You can watch Valve’s Steam Deck developer event at 1PM ET Friday, even if you’re not a dev

We’ve known for a little while that Valve is giving developers a huge five-hour tour of its upcoming Steam Deck gaming handheld on Friday, November 12th starting at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Now, we’re learning you can come watch even if you’re not a developer — Valve is telling press that “anyone can watch the event.”

Update: Here’s everything we learned from the event.

The five-hour virtual conference will include discussions of the hardware; games that will appear “on Deck”; how the Linux handheld can play Windows games via a Proton compatibility layer; a deep dive on the AMD APU that powers it by AMD itself; and of course tips for Steam developers on how to make those things work in their favor.

The initial announcement made it seem like you had to be a Steamworks developer “to participate,” but the company’s clarifying today that only applies to a final Q&A session (and possibly only when it comes to asking the questions: it sounds like you can still watch that, too).

Valve is a gigantic force in the PC gaming space, but it’s also a secretive company that doesn’t make a lot of hardware, so there’s loads of interest in any scrap of new information about the exciting new gaming handheld that might come out of the event. We’ll be watching for any news — and now you can, too.

Me, I’ll be particularly interested if Valve drops any more tidbits about what else the AMD APU can do. When I got to try the Steam Deck in person in Bellevue, Washington, Valve’s Greg Coomer kinda-sorta hinted to me that it might make sense in a possible future standalone VR headset, too.

Valve recently announced that the Steam Deck has been delayed by two months. Originally, small quantities were expected to ship this December, but now the first handhelds will arrive in February 2022.