Valve's handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, was announced last week. Due to its portability and similar design, the Steam Deck is billed by fans and critics as the rival to the Nintendo Switch. With the comparisons made between Valve and Nintendo's systems abundant, fans raised concern about the Steam Deck's thumbsticks being susceptible to drifting. Fortunately, Valve hardware engineers were quick to assure fans that drifting will not be an issue on this new handheld.

Thumbstick drifting, or more commonly known as Joy-Con Drifting when referring to the Switch, is a hardware problem that has plagued fans of Nintendo's console. The analog sticks of a controller would send out signals to the console, causing random movement or input commands, even if the sticks aren't being moved physically. This problem is still occurring to this day, with even the new Switch OLED being susceptible to Joy-Con Drift. When asked about the Steam Deck possibly experiencing the same issue, Valve said it was looking to avoid this issue altogether.

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When IGN had reached out to Valve for a first look at the specs of the Steam Deck, the design team was asked if the possibility of drifting was on their minds during the design phase. Yazan Aldehayyat, one of the engineers for the Steam Deck, was confident to put those fears to rest. "We've done a ton of testing on reliability, on all fronts really – and all inputs and different environmental factors and all that kind of stuff," he replied. "I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it's going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this."

With this statement in mind, a lot of testing had been done to ensure that the Steam Deck's analog sticks won't suffer the same fate of the Joy-Cons. John Ikeda, the designer of the Steam Deck, added that careful selection of parts were chosen when building the portable PC. "We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either."

This handheld gaming PC is looking quite promising for the future of Valve. With the ability to play any game from Steam's massive library anywhere, it's shaping up to be a rival to the Nintendo Switch. That being said, for fans looking to get their hands on this handheld, the Steam Deck is already sold out. Even with preventative measures by Valve, the Steam Deck has been scalped online before its release, too.

The Steam Deck will be available in December 2021.

MORE: Steam Deck Vs. Switch OLED Model: Which Should You Buy This Holiday Season?

Source: IGN