Valve's portable gaming PC, the Steam Deck, which debuted this week, has garnered a lot of attention when it comes to hardware, but the question that inevitably haunts anything with a thumbstick these days: when will the stick start to drift?

In an interview with IGN, Valve says "hopefully soon." Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, said of the Steam Deck's overall input, "We've done tons of testing on reliability," Aldehayyat said afterward, "We feel it works really well. We feel it works really well. And I think people will be very happy with it. I think it's going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every component is going to fail at some point, but we think people will be very happy and satisfied with this."

John Ikeda, the designer of the Steam Deck, also said that Valve chose the Steam Deck hardware because of its well-known performance record, stating. We didn't want to take any risks," he said. 'I'm sure our customers don't want us to take any risks either.'

With manufacturers like Sony threatened with lawsuits regarding the PS5 dual-sense controller drift issue, and Nintendo plagued with stick drift issues since the Switch's launch, having confidence in the radar of hardware engineers who design game consoles makes sense. [Read everything we know about Valve's new hardware, including specs and pricing, on Steam Deck. Also read a brief history of Valve's involvement with the hardware.