The Steam Deck handheld may not be a massive hardware success sales wise, but Valve’s beloved portable has still managed to change the industry and lead into a new slew of products for the Steam company. While a second Steam Deck is still years away, Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine brings the wonders of SteamOS to the living room.
There are still major issues with SteamOS right now, mostly tied to the way it handles flushing shaders after a game’s uninstall, and the fact that many multiplayer games are unplayable due to anti-cheat—something Valve hopes developers will fix in the coming future.
Another annoyance is the way in which Steam Deck specifically handles updates. Just last night, Valve added Display-Off Downloads to the handheld, allowing the handheld to “complete all active downloads” in a low-power mode. However, Valve wants to be able to massively improve this in the future.
Speaking to The Verge, Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explained that the company wants to support automatic updates for players who keep their Steam Decks docked, allowing gamers to have their games and OS kept up-to-date without having to manually flag updates.
This is a feature that Valve’s new Steam Machine will have by default, but Aldehayyat explains that it’s not an easy addition to retrofit into the handheld. Right now, the Deck isn’t designed to stay in a low-power state and check for updates, something that smartphones do constantly, but it could be added.
“That is something we are really interested in supporting,” the hardware engineer explained, but teased that there could be some annoying issues tied to that. For example, if the Wi-Fi drops out in this low-power state, the Steam Deck would need to know to actively keep attempting to reconnect, and what happens if Steam itself goes down?
There’s also the issue of a core OS update failing while in a low-power docked mode. Smartphones cleverly have multiple partitions to store an old update that can be restored if an update fails. Steam Deck also does this, but users have to manually go into boot mode to “downgrade” their OS to a previous version if an update fails. With an always-updating Steam Deck, Valve needs to find a way to make sure the Deck does this automatically to not impede the user experience.
It’s a lot to plan for, and it shows how much work actually goes in to making a modern device usable to modern users. While the Steam Deck is a great device, it’s nowhere near as casual friendly as a phone or a Nintendo Switch, and a lot of work actually goes into making sure that (almost) every problem you could have can be automatically solved without walking into a repair shop or spending hours scrolling YouTube tutorials.
