One of the biggest problems with the various handhelds is the steam deck managed to hit a perfect storm of a setup.

The hardware is excellent. It’s robust, and powerful enough to do the job, while being extremely power efficient.

The software is also slick as hell. Steam have leveraged their massive experience with game hosting to produce an easy to use, highly flexible setup. They also haven’t locked it down. The fact you can drop to an arch desktop is just insane to me.

Proton has come on leaps and bounds. There seems to be very few games that you can’t play on the deck, outside of those with external anti-cheat.

Integration into steam means you have access to your previous library. You don’t need to buy all your games again, it’s all there, ready to play.

Lastly you have the trust that steam has garnered. They have show time and again that they are in it for the long haul, not a quick buck. That is no small thing, in the PC gaming community. Too many of us have been burnt again and again.

Matching this with a new handheld sets the bar stupidly high. Surpassing it to displace an entrenched system is even harder.

Is the market that big? We already have quite a few options. But doesn’t matter for us that much. More options is probably good.