Valve plans to hold a Steam Deck virtual conference for game developers on November 12 to answer developers’ questions about the hardware, Proton and Steam Deck Verified program, and more. While the one-day event is only open to developers, their reactions to the event should help clarify some things for everyone, like how easy it is to make games fully compatible with the device and the sort of performance we can expect from it.
Each session during the conference will feature the Steam Deck team talking about “in-depth information and best practices to help you make your games a seamless experience on the Steam Deck,” according to Valve’s announcement post. The event will be held on Steamworks, Valve’s developer website. Those of us who haven’t paid the $100 entry fee to Steamworks will have to wait for this information to spread outside the platform. If the event is like other Steamworks streams, an archive will likely appear on the official YouTube page.
The deep dive on the AMD APU might give us some more insight into how powerful the Steam Deck’s custom AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 processor and graphics chip will be, and if developers are confident it’ll hit the 30 fps at 800p mark that Valve said it was aiming for with most games.
We might also learn how involved it will be for developers to get their Steam Deck Verified badges, which require games to run at native resolution, have full controller support, and for any middleware, like anti-cheat software, to run without problems.
Although Valve has released a considerable amount of information about the Steam Deck so far, the Q&A with developers will hopefully touch on areas Valve hasn’t talked about in detail yet. The first Steam Decks are expected to start shipping out in December.