After quite a bit of teasing, Elgato has announced the Stream Deck. The Stream Deck is a pad with 15 LCD keys that can be customized to control various elements of your stream. In their trailer, they show off controlling OBS to start the stream, switch scenes, toggling on-screen effects, and controlling other media across your computer. And, of course, if you really want to stick to macros and assign it a bunch of regular macros, you can. The deck is customizable in an Elgato piece of software and from what I can see in their preview, there is more specific kinds of integrations you can include like posting directly to chat, tweeting via the deck, and what I’m assuming are direct OBS controls with saving your replay. Some of these functions can be achieved with regular macros but others take a bit of tooling around to achieve but we wont know how in-depth many of these functions are until we get our hands on a Stream Deck.

Initially, I’d say that the strength of the Steam Deck will really be how simplified they can make these actions and how much the integrations really allow. For what it’s worth, the brands listed specifically are OBS, Twitch, Twitter, and TipeeeStream. I’d say the Game Capture software from Elgato has more going on than other direct game capture software so I do have high expectations for the Stream Deck software as well. You probably can’t beat drag-and-drop customization for this. A similar setup can be achieved if you use something like an X-keys pad, which is similarly priced, but certainly wont have the kinds of integrations that the Stream Deck will have.

Which brings us to price and availability. The Stream Deck is available for preorder on Amazon. The most similar X-keys pad is the XK-24 and, of course, you can put something together something for a fourth of the price if you really wanted to. Again, what you’re paying for here is the integration and the much more refined customization interface. And a pretty sleek-looking product as Elgato products tend to be.

The Stream Deck will begin shipping in May. If you have any questions, there is a QnA about the Stream Deck on Reddit. We’ll be sure to talk about any news on the Stream Deck that pops up as we #evolve and we’ll review one as soon as we get our hands on one. For more information, you can check out the Elgato product page.

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