do that if we'd not owned the entire stack. So that's really the biggest one.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Um, are you going to open up steamOS to other platforms? Is that something you're planning on doing? I know you kind of already mentioned.
Lawrence Yang: We've announced that we really want steamOS to be available for other hardware beyond just our own. That's still something we're working on. Uh, nothing to announce today, but there you'll, you'll be seeing some news soon.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Is it, is it possible that, you know, we might kind of go full circle and people will make a steam machine that sits underneath there. That would
Lawrence Yang: be great. That'd be awesome. Yeah. I think that, um, while we have our own opinion and our own point of view on like hardware running steamOS and steam, you know, uh, this isn't going to be the be all end all for, for everything. And for more people to be able to make different kinds of hardware that run this, run this operating system and run steam, uh, it's just better for everyone.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Um, you've done a bit of a revamp with the OLED and sort of like mid products, not completely different, but it's, it's got a little bit of difference. And I'm just wondering from what people you've been playing, you've been testing, it's been hands for, for quite a number of years now. Um, what sort of things are you thinking about, about sort of subsequent hardware?
Lawrence Yang: Um, for steam deck or just for steam deck, I guess. Okay. Uh, I mean, we have, we have, we have a list of things that we want to improve and it's like, it's the list that I think everyone would imagine would be. It's like, okay. You know, more, uh, more perf like play, play more demanding games at a higher resolution, uh, display, keep the battery life good as good or better if possible. Um, those are the three big ones I would say. I mean, yeah.
Yazan Aldehayyat: I mean, like, obviously we, uh, don't have any like concrete things to talk about, but yeah. I mean, like we, uh, we don't feel like, so as I said, I think we said before, it was like our intention with the steam deck was that it allows you to play your games. In more places. And while we think that has the ability to do that has improved significantly, the steam deck, it's still not a solved problem, right? Like we want to make it more portable. Um, like there's all kinds of things that, uh, that, that we would like to improve. Uh, but all of that is just being discussed and worked on and defined right now. Like, I don't think that we know exactly what we try to do.
Lawrence Yang: And then as far as other hardware goes, like, just like I said, a lot of hardware, um, products, shipping, and experience led to steam deck, what we learned by making steam deck and shipping it and getting feedback is also probably going to lead to other types of hardware as well. So we have other things that we're working on that we're excited about that we're not going to talk about today. Very
Gianni Di Giovanni: cool. Um, does it make it easier? And I guess you're talking to developers all around to have like one set of hardware to aim for, you know, it's much like the iPhone in many aspects. You've got one bit of hardware, you control everything up and down. Um, you know, tell me about the conversations you have with developers about this sort of hardware.
Lawrence Yang: Uh, yeah, I mean, I think devs, devs like to have a single target spec. Uh, it makes it a lot easier for them. Um, and, uh, it also lets us do things like the deck verified program where it's like, okay, here's your game. Here's our piece of hardware. We test to see how well it runs on our piece of hardware. And then we can let customers know how well the hardware, uh, how well the game will run.
Jay Shaw: Um, That said, if it is, if it's on deck and it plays really well on deck, um, what you can kind of, you know, presume there is that you've made a game that is going to be compatible with a large amount of hardware, right? So like you've, you've made it so that it's navigable with the D pad, which is, which is always nice. You've made it so that it, you know, perf is okay. And you can at least have a setting that works really well. Um, you know, on something that isn't a 40, 90 rig, right? Um, so we do find that, um, anytime a developer is targeting steam deck, they are targeting well beyond steam deck into a whole bunch of areas, whether it's, you know, other handhelds or laptops or whatever else. Um, so that is kind of a nice benefit of, you know, you're not just making it for steam deck. You're actually just making it for, you know, PCs period. So,
Gianni Di Giovanni: um, personally, tell me how you got to this point each individually. Like what was your career history into this point?
Jay Shaw: Oh, cool. Here's the weird one.
Jay Shaw: Um, all right. So, um, prior to valve, um, I was actually a movie poster designer. Um, and I worked at a company called Mondo and Alamo draft house, which is a theatre chain, um, in the States. Uh, so I had absolutely no experience whatsoever working in technology, uh, gaming or anything else. Um, the Lord knows why valve wanted to talk to me at all, but I'm glad they did. And, uh, yeah, about six years ago, um, I came in for an interview. Uh, people thought I could contribute. So I've come in. Um, so yeah, my, my history to here has been, has been weird. Um, but I'm a designer now at valve and I've, you know, uh, working on a bunch of different teams. So, yeah.
Lawrence Yang: Uh, I guess slightly more traditional route before valve. I was at Apple, uh, as a designer on the human interface design team, which was Johnny Ives team working on like iOS and OS 10 and all those things. And, um, after being at Apple for eight years, I was, I was looking for something new and then valve called and I was like, that's definitely something new. That's very different. So then I came to valve. Uh, I worked on VR stuff for awhile. I worked on a game, I worked on steam and then now I'm working on steam deck.
Yazan Aldehayyat: And I was previously valve. I was at Microsoft. I was on the surface team. I don't know if you know surface, right? So I was the, you know, working on the motherboard design side of things. And then, yeah, I wanted to try this new things. I came to valve primarily to do VR. So I worked on the index and then, yeah, we're out when index sort of started winding, like the development of it was starting to wind down. I guess we, a bunch of us started to look at what's next and I guess steam deck kind of got born from that.
Jay Shaw: One of these things is not like the other.
Gianni Di Giovanni: What do you predict is going to come out of the next five to 10 years of games? Where are we going?
Lawrence Yang: That's a really good question. I think we'll have different answers, but like, there's a bunch of interesting technologies that are happening right now that we have no idea what the effect will be. So like generative AI right now is like a thing that's happening. And a lot of people are trying to figure out how they're going to use it. Um, it's something that we actually looked at at valve as like, how are we going to, um, what is, what is our relationship with that going to be not only for ourselves and our own content and our own games, but also like for developers coming to steam as a platform. So we've started taking some steps there. Like we had an announcement a while ago, like months ago about like how if you use generative AI in your game, you have to disclose it. And then, uh, customers will know about it. And there's like, there's a whole system around that. Uh, we've yet to see really any change from that, that we can see. I'm sure that a lot of game developers are starting to use it for at the very least for like concepting and things like that. Um, but I don't know, that stuff is kind of like weirdly strange and scary. Uh, but I'm sure it will have some sort of impact. Uh, I don't know. There's other, there's a lot of other weird and interesting technologies that are happening. Like brain computer interfaces and virtual reality is still a thing that a lot of people are looking at. So I'm, I'm curious. I'm, I'm interested to see what will happen.
Jay Shaw: Um, yeah, I do have a different answer. Mine's dumb. I don't know enough about video games, but I will say this. Um, I have loved, loved, loved watching, um, watching smaller games, uh, just kind of flourish. Um, and I guess that's like, you know, I'm a little biased because, uh, we are working on steam. That's where we get to see a lot of that, but it's the, you know, the Vampire Survivors and the Balatro and the UFO 50 and the whatever else. I mean, there's just, it seems like every couple of weeks, there's some new, wonderfully innovative, beautiful game that comes out made by like three people. And it just, it's like, to me, at least that tends to be a better experience than a lot of the triple-A stuff happening. So my hope is that in the next five to 10 years, there's just more of that. It seems like we're, we're right on the cusp of like a really, really cool kind of, I don't know, surge and like smaller indie games. And I love it.
Yazan Aldehayyat: Uh, I don't know if I have a good answer. I mean, I guess, uh, the one thing that maybe I should say is, is I feel like, uh, PC gaming specifically still has a bright future. Like it's amazing to me how much is growing despite being already very large. And so like, I guess the only thing I could say is I think there's gonna be way more games on PC, better games, both small and big. So it's, it's gonna be pretty exciting.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Yeah. It's, uh, how many, how many Steam Decks are in Australia already? Do you know?
Jay Shaw: Um, more than two. I have no idea. I mean, do we know?
Lawrence Yang: Yeah. Uh, well we have, we have a few here in PAX, uh, that,
Gianni Di Giovanni: but they've been, they've kind of been a gray import thing for a while. You know what I mean?
Jay Shaw: : Like we don't, yeah. It's not that we would, we don't really know. I mean, to be totally honest, like we don't, you know, we're as much a technology company as we are. Um, we don't tend to track these things down and try to, you know, figure it out. But I mean, anecdotally, we have learned from a lot of customers that there are a bunch of Steam Decks here and there are more people who want them than, you know, there are Steam Decks in this, in the country yet. But yeah, we have no idea. I mean, I don't think we've really attempted to,
Lawrence Yang: we just learned that. We knew from a while back that Australia was our next region that we wanted to ship to. Uh, and we know that we're, you know, we're letting people down by making them have to go to a gray market, uh, source to get a Steamvac. So we're glad that we can at least, um, make that not necessary anymore.
Gianni Di Giovanni: Is New Zealand far behind?
Lawrence Yang: No news about New Zealand. Uh, it's, it would be the same kind of logistical challenge. Uh, we, we learned that it's a different country and it's in a different place than Australia. So, um,
Gianni Di Giovanni: what, what is the biggest misconception about the Steam Deck in your opinion?
Lawrence Yang: Misconception. I've got one. I've got one.
Jay Shaw: Yeah. What's yours?
Jay Shaw: Here you go. Okay, cool. Um, biggest misconception I would say is that people tend to say, oh, I think it's, it's going to be heavy. And it turns out, I'm, I mean, this isn't like, I'm not just saying, you know, objectively it's not heavy cause heavy is, you know, relative, but I think anytime somebody picks one up, they go, oh, this is considerably lighter than I was led to believe. And I don't know what led them to believe it. I mean, maybe it's our marketing images are just feeling very heavy or something, but it's really not a very heavy device. We find it to be ergonomically, you know, it's, it's comfortable.
Lawrence Yang: Um, I think there's less misconceptions now than there were before. Um, but early, I think early on there was some, uh, people were worried about what games could run on it. Uh, and I think that hopefully now that's not a concern anymore because we've, I think from our official verification score, which is not total, it doesn't include all the games that are on steam, but over 16,000 games are playable or verified on steam deck. Uh, and yeah, you can play almost any game on steam deck now. It's pretty great.
Yazan Aldehayyat: Yeah, I guess. I mean, I, I'm not sure if that's the actual misconception, but I feel like if you, uh, can I go on the internet and look up steam deck, you'll see a very big modding community. And so I think there's some people who believe that like, oh yeah, I have to mod my steam deck or I have to install this third party software or launcher or mods or whatever. And the true answer is like, you could do nothing. You can just boot it up, download games and play. Uh, and it's actually really easy to use. So, uh, if you're, you know, looking up online, don't get intimidated by the kind of things that people do. Like you really do not need to do any of that. It will just work. Um, and just go get freaky and weird. Have fun. So that's, that's probably one thing I'd like to point out.
Gianni Di Giovanni: There's definitely needs a few more RGB lights in there. Cause that seems to be the mod that everyone puts in there.
Lawrence Yang: I love that. So people doing that mod themselves. So like we don't have to, we don't need to help them.
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Gianni Di Giovanni: That's Jay Shaw, Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat from Valve out in Australia for the launch of the Steam Deck shown off at Melbourne International Games Week. Did you get a chance to play it there are you keen to put in an order?
Love to hear from you, you can get in touch with us on the SIFTER discord that's sifter.com.au/discord join in thereand tell us what you're been playing and tell us what you've ordered if you're grabbing a Steam Deck and check out some of our other great content on our website, that's sifter.com.au.
SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Courtney Smith, Adam Christou and Chris Button. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER.
This Lighmap SIFTER's interview podcast. Thanks to Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER's podcasts.
That's all for now, until next time have fun.
