If they sell enough of these, some developers will naturally just start adding active support in their games for it, even if only as a switchable feature.
[×] Use settings and textures specially optimized for this device?
The Switch has the SoC of an Android tablet from 2015. That's how Nintendo can sell the switch at 200 bucks.
There's no way for valve to discount the deck, which uses a cutting edge SoC cut from the same cloth as the PS5, at anywhere near that price point.
Flagship hardware has flagship prices. If valve would have built a cheap but underpowered device to reach the price point of the switch nobody would have been interested. Gamers are into the deck because of its cutting edge specs.
Well that's the beauty of the deck. Devs don't need to do shit, as it's basically a gaming PC in your hand that can run the same games you have on your steam library on your gaming rig but on lower graphic fidelity.
You don't need to changes things, but you probably want to. It's a general purpose computer and I could run e.g. StarCraft, but I would get slaughtered with controls like that.
The traditional business view is the casual gamers are growing, and the elite PC gamers are stagnant. Valve is trying to wreck that dichotomy with hardware like this, but I think that goes with making sure there are games that fit the form factor. You can't just sell this to people who rather play on their main gaming rig but are sometimes stuck without this.
Making games for this form factor != a retreat from the principle of general purpose computing.
