Valve made an ad for the Steam Deck

Valve's YouTube channel has been updated for the first time this year with a trailer for the Steam Deck. The minute-long advertisement calls it "the most powerful gaming handheld in the world" and emphasizes that it offers "portable gaming without compromise", highlighting features like "cloud saves, Steam chat, and more".

Seeing Ghostrunner, Prey, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Death Stranding, Control, Slay the Spire, and The Ascent running smoothly on Valve's device makes it look like a tempting proposition. Personally, the promise of being able to play my entire Steam library on a handheld makes me realize how much I prefer mouse-and-keyboard controls. Heck, I play Hades with mouse and keyboard, it's great for the Infernal Arms. Maybe the Steam Deck's touchscreen and trackpad would change my mind?

The ad finishes with a call to reserve a Steam Deck now. If you do, don't expect to receive one by the end of the year despite the declaration that it "Starts shipping December 2021". Depending which model you order, any Steam Deck reserved now is likely to arrive at some point in 2022.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.