RPS presents Steam Deck Academy: a grand repository of Steam Deck knowledge, made simple

This’ll learn ya

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Feature by James Archer Hardware Editor

Published on Feb. 20, 2024

Welcome to Steam Deck Academy, where we take the microfibre cloth of understanding and wipe away the smudgy touchscreen fingerprints of handheld gaming ignorance. Here, eager students – that’s you, I’m assuming – can feast their minds on all the Steam Deck guides, explainers, and investigations that we’ve produced, as well as further instructive pieces to come.

Liam (RPS in peace) talks up some of the best Steam Deck games.Watch on YouTube

This project was born from both a belief and a concern. The belief is that the Steam Deck is very much a PC, and like all PCs, it hides its secrets well. It's brimming with possibilities - to play more games, to install new apps, or to fine-tune how it runs - but with only a cursory built-in tutorial, the Deck can be frustratingly opaque on how you can actually seize them. I’ve always wanted RPS’s hardware coverage to feel useful, including to readers without much interest in the techy side of PC gaming, and helping you to get the most out of a Steam Deck (or Steam Deck OLED) fits right into that.

The concern is that while we already have a bunch of Deck-focused guides and articles on the site, they’re all kind of just... dotted about, not really connected to one another beyond a few embedded links. Steam Deck Academy aims to fix that, by acting as a one-stop library for all the practical advice and step-by-step guides we have to give, while also marking them as distinct from any bloggier or longer-form pieces (like our Steam Deck OLED discussion or interviews with Valve). Everyone wins, as does the very concept of knowledge.

Read on, then, for all our Steam Deck lessons, and look out for more to be added in the future. Tuition is free, though I can’t promise cheaper lager in the union bar.