If you're worried about the long-term health of your Steam Deck battery, Valve has just dropped a brand new update to intervene. Previously, if you wanted to prevent full charging of your handheld, you simply had to be vigilant, but now you can cap the charge at 80%, and this ensures that the battery is healthier in the long term and less likely to need replacing.
While there aren't any concerns over the general battery life of the Valve be proactive in trying to help gamers protect their consoles in the long term.
This battery update for the Steam Deck can be ed right now if you the beta update channel. This can be done from the settings menu, and you can swap between the stable and beta channels at any time.
Almost the entire update is battery-related and you can activate the aforementioned 80% cap in the power submenu within the settings. The display dim, suspend timeout settings, and show battery percentage settings have also been relocated to the power submenu.
Two final updates in the patch notes relate to pasting text when using the on-screen keyboard and a "speculative fix" for the DualSense Edge gyroscope bug. This is an issue where the DualSense Edge gets recognized as a PS5 Controller and the gyro features don't work as a result.
It's surprising that more devices don't offer an 80% charge cap, given the benefits it offers for battery health. Granted, with a gaming handheld, where the overall battery life available is quite low compared to, say, a gaming headset or keyboard, it'll be interesting to see how many people actually use this feature.
It is noted in the patch notes that this update is targeted towards players who have their Steam Deck constantly charging, which is typically anyone who has their handheld hooked up to one of the best Steam Deck docks at all times.
If you've got a gaming handheld but don't know what to play, check out our best Steam Deck games guide, where we've picked out 30 games ideal for handheld play.
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