Will the Steam Deck be a one-off? It's hard to answer that question before the units reach the hands of early buyers, but Valve seems to have ambitions to make more handheld gaming PCs in the future without other companies rushing in. [Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer told our sister site PC Gamer, "We're hoping that this will become a real category and that there will be multiple options within it. We're going to keep making devices in this product line.

This pledge might be best taken with a pinch of salt, given the company's rocky history of supporting hardware, but at least for now the ambition is there. And the company hopes it will not be the only one producing gaming-optimized handheld PCs.

"We also think it makes sense for others to fill this space," Coomer continued. If we're right, then other manufacturers will have more options to join this category, build their own handheld PC gaming units, and call them by a different name."

Valve's desire to do this is not surprising, given that it would take pressure off the company while driving more people to Steam's storefront. However, it is less clear what other hardware developers would gain from it.

The Steam Deck's aggressive starting price of $399, which Valve president Gabe Newell previously described as "painful" but "important," is something that Valve can afford to blow on hardware because it is a "good thing" that the company has been able to do for the past few years. For Razer, Alienware, and other PC hardware makers, they have to make money on hardware alone, but with Steam Deck's highly competitive pricing, that would be a tall order.

Still, if hardware manufacturers are up to the challenge, there are many things they can do to differentiate themselves. As the following tweet indicates, reducing the size would be tempting, given that the current model outperforms the Nintendo DS and every other handheld gaming device ever made, but that only scratches the surface.

"For example, someone might want to make a highly tuned version that has a long-lasting battery and can stream games from another PC," Coomer continued, saying this is a "pretty interesting" possibility. It's a low-cost, high-battery, technically very different architecture."

It is still possible to pre-order the Steam Deck directly from Valve, but the first allocation has long since sold out and buyers will have to wait until "after Q2 2022" for the unit to arrive.