It seems Valve has managed to drastically reduce the size of SteamOS just a couple of months before pre-orders start shipping out to consumers.
The size of the operating system on gaming devices is important due to the storage limitations they all have. In the case of the Steam Deck, the base model only includes 64GB of storage, meaning every gigabyte counts due to how big some of the more recent and most popular games are.
As PCGamesN reports, until now builds of SteamOS for the Steam Deck had weighed in at 24GB, but that changed with the latest version (v20211120.2). According to release notes shared by user madjoki on the MetaCouncil forums, SteamOS now only requires 10GB of space. There’s every chance it could continue to get smaller with new builds early next year, but a 14GB reduction is already impressive.
For comparison, the Switch OS requires around 4GB of space, the PS5 OS requires 158GB, and the Xbox Series X requires 198GB. Anyone who ordered the 64GB Steam Deck model will be pleased to hear they should have around 50GB in which to store their games and before having to buy a microSD card. Future Steam Deck owners were also pleased to discover yesterday that the handheld’s quick resume feature is on a par with consoles, allowing games to be suspended and resumed in just a couple of seconds.
