Valve opens requests for Steam Deck devkits

Valve has posted an application form online for developers to request a Steam Deck devkit. The company says it only has a limited number of devkits and is ready to deliver them.

Steam developers can now fill out the form to request a devkit; Valve says it wants to ship the devkits ‘as soon as possible’. Interested developers should be a member of the Steamworks affiliate program. This program also allows developers to implement Steam features such as achievements and microtransactions in games. To get into this program, developers have to pay, among other things, a hundred dollars.

The Steam Deck devkit is ‘functionally’ the same as the consumer version, although there are some ‘minor’ cosmetic changes. It is not clear what changes are involved. The Steam Deck is a gaming handheld from Valve with an AMD apu with Zen 2 cores, an RDNA 2 GPU, 16GB Lpddr5 memory and SteamOS. The console will receive a touch-sensitive 7″ LCD with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels. Deliveries will start in December. The cheapest version costs 419 euros.