Valve’s Steam Deck is one of the best gaming handhelds on the market and many owners don’t see any reason to upgrade right now, at least according to a recent poll we ran. A consistent stream of updates for the device is one of the reasons why it’s so great – with Valve regularly patching its Beta Client ready for larger Stable versions.

And now, as of February 19th, there’s a new Beta Client Update for the Steam Deck. The first thing you’ll notice is that this isn’t a very big update at all. It contains just two patch notes, but both of them address some annoying bugs that you may be running into at the moment.

Steam Deck Beta Client Update comes with two patch notes

The patch notes have been published online and follow a recent update that offered a battery life improvement by optimizing the device’s in-built Frame Limiter settings. Moving on to the most recent patch, Valve has addressed a bug while navigating the Steam store, as well as an issue with external gamepads.

We have just shipped an updated Steam Deck Client to the Preview/Beta channel.

General

• Fixed an issue with attempting to visit the full game’s store page and being directed to the demo’s store page instead.

Steam Input

• Fixed an issue where after disconnecting an external gamepad, the Steam Deck’s controller could get stuck in the non-primary controller slot

Source: Steam

The annoying controller bug is related to external gamepad usage. After disconnecting the gamepad, the (built-in) Steam Deck controls could essentially lose priority and no longer be considered your primary controller.

As we said, this update is only available for users on the latest Beta version. If you want to test it out, tap the ‘Steam’ button on your Deck, head over to the system settings, and find the ‘Beta Participation’ section. Simply select the ‘System Update Channel’ dropdown and change to the Beta version. You can also switch to ‘Preview’ to bring the most up-to-date patches, but this is less stable and not recommended for your average user.

If you want to update to this latest version, you'll need to be running on the Beta version; this can be done by tapping the ‘Steam' button, going to system settings, and navigating to the ‘Beta Participation' options.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.