Steam Deck Prides Itself on 'Reparability' and Won't Do Yearly Re-Releases, Says Engineers

The Steam Deck continues to be one of the most praised PC hardware releases in… well, ever, and the engineers want you to enjoy it for as long as possible. In a recent interview with Reviews.org, Steam Deck developers Lawrence Yang and Yazan Aldehayyat not only aren’t planning to try to replace your Steam Deck every single year, but they actually don’t mind at all if you get hands-on trying to fix yours—or even toy with it. 

When asked about modability, Yang explained that they actually intended on having the Steam Deck be extremely repairable.

“[T]he Steam Deck is so repairable, it’s so easy to take apart," Yang explained. "When we made the Steam Deck OLED, one of the things that we improved between LCD and OLED is the repairability. Even the little things. You take the back off and all the screws are the same, so you don’t have to remember these two were here and these six are in other places. And just making bits and pieces of the inside easier to get to.” 

It should be no shock that as a result, the Steam Deck is extremely moddable, but it apparently caught Yang by surprise, who said “the popularity of the modding community was not something we expected.” 

“It has been nuts to see how many people are willing to actually take the entire thing apart, including the display so they can do a shell swap. That’s dedication and also very scary.” 

This a huge shift away from other corporate attempts to make repairability nigh-impossible. Companies like Apple essentially mandate you use their parts, and they and others will consider your hardware an unrepairable brick if there’s even a hint that you tried to open it without their blessing. Such philosophies also make modding, even for cosmetic purposes, a hobby difficult for anyone not willing to pick up multiple pieces of hardware. 

In a similar ‘we’re not trying to brick your expensive hardware’ vein, the devs also say they’re avoiding yearly updated re-releases for the Steam Deck, calling it “unfair” to the consumers . Still, an update is possible—if it’s fair to the consumers to ask them to spend that much money again. 

“There’s no reason to do that,” said Yang. “And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.” 

In short, they’re trying to justify your next $400+ purchase of a shiny, new portable PC. It seems like a fair approach. 

Ta, Reviews.org.