I think an important factor people seem to forget about the steam deck is that it won’t simply cease to be supported like sony or nintendo do with their consoles. If a game comes out on steam and works on linux, it’ll work on the deck. Considering the amount of people developing wonderful but lightweight games, I doubt you’ll ever think 'this platform is dead".
And if you buy a game on PC, it doesn’t stop being playable in a generation or two like consoles.
Speaking of consoles, if you buy a game for PC then boom, it’s also on your Steam Deck.
I pretty much always consider games through the lens of my Steam Deck. If it’s a cross-platform game that would run well on the Deck, then I get it for the Deck.
And this is primarily because I can freely install those games to other PCs. If my Nintendo Switch were to get destroyed, then I lose my games with it (outside of emulation, of course). I don’t want games being so temporary. I still play games that are nearing 50 years old!
But also Valve will support it.
I bought one of those physical Steam Links nobody cared about. They didn’t do well and Valve ended it fairly quickly. 10 years later it still gets occasional updates from them and benefits from broader Steam Big Picture updates.
Steam Deck has been a huge success. Of course they’ll continue to support it.
Well, Valve may drop support for the firmware. Edit: Gaben simps need to accept that vendors do drop support at some point.
The Deck is a regular computer and you can run any OS on it.
Not having firmware updates doesn’t mean software suddenly stops working on it.
And on the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if software still gets updated as Valve keeps its minimum requirements as low as possible. As long as the drivers work, there isn’t a reason for different editions of the Steam Deck to run different versions.
You‘ll need a community effort to continue driver development.
Yeah, that’s called the Linux Community
No they won’t
source: literally everything Valve has ever made still works.
That’s no guarantee. It‘s naïve. And Steam stopped working on Windows 7 machines, so—
Microsoft is generally far more savage about dropped OS support than Linux. The latter undergoes fewer forced overhauls.
Yes, but this has nothing to with my initial statement.
Steam stopped working on Windows 7
You’re trolling, right? It wasn’t exactly up to Valve lmao. The world stopped supporting Windows 7.
Plenty of software still supports Windows 7. So literally not everything they made still works, there is no guarantee.
True, but they make their money via game sales.
Other OEMs make their money via hardware sales.
Valve has a much bigger incentive in keeping their firmware supported than AYANEO or ASUS…Yes but thinking a piece of hardware will receive support for eternity is naive. That’s all I‘m saying.
The entire point was that you don’t have to rely on vendor support. With proprietary consoles, unless someone hacks it, you won’t get any support when the vendor drops support.
Depends on what your usecase is.
My brother wants to play demanding AAA games on a big screen. He doesn’t see the point of a Steam Deck and is about to sell his.
I play indie games and emulated retro games. The Steam Deck is perfect for me to play. I can sit with my kids when they play in the back yard. The hardware isn’t going to go out of date for me for a very long time.
i play both AAA and indie titles. works fine, its just not going to run at 120fps with all the trimmings.
in most bigger titles I get like 25-30fps. which to me works perfectly. especially on such a small display.
performance doesn’t annoy me. the size of games nowadays annoys me. i can’t have more than one triple A title installed at any time because the damn things are like 200 gb now. i long for the days of 30gb downloads. even on big games.
but I can understand how if you’re looking for a smooth experience, the steam deck might not be as powerful as a full desktop.
not going to run 120fps with all the trimmings
Requires a separate gaming PC, but with Steam Link / Sunshine / Moonlight it can!
Don’t really see a reason to run games like Cyberpunk on low settings at 30FPS when I can pipe it in from the other room at 60FPS+ high / ultra settings
Came in clutch with the poor optimization of MH:Wilds. It was a struggle to run at my monitor’a resolution, but running at 1080P to send to my deck made for a decent experience.
indeed. if I owned another PC I would absolutely do it that way, but I install files locally for the time being.
but yes that is a great way to get insane fps on a steam deck. you just have to own more than one gaming computer lol.
can’t agree more. I have no ambition to play graphically intense shooters on my deck. It’s for chill controller games, which usually are not very heavy to run.
Graphically intense games can be good too, especially in bed, streaming from a PC in the other room.
It’s an outstanding machine for little rogue-likes at the bus stop, or some Star Fox, but I’m not even going to try to load something like Expedition 33 on it.
I tweaked the settings for Expedition 33 and played it on the steamdeck beautifully. Did nearly everything. Runs great.
Oh it’s possible, and it runs well, but I’d never recommend the SD for that.
But it’s all in your expectations I guess. I don’t use my SD for serious game sessions, I use it to goof off in bed, or on a plane or ferry.
A lot of people I’ve spoken to seem to think it’s a replacement for a ps5 or a full sized gaming computer. It’s enough to get by, but I wouldn’t tell anyone to chuck their setup and get one.
I’d say that’s probably a better use case for a console like a PS5 than a Steam Deck.
and I say yes, without caveats.
Steam Deck? Oh, you mean the Balatro machine!
Yesssss
I just wish Slay the Spire worked as well. I mean it works, but you can tell controller support was definitely an afterthought. But those 2 games are probably most of my played hours on it.
The controls for STS are very simple, you could get away with mapping keyboard keys to the controls or using the touchpad.
If you wanted to get fancy you could even map the touchpad to the card selection area (for easy card peeking) and use the buttons for everything else.I’m more talking about peeking itself doesn’t let you see everything. As in, everything is frozen in place while peeking, so if I’m checking enemy HP, it usually blocked by whatever card is selected, and you can’t back out of the selection you’re peeking through, so you’re stuck. That is just a problem with the game itself though, not the controller support.
But selecting a card should be visually more obvious, at least for non attack cards. I can’t count how many times I’ve selected a card intending to consider my move but accidentally playing it because I didn’t see it was already selected quickly enough. Now that’s maybe my fault for going too fast sometimes, but a better visual indicator would be nice.
Also, defaulting the enemy selection to the one I targeted last instead of the one closest to the left would also be super helpful.
I only play on the deck now since I found out about the recent Intel microcode issue the hard way, and I can’t afford to replace the 2nd and 3rd most expensive parts of a computer. Fixed disability income means I won’t get that done until I get my next job.
Ohhhh… yeah, fair enough.
I’ve faced both of these, especially the playing cards by accident bit. Hope they fix it in STS2.I can’t wait. I’m no expert player, I only have around ascension 4 done for each character. But it’s because I’m too greedy lol.
Slay the spire works fine on your previous phone. You know, that 3x lighter machine with 2x the pixel count you already carry everywhere anyway.
Not sure why you specified “previous” phone. I don’t tend to carry that around at all. The battery lasts a few hours if the screen stays off, said screen is cracked and it runs nothing “fine”. Everything haha and glitches around. It remains useful as a cat TV mainly.
Assuming that’s some kinda typo, the current one runs it much better, but getting the correct card when my hand is full is very unreliable, and the UI is cramped to hell since it is a smaller screen but can’t be scaled down as much due to readability. It does come in handy when the deck is at home though.
I’ve specified that because I’ve mainly played it on a 2013 Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (yes, wit a stylus), a FullHD beast that Steam Deck can’t even dream of matching even a decade later.
The steamdeck still holds up well halfway through a console’s generation.
Wtf kind of question is this? Of course it is. And in 10 years it still will be.
In 10 years I would expect a SteamDeck 2 with updated hardware.
Sure, fair enough. But the OLED Steam Deck will also still be a great system in 10 years, especially for anyone who has a gaming desktop. With local game streaming, even with aging hardware the Deck will still be able to play the latest AAA games, and it will still be able to play hundreds of thousands of older games natively.
As a patient gamer, it’s a no brainer.
The wait for the steam deck 3 will be painful though
10 years ago, maybe? It’s a 1 (one) megapixel brick.
I’ll probably still be using my Steam Deck in 2035 lol. It’s just so perfect for the types of games I play - mostly older stuff and modern pixel art / 2D games. I just beat Spiritfarer on it after beating Graveyard Keeper, and I’m nearly to the “end” of Stardew. I’ve played through FFVIII, FFIX, and FFX on it. My gaming time has quadrupled now that I can play all my games in bed or on the toilet or at the park. Just an amazing little machine.
There’s also the fact that even in the future, you’ll be able to have a current-for-the-time PC, and still be able to stream to the Deck locally anywhere in the house if you’re playing then-modern games.
It just has the perfect form factor and ergonomics to be the champion of that job, and i don’t see that changing any time soon.
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Got one last year for my bday
It’s 100% worth imo
Even if you don’t play games, it’s a fully functional linux computer for like <$400 that can play most modern games and handle anything less intensive than gaming no prob
While I wholeheartedly agree. I do want to make one small note for anyone that reads this and thinks like I did.
Don’t get one if you want to use it for professional audio work. It’s a niche use case I know but I thought I’d be able to install Reaper and use it as a little music workstation since reaper is just right in the discover store. Unfortunately, the Steam Deck’s audio drivers are basically only good for playing back audio. When trying to do audio work they were unusably buggy and had a bunch of latency.
If you want a little computer to make music with get a raspberry pi instead. Use the steam deck for gaming like it was intended for and don’t be dumb like I was.
yeah you’d probably want to run JACK instead of PipeWire if you’re doing audio workstation stuff, and with its immutable core there’s no good way to swap them.
I have a decent desktop with a wide screen display, but I love the portability of the Steam Deck. It just works with syncing save files and continuing my game when I am not at home or want to lie in bed.
I know what I’m getting when I’m not at my desk, and want usability over specs.
I use it to stream from a gaming PC, super long battery life and no loud fan. Amazing way to use the deck.
Can you describe how you do this? I have mixed experience with in-home streaming via Steam (latency, disconnects, inability to connect when the host is running Windows with no monitor) but would be very interested in giving it another go with a Linux host and the Deck.
Like, what’s your setup and how does your typical way of using it look like (startup, streaming, etc.)?
Nvidia 3060 on a windows 11 machine with Sunshine (Free, open source iirc). Set the resolution to 1280x800, pretty easy to run just about anything at max settings at that resolution. Pretty simple and I like having pirated games on another machine than my daily driver.
Moonlight installed on Steamdeck.
A nice wifi router is ideal, I recently got a Unify 7 Acess Point that has made the experience much better. Still worked decent on a 5ghz access point.
I have streamed from internet as well, even mobile Hotspot. Not great for fast twitchy games where timing is key, games like baldergs gate are great.
Love that you want to do it on linux, it has come a long way since the steam deck. Sunshine has linux installers as well. Nvidia video card drivers are the biggest hiccup I usually have with linux gaming/llms.
You can install Moonshine on the Deck, then install Sunlight on the desktop. Sunshine is an alternative streaming server software and Moonlight is the client. The setup has lower latency and is capable of 4k 60fps if your desktop and router can handle the throughput
Can you recommend a good router for it? Even with an RAXE500 dropped packets are a nuisance with both on wifi.
are a nuisance with both on wifi.
wifi
There’s your problem. Use ethernet + dock
Yeah, not really possible lol
Time for a successor, though. Sometimes I think Valve really doesn’t like money. They could make a crapton by bringing out a new Steam Deck and a Steam console.
It’s a PC, essentially, so the hardware is always evolving, they could upgrade whenever they choose to. The advantage of any console, the Steam Deck included, is it offers a very consistent set of specs the developers can target for years. If Valve iterates too quickly, then two problems arise: One, there’s one performance goal for devs interested in making a portable game to work towards, there’s many. In addition, the Steam Deck Verified program gets a lot harder to maintain if there are too many flavors of Deck to manage. I think Valve is planing on a lifecycle similar to the major consoles.
The upside is it is all PC hardware, and there are other handheld manufacturers out there, some even running SteamOS, so if you want a higher performance rig before Valve’s ready for the SD2, you can certainly find what you’re looking for.
The steam deck is getting long in the tooth and will increasingly have trouble playing newer titles. In PC gaming, you can’t have console-like product cycles.
I would argue the Steam Deck was never really meant to target the newest and greatest.
Sure, but at some point it’ll be just too outdated.
Maybe outdated for future CPU and GPU hungry games.
The same emulators that run now will continue to do so as will very likely indie titles.
In the end it depends on what you want to do with the SD.
Do you have a steam deck?
Yes.
