Valve has made a nice little booklet to pair with the Steam Deck. The handheld device is celebrating its launch in a handful of Asian territories with the booklet designed to help consumers understand what the product exactly is and the company behind the tech. It seems Steam wanted a new way to stress that its "hardware is designed to enable you to do things we haven’t thought of yet." Curious.
The book is available in English but is mostly designed to show off Valve as a company to new markets. The Steam Deck is about to launch in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong so the booklet is available in Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese. Although you can see the booklet online right now, it's intended to be handed out as a physical product at the Tokyo Game Show in Japan next month. If you could pick me up one while you're there, that would be grand, ta.
The book has a few topics it covers. The first is about Valve's philosophy on product creation and making its "customers happy". The second is Steam's history before rolling into the Steam Deck's history and why it is what it is. Then there is a section on working with Komodo, the company helping Valve launch the product in these new regions. Oh and it also wants you to know how pretty it thinks the Steam Deck is with a lot of pictures.
This sort of practice, I think, feels pretty formal and quite polite. I can't ever imagine Valve doing this in the West as Steam is such a synonymous name with gaming that it doesn't need any formal introduction to anyone in games. So to have a booklet to make sure people know Valve is a dependable, upstanding gaming citizen is rather amusing, but certainly quite informative. It'll be interesting to see how the Deck performs in its new regions post-release.
