It has been a big month in gaming, the release of Lost Ark saw millions of players come together for the biggest MMORPG release in quite some time and has shown the demand for these game types, and the release of Elden Ring this past weekend has shown the huge demand for a big single player game too – it stands to reason that hype around a new gaming platform would see success too. Mobile has dominated the gaming market for a long time and continues to be the future for gaming as a whole from games of change here at casinosuden.com through to the growing esports scene too – so any emergence of a new device will be met with excitement particularly in the handheld and mobile market.
The weekend saw the release of the long-anticipated Steam Deck – a portable PC that has enough hardware to run even the latest big releases and all of the features needed to keep the tech mobile friendly too, coming in at a reasonable price point with the base models touching $400 and going up from there depending on requirements for storage or a slightly different display, and having received great reviews from early looks and hands-on feeling since its release too. As a bit of an added bonus for some lucky fans of the new tech too, a limited hand delivery offering was provided by the head of Valve, Gabe Newell, who had been trawling local neighborhoods to the company’s head office to give out free signed devices.
This hand delivery looks to be very limited to the Seattle area where the company is based, but for the few who did receive their devices this way, it’s a nice touch on top of getting the device timely and ready for the weekend of gaming with big new titles like Elden Ring. It has also been a great piece of marketing, not that it was needed so much with how well the device has been received already and had already developed a huge amount of hype from the embargoes lifting and showing many of the anticipated features really living up to expectation.
Initial reviews have already started to come back from the device too for what may look to be changed in the future – most of the attention has been focused on keyboard options as much like console and similar devices the on screen keyboards don’t cut it and can often lead to frustrations – some have nodded to Steam Link to connect to smartphones to use a mobile keyboard to type, where other suggestions have looked more towards shortcuts on the device to help out here.
Other suggestions have yet to gain much traction but given it is only the first week of release for the device, feedback is still coming in with different suggestions – the keyboard idea may eventually fade away in favor of more practical choices, or with the hope to see different connectivity features or other physical upgrades that could be made to the device itself.
Not is without its issues though and despite a fantastic launch some flags were raised – notably with one specific game – Destiny 2. Players who had attempted to play the game on the device were often returned to their game library instead, with suggestions that this may have been due to the anti-cheat the game uses and a warning followed from Bungie that if players tried to bypass this, they may risk facing an account ban for doing so – quite the step to take, particularly for a device that could be more impactful on the games success for a handheld audience too.
It may also lead to questions for other games that rely on an external anti-cheat to launch too which is becoming more common, if Destiny 2 is already running into issues using the BattlEye system, will the same be true for similar platforms such as Easy Anti-cheat too? And will it be something resolved in the future to ensure all players are able to access games they’ve paid for on the platform, or will this be a persistent issue that plagues the device for some time yet? For now it’ll be better for players to err on the side of caution and to steer clear of any games that have a reliance on anti-cheat software.
Whilst it won’t be a piece of tech that takes away from the huge mobile market, it does show there is still interest in the space for developing portable hardware in a similar vein to what Nintendo was able to do with its Switch device – it also shows further change as a platform that lends itself to a very large digital library of games across multiple platforms, something that has become less common over time as single use copies and digital libraries have been limited in the past.
