One of the biggest questions we’ve had about Steam Deck is how much playtime we’ll get from its 40 Wh battery. And, for people who would rather stream their Steam games from their gaming PC rather than play them locally from the handheld console’s SSD, we’ve got some great news for you. On a trip to Valve headquarters to see the Steam Deck in person, the developer gave us a pretty impressive number.
Valve’s Greg Coomer tells us that you can “play something like 8 hours of Death Stranding, or a high performance game, on this device if you stream it rather than playing it locally.”
In previous interviews, Valve said you could expect 2-8 hours of battery life on Steam Deck, depending on gameplay and settings, using the example of Portal 2 running for 5-6 hours when set to 30fps. .
“At the same time, we’re trying to give people options,” designer Tucker Spofford tells us. “Because if you’re 30,000 feet away on a plane and you probably won’t be able to stream Death Stranding over Gogo Wi-Fi. Well, you can still play it. And the same purchase you made on Steam in two places. “
It looks like if you want to get the most out of the Steam Deck’s battery life, streaming your games from your gaming PC might be the best way right now. Another plus is that it allows users who might have purchased the lower storage capacity Steam Deck to stream games from their library that they would otherwise not have room on their device.
Valve allowing customers to play their Steam games the way they want was a central theme in many of the conversations we’ve had with them, along with the lessons learned from Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, and the Steam Controller.
“So a lot of it was about creating a piece of hardware that could have all of these things in one place,” Coomer explains. “Just like a PC gaming experience, where you can customize what you get out of it, we’ve tried to put in enough types of inputs and ways to play and make it all really easy to navigate. use, so that everyone can find a comfortable way to play the game they want to play. “
Valve also told us that it intends to continue making devices in the same vein as Steam Deck, so the idea of a cheaper streaming-only device isn’t too far-fetched. For now, however, let’s hope Valve can deliver the units due on this holiday before announcing new benchmarks.
