Aperture Desk Job is Steam Deck’s first-party touch that Xbox Series X was missing

Last night, I was thinking about how a Valve Steam Deck game would look. That’s almost entirely because I had just read a Gabe Newell interview in Edge magazine, where they asked him about Valve developing a first-party game to show off the portable hardware, and he said Valve thought about it but decided to put its resources elsewhere — like making Dota and Counter-StrikeYou will be able to work more efficiently on your device.

This morning I was surprised to hear Valve make the announcement. Aperture Desk JobsThis is a game/tech demo that you can get for free in the Portal universe. There’s enough wiggle room here that I’m not so worried about Newell’s comments being misleading — Valve refers to it as a “short” rather than a game, for one. It got me to thinking about how valuable it would be for a first-party launch alongside new hardware.

It was nearly impossible to not have one in the past few decades. There’s no world in which the Nintendo 64 didn’t launch with Super Mario 64Saturn, or? Virtua Fighter. With the introduction of PlayStation, the consoles began to be marketed without mascots. However, most consoles came with custom launch games that showcased the console’s capabilities and helped justify their purchase.

In recent years, though, the idea of a console has started to change — especially at Microsoft, which constantly talks about its strategy of turning consoles into access points rather than isolated boxes. Microsoft delayed Halo Infinite and ended up launching Xbox Series X without a centerpiece first-party game, it was disappointing, but it also sort of felt like that went hand-in-hand with Microsoft’s strategy about not needing clear-cut hardware generations.

Since Valve’s Steam Deck announcement, I have been thinking of it as the same thing. It is hardware that allows you to run Steam games from your portable device. It’s a new access point to an existing library. So it didn’t even occur to me that studios would design custom games for it. There’s nothing on there you can’t do with a standard controller, right?

Aperture Desk JobsIt seems like the game to answer that question. The way Valve announced it — telling players to “lower your expectations” and giving it away for free — suggests this will be a small project, perhaps similar to its VR tech demo The Lab. Comparable to Halo Infinite, I’d imagine the investment is something in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars less.

But there’s something nice and comforting about the people who make hardware delivering custom software to show it off.