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Valve says it has done lots of reliability testing for Steam Deck thumbsticks

Valve says it has done lots of reliability testing for Steam Deck thumbsticks

PC giant Valve has said that it has done "a ton" of work to make sure that its Steam Deck thumbsticks don't drift.

Speaking to IGN, hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayya said that it was important for the company that its newly-announced console was reliably made. This comes in the wake of both Nintendo and Microsoft hardware issues with their controllers, namely problems with the thumbstick input that result in them "drifting".

"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," Aldehayyat said.

"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."

Steam Deck designer John Ikeda added: "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."

Steam Deck was announced on Friday, July 16th, with pre-orders for the hardware being the third highest-purchased item on Steam for the week.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.