Valve is confident Steam Deck won't have stick drift issues
The team has worked to ensure the Steam Deck has quality parts and that they're tested under various conditions.
Stick drift on thumbsticks is a problem that has plagued the industry in recent years. With Valve about to step into the handheld market with its Steam Deck, a device that has thumbsticks, users are no doubt curious what the company has done to ensure stick drift isn’t going to be an issue. As it turns out, the problem of stick drift – and the quality of the parts overall – has been on Valve’s mind throughout the process and it’s confident the Steam Deck won’t have stick drift woes.
In an interview with IGN, hardware engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat, and Steam Deck designer, John Ikeda, shed some light on stick drift and the decision-making process for the parts based on those technical problems.
According to Aldehayyat, the team has done a significant amount of testing on reliability, with different inputs and environments. However, no amount of testing in a laboratory will be able to account for every situation in the real-world. Aldehayyat continues, “Obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with [the Steam Deck].”
It seems as if the engineers have worked hard to ensure quality parts make it into the final build. Ikeda touches on this, “We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either."
At the end of the day, technology will no doubt wear down and break, but it’s good to know that Valve is working to avoid stick drift issues with its Steam Deck. It certainly wouldn’t want to find itself in the situation Nintendo faces with class action lawsuits over Joy-Con drifting. Be sure to keep it locked to Shacknews for the latest on the Steam Deck, which you can pre-order now.
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replySam Chandler posted a new article, Valve is confident Steam Deck won't have stick drift issues
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I'm super excited about this. Can't help it.
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Please correct me. Part of why the Switch is a success is Nintendo publish 1st party games designed to work on the Switch with all the tricks and compromises to produce the best fidelity and frame rates.
The Steamdeck is just gong to run native PC games to a lower resolution, so you're going to have to play around the graphics settings extensively to tune graphic settings to get best results on a small screen. And it won't be just resolution but tuning things like filtering, shadow detail and it will rely on drivers being continually supported for a linux OS?
I dunno it seems a bit of a nightmare to me and makes me think it might've been better for Sony or Xbox to produce a handhold.-
It's a custom APU they ordered from AMD - the driver support would be included and they've confirmed they've worked with them closely on that to do things you just can't do on Windows right now, like suspend/resume for games.
I also suspect you'll see pre-set configurations for many games as they have a fixed hardware config and they reiterated over and over how important the "pick up and play" console like experience is for them.-
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Not when you compare it to how Sony or MS get third parties to support their consoles. Has been very few big third party VR games. And yet we're expecting third parties to relying third parties to almost exclusively be the ones that are supporting the Steamdeck.
Don't get me wrong it's still an interesting niche product if you're just playing native PC games on it, I just don't think people realize how it's going to be a hassle configuring games on it if it's not supported correctly.
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They've released a good product and not tied it behind a walled garden which is amazing. But they haven't thrown their money behind it to third parties. Why don't Valve do things like giving discounts to developer store costs if you release a VR version of your game, or a steamdeck version.
They take big cuts from the PC similar to how Sony and MS do on their products but they seem slow to throw that money back in the same way Sony or MS do.
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They did, sure. I wouldn't say that isn't a good track record, though.
That was a solid way to handle the Steam Controller - there's so much individual variation in how people are going to want that sort of thing to work.
They've also done a huge amount with SteamVR that I don't think you're giving them a ton of credit for. It's probably the VR platform with the best overall support for various hardware from different vendors that all pretty much works like native.-
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Because there is no "something that just works" when you're adapting a control mechanism to an entirely different input device.
You often can find a config that works just fine with no fuss; the community configs came pretty fast and at least for the games I tried were pretty good.
But you STILL have to learn how to use it.-
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That wasn't my experience. I was already a big picture user, maybe that makes a difference, but my experience was to click on a game in my library, tap the button for controller config, select the top configs based on number of users, tweak it, and go.
When I started from scratch it was because I wanted to try new things like building out custom pop-up menus.
I now have configs for basically all my favorite first person games that work great with it - all the Thief and Deus Ex games, System Shock 2, etc.
But the thing is that each game really does need serious consideration to make the most of. When I toggle the scope in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, it also tweaks the sensitivity for gyro aiming so I can make precise sniping shots.
There is no way to set that up in some automatic way; it requires both per-game consideration / configuration and using that config for a while to learn it.-
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Well for one, every feature of it is present in the Steam Deck, so I'm not sure I'd say they gave up on it entirely.
But as I said: it requires a learning curve. If playing first person games from the couch isn't worth that "hassle" to you, you're not going to bother with it.
The other issue is that the omission of a d-pad meant that it couldn't replace an existing controller for many people - it was asking to be a new, second (or third) device in your living room, a compliment to your existing game controllers.
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fastest MicroSD cards are "only" 100MB/s or so I believe, so any NVME drive will annihilate them in raw transfer speeds. access times are still pretty good though.
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