Gabe Newell, President and co-founder of Valve, has praised the openness that the PC ecosystem offers, referring to it as a "superpower" as compared to the consoles on the market. In an interview with IGN, Newell was discussing the Steam Deck, the company"s upcoming handheld that has been garnering a lot of interest ever since its announcement. He stated:
Our view is that the openness of the PC ecosystem is the superpower that we all collectively benefit from. So if you want to install the Epic Games Store on here, if you want to, run an Oculus Quest on it, those things are, those are all great. Those are features, right? That"s what I want to hear as a gamer.
Although Valve is the developer of Steam, other digital game distribution platforms like Epic Games Store, and such, will also be equally supported since Steam Deck is officially described by Valve itself as a "powerful handheld gaming PC".
Similarly, while the Steam Deck comes with SteamOS, you should be able to run even Windows 11 on it too, as the handheld is powered by a Zen 2-based APU and it does, on paper, fulfills the Windows 11 hardware compatibility criteria. Essentially, Newell views these as added "features" instead of nuisances.
In terms of performance, the company seems pretty upbeat on the Steam Deck as it recently stated that most of the games tested on it are achieving 30fps or more at the native 800p resolution. This is plausible since we now know that the eight RDNA 2 CUs inside the custom Steam Deck APU are fed by a decent amount of bandwidth (88 GB/s) after Valve updated the handheld"s memory specs on its official website, ... again.
Source: IGN