Steam Deck designers promise they included as much battery as physically possible

Steam Deck designers Greg Coomer and Jay Shaw recently spoke with PC Gamer about the console and one of its most talked about features, the battery life.

According to the recent iFixit Steam Deck teardown video, the battery is a 40Wh (5,313mAh) and boasts an ‘L’-shaped design, which allows it to fit in an otherwise awkward position. When asked about why that was the case Coomer responded: “We basically put as much battery as we possibly could into a device of this size, given everything else that has to fit into it.”

Shaw further explained what offering a larger battery would have done for the system overall design. “I mean, then we're into the conversation of having to change the actual physical specs of the device. And then that gets into a lot of ergonomic compromises that we really didn't want to make, because chiefly we really want people to be comfortable playing this device for as long as they want to.”

Considering that other options are already available for extending battery life, such as messing around with graphical settings or that Variable Rate Shading (VRS) will be making its way to the SteamOS 3.0 around May or June, players have plenty of ways to combat the portable’s limitations.

The duo also revealed during the interview that there were never any plans to offer different tiers based on battery life. “We mostly talked about other things. We considered memory, but we didn't really have an array of APUs to choose from.”

The Steam Deck’s first wave was released today. Those who reserved a system will have three days to purchase from receipt of email before their pre-order is released to the next person in the pre-order queue.

Via PC Gamer