How to customize boot animations on Steam Deck

Want to make starting your Steam Deck a little more exciting? The Steam Deck has supported custom boot animations for a while now – that means that your startup screen can show a brief customized video as you log into the platform. There are many possibilities for these intros, from custom videos that Steam releases as promotions to animations from talented online designers covering a broad number of subjects.

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Interested in finding one of your own? We’ve got good news: The latest Steam beta updates have made getting a customized boot animation much easier. With just a small amount of tinkering, you can set one up. Here’s everything you need to do.

How to add a custom boot animation to your Steam Deck

Step 1: First, you need to enable Steam’s latest SteamOS 3 beta update. Eventually, the boot animation capability will be rolled into normal updates, but for right now you’ll need to take an extra step.

Turn on your Steam Deck, and use the Steam button to bring up the menu. Choose Settings. Now go down to System, and you should see an option for Beta Participation. Here, you will find a dropdown menu with options to choose from. By default, you’re on the Stable version of SteamOS. Switch to the Beta version, and allow your Steam Deck to update to the latest Beta features.

Step 2: Now it’s time to find a boot animation that you like. You could just Google for one – there are many sites where you can find options, and the Steam Deck subreddit is always willing to make some recommendations. But if you want specifics, you can start with the Steam Deck Repo site, which collects a number of excellent boot animations (including those inspired by The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2077, Futurama, and much more), or find a roundup of favorite animations like this article. Download it onto your Steam Deck when you find one that you like.

Whatever animation you choose, it will need to be in the WebM file format. If the video doesn’t download in this