Valve has said that any repairs needed on a players’ Steam Deck should be handled by the professionals.
Last October, Valve shared a video detailing how to safely open and exchange the thumbsticks and SSD in the Steam Deck, but in a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais has warned people off DIY repairs.
“At the end of the day, it’s a PC that you own, and so we were very cognisant of that fact that people wanted to have all the data on what’s in there,” Griffais said. “But we recommend repairs are left to pros or returned to Valve for anything that goes wrong, if that comes up.”
“We recognise that there’s a big desire for people to be able to upgrade their PCs and we looked at it really hard, but at the end of the day, the goal of having the portability and the handheld form factor was pretty at odds with a lot of that. So we got in what we could, and we made it as modular as possible, given the goal of being portable, but it’s definitely a big tradeoff that we had to walk there,” he added.
Luckily the Steam Deck is purely modular, allowing you to swap in new joystick easily if one ever comes out to be faulty or develops drift. You can buy them from Valve and they're easy to install. Nintendo and PlayStation need to get serious about right to repair like Valve pic.twitter.com/N73fG3Edfp
— Usama Javaid
(@JavaidUsama) March 1, 2022
His comments come as players reported issues with joystick drift on the Steam Deck.
Valve has since confirmed the problems were caused by a “deadzone calibration” bug and the company has already shipped a fix.
Nintendo Switch users have been plagued by similar issues of drift, when the controls register movements the player didn’t actually make, since the release of that console.
Nintendo Of America’s president Doug Bowser has promised “continuous improvements” and the company is offering free repairs on all Joy-Cons affected. However some users have taken things into their own hands, with one YouTuber using nothing more than a bit of cardboard to fix the problem.
In other news, according to Destiny 2 developer Bungie, the game won’t run on the Steam Deck and any players attempting to get it working on the handheld console will be met with a ban.
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