Valve Warns You Could Die If You Tinker With The Steam Deck

The Steam Deck is a wondrous machine, so it's only natural to satisfy the need to pries open the case and see the teeny tiny gnomes inside that make the games go. Only don't do that. Please don't do that. You might die.

While it is diminutive, it certainly packs a punch with a custom AMD APU with four-core, eight-thread CPU and an eight RDNA 2 compute units GPU. With three different versions offering increasing space on the SSD, Valve intended it to be "powerful enough to handle anything that you threw at it," be it a session of Stardew Valley, a couple of rounds of Apex Legends or settling in for the long haul climbing the seven thousand steps to High Hrothgar.

Check out the Steam Deck in action here - playing top tier games like Disco Elysium, Hades, Crusader Kings 3 and more!

With all that power comes very real risk, apparently. A new teardown video from Valve shows off what's going on inside the handheld, but also warns that you really shouldn't open up the console yourself. The company warns that swapping out parts and fiddling with the console's insides "may mess things up, like profoundly".

It adds that you should only do it if you "feel like taking big risks with your property, and with your life, which could end if you do this wrong." That's an alarming warning, but it's a very real one: any damage to the machine's internal battery could lead to it catching fire, which could of course end very badly. There's still probably only a small chance such a move could result in death or injury, of course, but Valve needs to cover its bases to avoid getting sued by someone who had their face blown off by the Steam Deck.

However, don't hold off on the Steam Deck if you are tempted, as this machine is going to be Valve's magnum opus for a while.

"So many of us want to treat even this device like a platform that can just be upgraded at will, and we can just, you know, why not upgrade it every three months?" said designer Greg Coomer in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. "Obviously, that wouldn't be the best service that we would do for game developers or customers if we tried to operate that way... There is not a design for Steam Deck 2, but we're thinking along those lines and having conversations already."

Topics: Steam