Online conferences and webinars have become curse words in the age of working from home, but when Valve is hosting one based on the Steam Deck portable PC, well then things are more interesting.
The Steamworks Virtual Conference: Steam Deck will take place online for one day next Friday, 12th November at 20:00 local time (that’s the CAT time zone for international readers).
Unfortunately for anyone tuning in locally the event will run for a projected five hours ending at 03:00. Those in other time zones will have a more reasonable experience, however.
Thankfully there does seem to be a chance to catch the event later as a video instead of an interactive event.
“Note: The English broadcast of this event is November 12, with localized versions released soon after,” reads the announcement.
This seems to suggest that a video, possibly with subtitles in other languages, will be made available at a later time.
The following topics will be covered by the developers who actually created the Steam Deck over at Valve:
- Steam Deck Hardware
- Development without a dev-kit
- Steam on Deck
- Proton Support
- Steam Input
- Steam Deck Verified
- APU deep dive with AMD
Worth mentioning here is the “Steam Deck Verified” portion. Recently valve launched an initiative to test every single game on Steam to provide users more information about how games will run on the handheld. Games will then be given a categorisation based on its compatibility with the Steam Deck and how well it translates to the hardware and software of the device.
Documentation for this process for publishers and developers is available but we have to imagine that some extra information will be revealed in the conference.
After each of the topics is discussed by the Steam Deck team there will be Q&A sessions.
Steamworks developer wishing to participate can do so for free and can head on over to the announcement page to set themselves a reminder. The event will take place inside of Steamworks so participants don’t need to go to any other external site.
