Steam Deck, the new portable PC gaming system from Valve, has been out in the wild for a full day now in the hands of eager gamers. What started out with some pretty wild prototypes has led to Valve bringing out one of the best budget gaming PCs on the market, as well as an excellent handheld gaming system. Of course, no product launches to the complete accolades of all, so here are the most requested features for the Steam Deck after one day of use.
On the Steam Deck's community Steam page, so far 26 feature requests have been submitted by early users. Some of the most popular, repeated and awarded requests among the group have specifically to do with the device's keyboard options. Given how much having an easy to use keyboard can help, it makes sense. Console gaming has always been inhibited by the poor onscreen keyboard options, and PC gamers have come to expect a bit better.
Quite a few users are calling for the split trackpad typing system that the Steam Controller uses. This allowed people to use the trackpad in combination with the triggers to type, which according to comments on the Steam Deck page could be a bit of a game changer. Hopefully this is a configuration option that comes around sooner rather than later.
Others are looking for even more control over their keyboard options. Some want to be able to customise the key order manually so it works better for their language preferences, and others want to be able to manage the touchscreen bindings more completely like with the Steam Link app on a touchscreen phone. There's even mention of setting it up this way as a virtual keyboard when docked, which could be super useful.
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There are plenty of non-keyboard related suggestions too, but none with quite as much support behind them. Some other interesting ideas I hope Valve picks up include per-game performance profile options for running games. Given the Steam Deck is a portable device, being able to really turn the processing down on simpler on the go games could be a huge save to the battery life. Profiles sound like a handy way of managing this seamlessly.
Another request which seems very sensible is for after session surveys on games that aren't verified for use on the Steam Deck. Plenty of games still work, even without technically being supported and this would give the community a way to let each other know. Some games may work well in some ways and not in others, so a survey where people could communicate their experiences sounds like the best way to handle this until more games can officially move over to the platform.
Lastly, there's an upvoted request that is very close to my heart. It requests that the Steam Deck should ship to Australia. Please! That's an ask I can get behind full heartedly. Hopefully the supply will pick up as Valve has promised and we'll start to see these systems on our shores soon enough.
