Elgato Gaming Reveals the Stream Deck

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. [Unsupported shortcode: embedyt] 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

for 

$149.95

. The most similar X-keys pad is the

XK-24

which is $139.96 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

.