Valve has been credited with changing the gaming industry on several occasions. From the massively influential Half-Life to the release of Steam, the company has essentially been a trailblazer since its inception. In recent years, the Steam Deck has been yet another game changer, igniting a gaming handheld craze that's already influencing PC gaming. Now with a full SteamOS release on the horizon, there are a lot of reasons to believe that things will change for the better yet again.

4 We might get cheaper gaming handhelds

No Windows fees

Part of the cost of a Windows-based gaming handheld goes into acquiring the license for the operating system. It might not be a sizable cost, but it contributes to it overall. While Valve hasn't publicly stated whether SteamOS will cost manufacturers money to license, SteamOS was previously available for free for Steam Machines. Given that Valve is also clearly trying to push people away from relying on Windows, and given the active development being put into Proton, it's not out of the realm of possibility that SteamOS will be available for free on gaming handhelds, or at least cheaper than the competition.

However, there's another reason why gaming handhelds might get cheaper, too. The Steam Deck is a relatively underpowered handheld when compared to the likes of the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, but it still manages to hold its own. That's thanks to the optimizations Valve has made, where we've even seen titles like Elden Ring perform better under SteamOS and Proton than natively on Windows when installed with Valve's Windows drivers.

While Elden Ring still runs worse on the Steam Deck than it does on the likes of the Lenovo Legion Go, the point is that manufacturers can make cheaper handhelds that may not be as powerful but can still punch above their weight, assuming that they use SteamOS.

3 Games might be better optimized

Or at least have better quality options

There's a bit of an epidemic at the moment of games not being optimized, which results in poor performance on machines that they really shouldn't have problems with. Suppose gaming handhelds see significantly more mainstream adoption. In that case, that may force game developers to spend time optimizing games to run on weaker hardware like handhelds, as the expectation will be that they should run. When it comes to developing games for PCs in general, developers can target high-end hardware like RTX 4000 series GPUs, but it's hard to stick to that if there are a sizeable number of gaming handhelds that make up the market of consumers, too.

There's a flip side to this though in that perhaps with the state of game development being where it is already, companies might not optimize for gaming handhelds regardless. At the very least, then, it might lead to developers creating graphical presets aimed at gaming handhelds, like Cyberpunk: 2077 did with the Steam Deck. Either way, it forces the hands of developers to create an experience that at least takes into account that people may not be playing on powerful hardware.

2 Linux becomes harder to ignore

The year of gaming on Linux? Finally?

Linux has been around for decades, but in recent years it's played second-fiddle to Windows for a lot of different reasons. Valve's focus on Linux likely comes from a few places, most notably that it's an open-source platform that anyone can use, which gives the company more leeway to try and push consumers there as time goes on. It essentially protects it against Microsoft's own store while also expanding the number of platforms it targets. Plus, in the case of the Steam Deck, it makes it possible for the company to ensure that games run on its own hardware with its own software.

The downside of gaming on Linux is that there are plenty of games that simply don't work natively on it, which is where Proton comes in. It enables games to run on the operating system (flawlessly, in some cases) while still maintaining the benefits of using Linux. With anti-cheat software that runs predominantly on Windows, increased Linux adoption forces developers to either port that software to Linux as well, or innovate new anti-cheat solutions that don't rely on a kernel-level driver.

Either way, these are good changes for consumers. It gives more choices and can potentially decrease reliance on a kernel-level anti-cheat which many consumers might be uncomfortable with.

1 It can enable more couch gaming experiences

Like a Nintendo Switch, but PC

While Valve's gaming handheld is built to be used as a handheld, Valve actively supports docking the Steam Deck and using it with a PC. While other Windows-based handhelds do as well, they treat it like an external monitor, rather than the console experience that the Steam Deck provides. With SteamOS being built around those use cases, it can enable more couch gaming experiences, akin to something like the Nintendo Switch.

While there are games out there that have two-player co-op on the same machine, those are few and far between. There are games like It Takes Two that run locally but are nowhere near the ubiquity of console gaming co-op. That might change as more gaming handhelds can be used as consoles, especially if Valve's "Fremont," a rumored SteamOS console, comes to pass as well.