IGN asked Valve about stick drift as part of their ongoing Steam Deck reveal. In response, designer John Ikeda said that they’ve chosen parts with reliability in mind. “We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right?” said Ikeda. “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.” Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat also underlined that they’ve done a lot of reliability testing on the machine. “I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it’s going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this,” he said. Company-likes-own-product shocker, but it’s useful to see a manufacturer sticking their hand in the air and say that they don’t think they’re going to have a particularly common hardware issue. The Steam Deck was announced last week and has us all aflutter. It’s a handheld gaming PC with Steam built-in, and it’ll run almost everything a regular PC would. That includes games with mods. You can stick Windows on there, and other game stores even. Personally, I’m ambivalent. I placed my £4 pre-order for the full fat version, but I can’t decide if it’s perfect or terrible. Yes, I want to play Hades while lying on my couch and without having to buy it again on the Switch. But no, I don’t particularly want to play a AAA experience designed for a big screen on a heavy, 7-inch, 720p display with a 2 hour battery life. Also it looks like a Game Gear.
