Ironically enough, it’s led to me playing more games on the living room television! The steam deck helped me adapt to playing with a gamepad, as opposed to mouse and keyboard.
Until they come out with a Steam Controller 2, I will say the best gamepad for steam is the Dualsense (a Dualshock 4 also works). It’s got one touchpad instead of two, but Steam lets you map the left and right half separately, which covers my primary use cases. I also installed the RISE4 remap kit, a hardware mod that adds paddles on the back of the controller which can mimic any face button. Not as good as having actual new buttons, but it does mean I can run and jump without taking my thumb off the right stick.
I only bought the Steam Deck so I could play Windows games without having to give money to Microsoft, or pirate Windows. I’d much rather play games on macOS, but unfortunately, there are way too many games that don’t run on macOS (or used to run, but don’t anymore).
Now that Apple has their own Windows compatibility layer in the form of the Game Porting Toolkit, I don’t use my Steam Deck as much as I did.
Whisky will allow you to run Windows apps, including most games, on a Mac without needing a VM or Boot Camp. It’s basically a front end to Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, which requires Sonoma, so Whisky also requires Sonoma.
And while most games work well, games with a launcher will most likely fail, as will games that use kernel-level anti-cheat or some other DRM on top of Steam’s. Steam works well with Whisky, but Epic’s store doesn’t work for some reason.
I am a father of young children. Prior to my deck, I would be just too tired by the time the kids were asleep to go downstairs in my basement and play on my desktop. That just led to me playing games maybe once a week on the weekend.
Now that I have a deck, I can kick my feet up on the couch and play for an hour or two before bed.
Because of the deck I actually am able to make time to play games. Without the deck I just skip games altogether during the week.
I went from buying and never playing PC games to playing them pretty often.
My gaming PC is in the basement. I rarely find the time to hole up down there with kids and family life. But I can hang in the living room on my couch and play now. Game changer.
I’ve installed games on the deck that I thought were interesting but I wasn’t in a rush to play right away. And instead of those games getting forgotten I ended up actually playing them.
I was on a decade-and-a-half gaming hiatus (job, kids, the usual) until we got the Nintendo Switch early in the pandemic (and it was a saviour for the whole family). When the Steam Deck was announced, I hesitated a day or two (this probably pushed me three to four months in the delivery queue), but eventually realized that this is the device I’ve been waiting for my whole life (a Linux-based gaming hand held which can also be used as a general purpose computer) and ordered it. I had a dormant Steam account with only Civilization V in it (my wife got it for me on DVD when it came out, and that’s when I made the account). Since then, I bought >200 games and >100 DLCs (I started playing some of the lighter ones on my under-powered Linux laptop before the Deck arrived and continued on the Deck using cloud saves), finished multiple games, and felt sleep depraved for months.
Currently, me and my wife are playing Divinity 2 in split screen mode on the big TV. I also use the Deck for online courses, responding to emails, writing documents, surfing, etc. I created a desktop controls binding for handheld desktop mode usage which allows me to change zoom and brightness, bring up the keyboard easily, copy and paste, open the start menu, alt-tab between windows and go in and out of full screen mode etc. all with one or two motions of the controls. For example, I mapped swiping up and down on the left touchpad to mouse wheel up and down, and swiping left and right on it to SHIFT+mouse wheel up and down, allowing me to scroll in all directions using my left thumb. This allows me to use it for reading illustrated books where I need to zoom in and out and scroll across the page.
Yep. I listened to a course on Coursera about Unity game development (alas, Unity), and installed Unity Hub and the engine, and made actual (simple) games on the Deck it self using a keyboard and TV. Then I was able to test play the said games on the Deck right there. Here are the links to the games if you care to check them out:
For me it is quite awesome to be able to play a game on my PC, and take the Deck with me and continue the game on-the-go, then pick back up on PC, without losing progress. It’s pretty seamless.
Also, if I’m just downstairs from my PC, or outside, I can stream from PC to Deck and enjoy reduced battery consumption and faster loading times. I think the graphics look much better too, but that may be optimistic-colored shades.
I play so many more platformers and 2-d bullet hells. I never enjoyed the latency of a wireless controller, or the inaccuracy of wasd inputs, and wired controllers are a pretty big no no in my house (we love our animals more than our electronics, but electronic loss is so hard to handle), the steam deck is great with most games native controller support, and the community layouts make most non natively supported games work wonderfully.
I just wish it had a built in kick stand, I bought a little stand for it but the deck is just a bit too heavy when it’s almost vertical.
I do a lot of flying and travel for work and the Steam Deck has been fantastic for it. My gaming laptop can’t draw sufficient wattage from the airplane’s power outlets so I couldn’t use it for gaming in flight, so I needed another solution that wasn’t gaming on my phone (let’s face it, most mobile games suck).
The Steam Deck gives me that extra versatility when traveling. I find myself playing games that I wouldn’t otherwise normally play due to the control scheme. I’m mainly a keyboard and mouse user so adapting to a controller for most things was a bit of a learning curve, but it’s much easier when playing games well suited for it (Ace Combat 7, American Truck Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2, FEZ). My favorite though so far has been Grim Fandango Remastered. The controls are so intuitive that it’s like the game was custom made for the Deck (despite the original being two decades old).
I haven’t really played FPS even though there’s a gyroscopic control scheme available, I miss the precision that the mouse enables. Hack and slash in TES 4 Oblivion works well though, but not really with bow and arrow shooting.
I also couldn’t really do RTS for the same reason, even with the track pad like functionality.
It’s great though for side scrollers, isometric RPGs, third person action adventure games, driving games, and simulators.
Can I recommend a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for rts and 4x games? Even low twitch fps’s (satisfactory) work really well on the deck with m+kb, and they’ve made some pretty low profile keyboards to work with the deck, just need a stand to put it on.
This, the Deck is a godsend on those longer flights where I would be using the switch, but it can’t run current-gen games. And also, emulation. Nintendo devices are in a constant back and forth with people looking for exploits, the Deck just says “You want to run a PS2 in this bitch, here’s the pcsx2 flatpak and another that passes it through the Steam GUI with images so it looks like it fits in your library, I won’t ask where you got that ISO of King’s Field 4 if you don’t ask when Half-Life 3 is coming out, kthxbye!”
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