How much do you use your deck? Was it a good purchase?
I was on the edge buying the thing and told myself that if I use it 50 hours it’s a reasonable purchase. Now I’m sporting closer to 200h within one year I could not be happier.
Did you have any (self made) goals when buying Steam Deck? Did you achieve those? Or did you buy it and now it’s collecting dust? I’m curious
Well over 100 hours so far, which is a lot for me personally.
I use to to play Steam games, emulate GBA games, play non-steam games, watch TV, Movies, and YouTube.
I used it as my computer recently at an old school LAN party.
I play card games, turn based strategy games, RTS games, FPS games, arcade games, couch co-op games. It’s awesome to play on, it’s awesome to mod, it’s awesome to use as a portable device, as a home console, or as a portable PC.
I use it with friends on Discord, I listen to podcasts and music while playing by myself. I’ve used it traveling locally and across the country. I’m gunna use it tomorrow on my TV to watch a live sporting event.
There just hasn’t been any real significant complaints I’ve had at all. It does everything I can think of and more. It’s one of the best purchases I’ve made in years.
I play for maybe an hour or 2 every couple of days. I recently docked it to the living room TV and now the wife plays a couple of hours a week now too.
I work from home, and my work computer and personal rig share a desk - by the end of the work day, sitting in the same chair at the same desk to stare at another screen started feeling like a chore and I had all but quit gaming.
The Deck has changed that. Not only am I loving gaming again, but I've found myself playing genres I never would have on my PC (things like Vampire Survivors just feel great on it, but I had no interest in them on my PC)
My night shift coworkers bring in PS5s and Xboxes and set them up every night. I felt guilty bringing in a switch or 3DS on holidays I knew would be dead when I worked on nights. A handheld seems somewhat acceptable to me as it can just be turned off and thrown in a bag when it gets busy.
Now that I’m on days I read semi related technical books of things I’m interested in or hack around on a pi or Arduino that may or may not lead to something useful for work. That way I can say I’m learning my job better even if it’s stuff I’d do in my free time. Boss seems to like that.
My SO bought me a deck this past summer sale. So far he has used it for way more hours than I have lmao
Altogether, I wanted the deck so that I didn’t have to buy a dedicated desktop for gaming. I just have an old Lenovo for school that keeps up with some of my gaming, but not all of it. I really enjoy the portability of the deck. Its heavy and I’m weak and holding it up while I’m lying in bed makes my arms tired quickly, so I bought an articulated tripod tablet holder. Now I can game for so long without having an entire laptop in bed or on the couch.
Oh my God, maybe 500 hours or more in a year. I actually stopped gaming on my PC. It was aging anyway, and I still think I’ll get a new PC to play starfield and armored core. But I have put some serious time into my deck.
I beat: Horizon zero dawn Breath of the wild Kingdom come deliverance Wasteland 3 Assassin’s creed black flag Dredge Children of morta
I almost beat: Tunic Outer wilds Hades
And sunk hundreds of hours into the roguelikes vampire survivors risk of rain 2.
I credit the suspend / resume feature as much as anything else. When playing through a big game, being able the press a button and instantly pick up where you left off, vs: booting your PC, launching steam, maybe launching a 3rd party launcher, loading the game, loading your save, then playing. It’s one second to start playing vs 5 - 10 minutes? So when you only have 20 minutes to play, you actually play.
I hope steam os becomes available on more powerful or custom hardware honestly, because going back to windows or even Linux feels like a chore after getting spoiled by suspend / resume on the deck.
Recently I realized I had 350 dollars worth of CSGO creates sitting in my inventory. So I bought a steam deck. I’m a game developer so I have a desktop with a 1080 and 64 GB of ram, a desktop with a 4070 and 64 GB of ram. A laptop with a 1660 and 16 GB of ram, and now a Steam deck with 64 GB of storage and a 1 tb micro sd. I use my Steam deck rarely at most. I have so many devices I don’t really need a Steam deck but I had enough to get the Steam deck and honestly, I probably would have bought 350 dollars worth of games but I thought the investment in hardware would help me test games for Steam deck compatibility. Besides it’s something to add to my collection.
Overall, I don’t use it though. I don’t even really use my laptop. If I am going to play games I usually do so on one of my desktops. Also, I will say I think I made the mistake of not dishing out 200 more dollars for the 512 GB version that comes with an anti-glare screen. The load times for micro SDs are really long and I am surprised they only support UHS-I instead of something faster. The anti-glare screen also helps it be a more viable device as I’m likely to use it in the car on road trips or someplace like the living room where we keep the curtains open.
I also didn’t realize it got so hot. I wouldn’t really want to give the device to my kids to play. My oldest is 5 and he loves the Nintendo Switch but we don’t have a ton of games for it. I’d love to give him my steam deck to mess around with but the deck seems fragile and gets extremely hot compared to the switch or even his Samsung A7 tablet. I wouldn’t want him to feel the back of the Deck, get burnt, and drop it or get scared of it. It’s really not a young-kid-friendly device like I thought it might be.
Closing thoughts, I got the hardware essentially for free and I like it. It’s a great little device and I certainly love messing around with Steam OS in desktop mode. It’s a cool little experiment. I feel like if I was a consumer I’d likely would have been a bit disappointed with the 64 GB version. It might be worth it to pop it open and install a better drive in it someday but I’ll stick with the slow SD card for now. Most of the time I use I’m just trying to waste time anyways.
I use it pretty much daily since I got it last year. Ive predominantly using it to clear my backlog of games that ive accumulated over the years.
In the past 12 months, ive finished GTA 4
GTA 5
Red Dead Redemption 2
Sniper Elite 3
Sniper Elite 4
Metro 2033
Final Fantasy 15
Fallout 4 + DLCs
Fallout New Vegas + DLCs
Bastion
Bomber Crew
Guacamelee
Halo Spartan Strike
Halo Spartan Assault
Portal
Portal 2
Star Wars Jefi Fallen Order
I’m currently playing Doom 2016 and its amazing.
Plenty of other games to get through like Cyberpunk, Witcher 3 and maybe another play through of Skyrim and Fallout 3. Ive played through them several times on Xbox but I want to do it again on Steam Deck.
It’s my only PC, so I’ve used it quite a bit, although not as much as I thought I would?
I got it day one and played it a fair bit last year (about as much as my PS5), but recently I’ve been playing on PS5 (and Series X, to a lesser extent) a lot more. It hasn’t been collecting dust too much, as I’m still using it as a regular old PC, but certainly not daily.
Well, mine has 100% restored PC gaming which abandoned about 10 years ago, and has improved the experience by light years. At home, I use the deck in my living room and family room docked, and anywhere else as a handheld (pooping has changed forever).
At work, I use it an lunch breaks, and during boring meetings I don’t need ta focus much on.
The library of games available would be unthinkable to me as a kid. Most modern PC games, and everything prior can be played either natively, or via emulation.
literally every day. I don’t want to sequester myself in my room to play on my PC, and I don’t want to monopolize the living room TV and have a big desktop tower looking ugly in the entertainment center, so the deck essentially gave me PC gaming back. I debated whether to buy it for months and months, and I shouldn’t have. My goal was nothing more than to be able to play PC games and to unlock emulation on a small screen with real controllers. I just finished playthroughs of metal gear solid 2 and fallout new vegas, and I’m starting red dead redemption 2 today (if the damn download ever finishes). The only thing I’d caution a new purchaser about is springing for the big hard drive and/or being willing to install an aftermarket one. SD cards seems like a reasonable sol’n but reports are coming in that the deck is hard on them because it does a lot of writing to the card, and that an SSD is a worthwhile investment.
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