Valve's Steam Deck will begin shipping to early buyers as early as the end of 2021, but the promise of a portable Steam machine has proved so popular that those aiming to pre-order the Steam Deck may have to wait until late 2022 ...

When the Steam Deck finally arrives in customers' hands, the joy will be palpable: Valve has designed it to support pausing and resuming games, much like the Series X and Series S on the PS5 and Xbox.

The good news comes from a recent IGN chat with Valve, which outlines how the company has attempted to design the Steam Deck operating system to replicate the advantages of modern game consoles on a handheld portable device.

According to Valve designer Greg Coomer, giving players the option to stop the game, put the device down, and later pick it up and immediately resume without having to restart the game or load a save was an important priority for the Steam Deck was an important priority for the team.

"That feature came up in early conversations with AMD [the developer of Steam Deck's APU] and also with our internal Steam developers," Coomer told IGN, adding that the team made it a priority to "not lose sight of the importance of that feature."

The Valve team is also reportedly exploring ways to allow Steam Deck owners to pause a game in the Deck and later resume it on another PC to pick up where they left off. Such interoperability is possible because Steam Deck essentially runs natively on Steam, with some minor tweaks.

In fact, Valve told IGN that some of the Steam changes made for Steam Deck will begin to be reflected in the desktop version of Steam before Deck launches.

Additionally, Valve plans to replace the aging Big Picture mode with Steam Deck's UI at some point down the road. In other words, we may see a future where you can start playing a game on your PC, pause to play it on Steam Deck when you are out and about, and then use the same trick again when you want to relax on the couch and play it on your big TV using the old Steam Link.

It's great to see Valve researching ways to bring one of the best features of the new PS5 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, suspend/resume, into the PC gaming realm. Considering that both Microsoft and Sony have launched consoles with inadequate suspend/resume functionality, Steam Deck could even surpass the latest consoles in this aspect if Valve can get everything running smoothly.

Notoriously, the PS5's rest mode remains broken six months after its launch and remains unreliable, as evidenced by countless user reports of losing progress because the PS5 exited a suspended game without warning. The suspend/resume feature on Microsoft's Xbox series has proven to be more reliable, and given its usefulness, it is exciting that Valve is bringing this feature to PC games.