Useless, therefore essential: you can now start your Steam Deck with a (too) long animation

Valve has rolled out an update for its beta Steam Deckincluding improvements, bug fixes and… an interesting gimmick.

In response to a crazy idea from the community to customize the start-up animation of the hybrid console, Valve has notably extended its start-up time from 10 to 30 seconds.

A longer start: the new fashion

To make waiting for the start of the Steam Deck more entertaining, users had fun customizing the animation, even though no native support was yet planned. Take a look at a particularly funny example:

Far from being offended, Valve found the idea so funny that it encouraged the practice by making it more accessible via an update in early October, then with the one that interests us here. The community has already set to work to develop 30-second startup animations, notably via a subreddit.

To apply these animations already created or of his own, simply establish the following path on the Steam Deck: steamui/overrides/movies. The console will pick up the startup videos placed there. It would also seem that Valve, which has not lost the north, plans to sell its own boot animations on the Steam store. In any case, this is what a data miner discovered through a JSON document.

A feature still in beta

For the time being, this useless functionality, therefore essential and potentially lucrative for Valve, is only at the beta stage. No release date for the official update has been disclosed yet. However, it is possible to opt in to participate in the beta phase by going to Settings > System > Steam Update Channel.

As for the other additions of this beta update, we can notably mention an improvement in the quick access to the menu. This will allow access to the notifications tab when a friend sends a message, invites to a game or voice chat. Accepting these invitations will also be facilitated via a notification at the bottom of the screen which will avoid having to go through the chat window.

The lock screen also receives some improvements. Among these, we find in particular the addition of specific symbols to the controllers, or the correction of a bug forcing to manually remove the keyboard integrated into the screen when the console was put on standby on the lock screen.

Source : Valve