The Switch will soon have a new rival.

Valve, the publisher of cult games like

Counter Strike

,

Half-Life

and

Portal

, also owner of the Steam games store, has just announced its first portable console, the Steam Deck.

Console in quotes because it is actually more of a laptop that we would have managed to fit into the case of a Switch.

Valve's console is capable of running virtually any PC game referenced on Steam.

Heavy under the hood

It will be possible to play titles like

Death Stranding

,

Control

,

Doom Eternal

or

Hades on it

. In theory, Valve's handheld game console is therefore much more powerful than Nintendo's.

We find under its hood a quad-core processor and 16 GB of RAM.

The screen measures 7 ″ but displays a modest resolution (1200 × 780).

The display will therefore be reduced to 720p.

Buyers will have the choice between three models: the model with 64 GB of storage at 419 euros, the model with 256 GB of storage at 549 euros and the model with 512 GB of storage at 679 euros.

If the cheapest model more or less lines up with the price of the Switch, prices soar for other models.

With the 64 GB model, players may also quickly be limited in space if they play anything other than independent titles.

Note, however, that the small console supports microSD cards for memory expansion.

A serious competitor

Like the Switch, the Steam Deck can be used in nomadic mode and in docked mode. The autonomy will revolve around 5 to 7 hours of nomadic play. In docked mode it will be possible to use it with a keyboard and a mouse. The console will then turn into a real workstation under Linux.

The concept is very appealing on paper.

With its huge catalog of games, Steam presents itself as a serious competitor for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft in the console market, but its very limited distribution network, its lack of experience in marketing products, the relatively high price of its console and its unattractive design may work against it.

If the American publisher has succeeded in publishing games, it has multiplied the fiascos in the hardware, with its Steam machines but also its Steam Controller, long mocked for its ridiculous design.

Pre-orders opened on July 16 on the Valve website.

The console will be available at the same time in the US, UK and Europe.

If you are interested, IGN has already made a very nice video presentation of the machine, to find here.

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