If only i can buy it directly through steam and not grey market. Shit is expensive from where i am. Bought it anyway though and yeay, my unit has bad shoulder button and the trackpad rattles on the left side. Bad luck i guess, seems like those two problem is common.
The problem with grey market is the warranty. Cant send it back to steam. Otherwise ill exchange it right away. Need to send to seller and repair it. Cant even exchange it. Had to send my deck three times before i call quit and sold it.
Maybe in future ill buy it again and see how’s the build quality. In the mean time ill just remote play my ps5 with my switch.
My steam deck gets so much more play in the summer. My home office and desktop are in the hottest room in my house (because I’m dumb), so being able to hang out on the couch in my cool living room playing Fallout 1 has been a godsend
I have neither and still find the Steam Deck more appealing for me.
Whiiiich, lends me to the next question, is the Steam Deck an inferior product compared to all the other existing PC handhelds? I mean we all know we have seen the Steam Deck basically created this new sector (inspired by the Switch), but I have seen lots of hate, or lots of praise towards it, by different users and I can’t exactly pinpoint which is the truth (it seems like the console wars of nowadays lol), at the point that all the praise the Steam Deck gets is a meme (I see this behavior on YT especially where this handhelds really show).
I still think the Steam Deck has the best price, but at the time I have enough income for getting one (and putting aside they don’t ship to Mexico) I think the market will have newer alternatives lol.
It’s a little like comparing a top of the line gaming laptop to a middle of the road efficient laptop. Sure the games will run a bit better on the powerful laptop, but you’re trading that for battery life. The Steam Deck is insanely efficient, and they made a few hard tradeoffs like the 1280x800 display resolution (which is great for battery, and honestly plenty sharp for the screen size).
I’m still a little blown away it runs Balder’s Gate 3 and Cyberlunk 2077 at all.
but Windows is so astonishingly terrible on handhelds
The way you are telling me this reminds me of the old HP windows laptops I used to use that their battery life did not even last 2 hours lol (I eventually got a MacBook Pro and that was a massive upgrade).
I still don’t picture windows doing that great with laptops (as in optimization), but I don’t know, I have seen very good laptops with good specs very recently that it could maybe make up for Windows being not optimized for anything.
It’s very similar to the raspberry pi in that other products have better on paper specs but the deck is the cultural hub and will have the longest support.
I thought Valve wasn’t known for a long support for handheld, at least that is one comment a friend of mine said (that the Deck would be forgotten as the Steam controller).
If it’s official or not, the deck has tons of third party support through companies like Jsaux and their colab with iFixit. On the software side you have Camera, Bazzite and a wealth of options should steam OS disappear. I don’t think Valve will drop the deck tbh and them not being known for long support of the handheld this is their first one, your friend might be talking about the steam controller but even that is still supported just not for sale and was very much a cult product rather than a successful one.
I think steam deck is a pretty good choice from that perspective.
There is little vendor lock in, you could upgrade from a deck to a competitor and so long as it uses steam you won’t really be missing out on anything
Valve has gone in pretty hard on repairability. so while it may become obsolete (and I don’t think it will for a while, Moores law isn’t what it used to be) it should still be able to run very far down the line.
The steam controller and ecosystem planned around it was a financial failure. While there were a hunch of enthusiasts into the steam controller (myself included) it never gained mainstream appeal. The steam machine that it was meant to synergize with did even worse. Otoh the valve index did pretty well and still is quite a popular pick if you wanna get into vr today despite being 5 yrs old, while vr wasnt as successful as i think some wanted (I blame meta for that!) It did carve out a niche for valve that helos there long term plans. The steam deck has been a run away success and also brings a big boost to a lot of valves long term strategies (decoupling from windows, competing with consoles, giving people a reason to stay on steam), and its already seen a refresh. I would be very surprised to not see a steamdeck 2, although it may be a while (valve has stated as much, because they want to make it easy for devs to target steam deck for recommended specs)
the steam deck is less powerful than other handhelds, but is currently the best user experience and battery life on the handheld pc market. Even so the performance is often a non-issue, it can even play cyberpunk at a decent framerate.
often have worse frame pacing and battery life especially compared to the OLED model.
Yeah, honestly the fact that the Deck with less raw power leaves similar results is a huge positive point I guess, I honestly haven’t seen anyone complaining that much because of the performance issues.
And yeah, better battery life is always good in my book, I think other handhelds have a joke of battery life.
It’s so much more convenient to play locally though. Just press the button and you’re back where you left. No need to boot up the PC, start the game, establish the connection.
For real. I almost never turn my deck off. It just stays suspended right where I left off in my game. I push one button, and 3 seconds later I’m right where I left off.
Nope. No issues at all. Uses up like 5% of the battery per day to be suspended like that, so if I’m playing through a game I can play the entire thing without ever seeing a boot screen or intro or having to worry about getting to a save point. Just right back into or out of the game within a couple seconds.
I often have issues with the sound though depending on the game after waking it up again, which is annoying. The sound is cracking and partially distorted.
I’ve had the audio desync in cutscenes after leaving a game open in sleep for a week or two. I think it’s an issue with how the game timers work. If they’re counting since the game started, any slightly inaccuracy will become more obvious as the game is left open, regardless of sleep.
I remember having that happen to me sometimes when I was playing borderlands quite a while back, but what I’ve been playing the past several months doesn’t have it happen, so I thought they fixed it. If they haven’t, I guess it must be game specific.
I love that feature so much. I have played through at least 20 backlog single player games with my deck. Amazing games that I could never finish before because it’s apparently too much to ask for my brain.
The point is you don’t need to be at your house, or a place to set a tiny TV, or a kickstand, or a wall outlet. Also, if you’re using an Xbox controller, I can’t overstate how hard you are missing out on gyro controlled aiming on a steam deck. It works incredibly well.
I love it. The kids cheap laptops with Ubuntu are now fully fledged gaming laptops! And a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and the cheap tablet is also a gaming computer.
Edit: also wireguard to connect from outside the house.
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