Though I've long since given up on my gaming days, I purchased a Steam deck last month, mostly out of impulse. I'm frankly astonished at the amount of playable games, and also the amount of quality indie games out there. I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog. Its been more enjoyable (and surprisingly comfortable) than I expected too. I'm definitely in the very casual crowd at this point, gaming an hour or two a week on the couch, and its hit that sweet spot.
Purchased the base model; overall impressed with the quality of the device too. So much more comfortable than I was expecting, I just rest it on my lap. Its great.
Nice to see at least somebody is actually putting their games on sale. The last few Steam sales have been pretty sad. Back in the day you could look at your wishlist and the average game would be 50% off, with lots of 75%s and 90%s. These days they act like giving you 20% off a five year old game is some big sale.
I just opened my wishlist and everything is 50-90% off except for two items one of which is a relatively new DLC expansion (other DLCs for the same game are 50% off).
I really shouldn't buy more games now though, when I have so many that I haven't even played yet or barely played.
I picked up Forza Horizon 5 for 50% off and Doom Eternal for 67% off. Cyberpunk is 50% off, Back 4 Blood is 80% off, Control is 75% off. It’s not everything that’s on huge sales, but there’s plenty of deals on big games.
It's probably a matter of tastes but the games I'm interested in are on deep discounts. I only picked up a few because I already have a big backlog. The sales are there but it depends on the game.
That depends on what on your wishlist though. I just bought Halo collection (90% off, includes 6 games) and Sleeping Dogs (also 90% off) for a grand total of $5 (localized pricing).
I got sleeping dogs for the same price several months ago and could have also done so twice a month ever since... It's effectively just the going price and the discount is pulled just as an incentive to push immediate purchase when people do happen to log in....
I've stopped buying things on sale and am now waiting until I'm ready to play a specific game before buying it... Nearly 100 unplayed games on my gig with most never going to get played (I played Baldur's Gate enough as a kid, I don't need to play EE).
Inside was an amazing game. The feeling of the environments you go through is just indescribable, like a combination of megalophobia/submechanophobia and mystery.
Agreed, these are two brilliant games from Playdead. Apparently they've been hard at work and are hiring for their 3rd title, which I personally can't wait! Definitely worth a buy/play.
Yeah but B listers can make a very good living, often times with more steady work than A listers since they don’t have to manage their reputation as much. They’re the session musicians, or the AAA dev working on his indie project on the side of film/TV. Still they’re also a minority but if you show up and do your work for enough years it’s an achievable track.
Many people only play free phone games. It tracks. I know people on the internet constantly discount it, but mobile is much too big a platform to ignore in discussions like these
I think the market is confusing gambling with gaming.
The two markets don't overlap (or not directly, I'm sure there are people who enjoy both). We pretend they do, but the only thing they share is the technical aspects in producing something.
Diablo Immortal clearly highlighted this.
It's equivalent to saying that soccer and basketball are the same game because played both with a ball.
"core gamers" (the gamers that play videogames) are actually "videogamers".
Mobile gamers are gamblers.
Of course there are also some videogames in the mobile world, so you can find some core gamers playing videogames on mobile
Only went as a novelty maybe a few times before having kids. This drive-in was a godsend since having kids ~5 years ago, and have been going regularly since. Extremely handy during COVID too.
Hmmm.... So is bull fighting but most of us refuse for various ethical and moral reasons...
Maybe we should treat a giant parking lot that goes unused for 99% of the time, and requires people to use polluting transportation when they could use public transit to go to a theatre, as the giant unethical mess it is, eh?
To be fair, most movie theaters in the US have a giant, 99% unused parking lot attached to them anyways. Plus anywhere with a drive-in probably doesn’t have transit.
About a year or 2 ago I started to mainly buy games on Steam (and even wait if they start out exclusive to something like Epic) just so I can get the "free" Steam Proton compatibility for my Linux machines (NixOS), my Mac, and my Steam Deck
The cost per unit is 0. Once they’ve sold a game at full price to anyone that will pay, they can lower the price to near 0 to capture any remaining demand along the curve.
Looking through Steam sales for sub-$10 titles with "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews is a good filter.
Some of my favorites over the years include Slay the Spire, Celeste, Vampire Survivors, and FTL.
Edit: How can I forget the "holy trinity" of mystery indie games? Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, and Her Story. These are brilliant games that really make you feel like a detective.
I adore Return of the Obra Dinn, but didn't quite enjoy the madlibs aspect of The Case or the Golden Idol. However, it isn't necessarily a bad game and it did scratch the Obra Dinn itch a bit.
So many hours spent playing FTL. I was against getting Netflix subscription (we already had 3 streaming apps) until one day I noticed Into the Breach is available on mobile if you have a Netflix subscription. Can't believe I'm subscribing to a streaming service to play an indie game (wife turns out enjoy Netflix though).
I wish I could play Outer Wilds again. That's up there as one of my all time favorites. Obra Dinn was phenomenal as well. I haven't heard of Her Story, but if you're putting it in the same league as those 2, then I'll have to try it out! It's also only $0.99 on Steam right now.
Honestly, steam.
I look at steam queue occasionally, I also look at "similar to this" section on a game I played (store page).
I search for tags of things I like, I also use the steam experiments (although most of them are integrated) and I make a point of looking at all games on discounts when there are "festivals" in the dedicated festival page.
Then world of mouth.
I also make a point of grabbing stuff only when positive rating is 90% or more (recent) and of things that have at least ~5000 reviews or more.
There are exceptions obviously, but this helps a lot to trim down the things I don't love, my backlog is already infinite.
I can give you a list of my favorites if you want and you can trim down.
As I said, world of mouth!
Sibling answers are good but if you want to go deep, twitter/game dev mastodon is a great place. I try to follow anything that looks or sounds interesting, though it often takes years before actual release.
I've found many good ones just from looking at games with high review score on MetaCritic. This is how I found Hollow Knight and Chained Echoes, for example.
On a side note, it's quite astounding what just a handful of people, sometimes a single individual, can accomplish. It becomes quite clear that the main limiting factor when trying to create a good game is simply your own imagination and creativity. A large team with a huge budget seems to be just as much of a curse as it is a blessing.
Cannot recommend Adam Millard's youtube channel enough.
Every year he reviews his top games, many of them make it to my wishlist.
ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Eo7fwGBJ4
You can have a look at other years as well.
My personal method is to find a Youtuber who you enjoy watching that has similar taste to you and plays a variety of games. Also gives you a preview to decide whether you like a particular game or not.
>I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog.
I've actually kept track how much money I've splurged on PC games this year. I've spent 420.10€ directly on Steam and I have 56 direct Steam Store game acquisitions in my license history. Outside of Steam, I've spent 111.30€ and I have 151 "Retail" acquisitions (which aren't all games since "Forza Horizon 5 Oreo Zonda" is in there). So a total of 531.40€ spent and 207 product activations.
Feels pretty cheap considering previously I used to buy actual physical box copies of PlayStation games, and those were generally not cheap. Average game price for those is like close to $40.
Is the base model EMMC able to be removed to install NVMe? I was mulling over picking up either a Steam Deck or a Realforce R3 on Friday and still haven't decided.
Edit: Looked it up. Yes, its storage is 100% upgradable.
Yep, that’s the route I took. Bought cheapest steamdeck model on sale, took the chance on a 2TB stick from aliexpress and have been very satisfied so far. Link to the 2TB I bought, which is now roughly 15% off: WD SN740 2TB
https://a.aliexpress.com/_ms4e8NQ Only concern I had was that this retailer did not ship it in antistatic wrap. Another one my brother got did ship in antistatic wrap though. It’s aliexpress, what can you do.
Thanks, just bought a base model + dock. I've got a bunch of 128GB SDs, and my only current plans are to use it for PC-98 emulation, so load times shouldn't be a problem.
You can work around this somewhat by moving things to external storage and they symlinking it back to the original spot (or so I've heard, I have the top end model and haven't filled it up yet).
only issue with microsd is very slow writing speed. For games that are in the dozens of gigabytes you will wait a LOOOOONG time for the process to finish,
The only caution I would advise is that the fan loves to jam on mine post installation of the WD. The Steam Deck will run but throttle viciously. The problem disappears with reinsertion of the stock eMMC or a little 256GB module.
The only solution I found was to simply not screw in the rear outer enclosure screws fully tight, or to replace the cover with the JSAUX unit that includes an additional heat spreader.
I mostly play managemen/city builder style games like Cities Skylines or Factorio. Have you tried any of those types of games and if so what's been your experience?
I play a ton of these on Deck. Very satisfied with it. I am also a pause - command - unpause kind of player though. But the trackpads work better than you'd expect, and often have community layouts for the controller than add things that make it even nicer than playing with mouse and keyboard (the rotary menus for city overlays are awesome)
“Better than you expect” but still not ideal. It’s doable, but I just don’t get the same enjoyment out of mouse heavy games. But with cloud save it can be great to dip in when not at the computer
The dock is not too bad an experience either. I have played RTS/strategy games on the deck using the dock/mouse/keyboard/monitor. It's a bit fiddly getting the resolution to work well on the monitor, the deck has everything optimized for its own screen size, and anything bigger than 720 makes it sweat. But it does work, and especially for older titles, it's great.
It does enough of what I wanted from my gaming PC, that I just gave my older PC to a relative.
I haven't played Cities Skylines on the Deck, but other mouse + some keyboard management games (Victoria, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron 4 (to a lesser extent), Football Manager) are perfectly fine. It takes some adjustment to get the proper layout that makes sense with any shortcuts you might want (e.g. pause, adjust speed, open this or that menu) but they work perfectly fine.
the trackpads work well with these kind of games. As long as you don't expect to act in urgency - typically building / management games work very well with this device.
That sounds like a bold statement. I would imagine the large majority of players of any mass-market title don’t know about or use any non-built-in mods.
It's going to depend on the game. Games like Skyrim are essentially just modding sandboxes, and you can measure this at least reasonably objectively. SkyUI is a single extremely popular mod for Skyrim. It's been downloaded by 6.5 million unique users from a single site hosting it [1], another 1.5 million on the Steam workshop, and who knows how many others from everywhere else.
That is almost certainly a vast majority of PC users using that single mod! This is also probably why Bethesda tried to make 'paid mods' a thing, and bring them over to consoles. Not only does PC seem to be their best selling platform, but people are largely buying Skyrim to mod it, and Bethesda wanted to try to start taking a cut of it.
On the other hand I'd completely agree with you for games where modding isn't so well supported. That results in more technical issues, and less impressive mods. I mean in games like Skyrims you have literally entirely new and complete games built as 'mods.' Some even get their own independent releases, like Enderal [2], which many would claim is [vastly] better than Skyrim itself.
~8 million downloads (and thats assuming duplicates don't get recounted?), vs 60 million copies sold [1] is still barely ~15%. This might mean that for PC, its more like 8 million out of 16 million and 50% of PC players are modding.
So in a best case, it's 50% of PC players (which may apply to steam deck), or worst case, less than 15% of all players (which may also apply to steam deck).
It didn't sell anywhere remotely near 60 million. That was an offhand comment from Todd Howard who was being a bit misleading. He was mixing all the different versions of Skyrim (Skyrim, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Special Edition) and calling them simply Skyrim as a whole. It's like saying "Mario" has sold a billion copies. If you're not familiar with the series, those aren't like 'game of the year' type collections, but distinct incompatible binaries. Each has their own incompatible mods.
I'm only talking about "Skyrim", the original game. It sold in the ballpark of ~25 million, with a probable plurality on PC - so somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million there. And no, like I mentioned, the download numbers are unique users - not total downloads. The total modding userbase is also going to be well upwards of 8 million. There are lots of reasonably sized non-English Skyrim modding sites also hosting SkyUI, and there's probably at least a small number of modders that have never installed that specific mod.
Most of the sales of the "original" Skyrim were on Xbox 360 if sources are to be believed, Wikipedia has the 360 version as selling 13.7 million put of 23. And the PS3 version may have even outsold PC. Obviously anecdotal but that's where most of my friend base played it too.
I think it's fairly safe to say that those numbers are unlikely. One of the only real specific, and accurate, figures we can rely on is Bethesda in late 2011 saying they'd shipped (not sold) 10 million copies to retail (which excludes PC). In 2013 they stated that 20 million copies had been sold (which would include PC). The two notes I'd add here is that they never gave anymore shipped numbers, which means they probably never broke another meaningful benchmark on it, and that console titles (with very few exceptions) are overwhelmingly front loaded in sales.
I'm quite confident on the PC sales, because there's an oddly consistent little metric. For games that sell beyond a minimum amount, about 1 in 60 players tends to leave a written review. So total sales tends to be in the ballpark of written_reviews * 60. For Skyrim, that's 180,000 reviews or 10.8 million sales [1]. Linked because the game's been unlisted since the Special Edition came out. That metric also matches the mod count near perfectly, as well as Bethesda's sales announcements, and also their behaviors like trying to do things like create 'paid mods' (and the predictable backlash it entailed). So I'd estimate reasonable figures would be around 10 million on the PC, and a 2:1 360:PS3 ratio for the remainder. So you end up with somewhere around 10 million, 7 million, 4 million, with a variance probably in the range of something like 30%.
It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders, it's what kept the game alive. For example, you can only unlock 11% of a map without a mod and even "mod free" playthroughs you'll find on YouTube still have to use a couple of them that don't affect the gameplay.
Sure, there are console players that have no means of installing a mod, but I'd be shocked if even 10% of PC players didn't use at least a couple.
> It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders
After being just about finished with the game, I decided to try some mods. Things that should address pain points, like indeed not actually being able to use most of the map, and traffic management.
The traffic turned into so much micromanagement to get cars to pick the right lane, and every time you made a change anywhere it required updating half a dozen other intersections as well, it just wasn't fun to grow the city bigger than possible in vanilla.
I remember one of the last games being an attempt at public transport only, where housing and shopping and such were accessible only by taking the subway. That worked super well in some aspects, and it's fun to design the mass transportation systems to underpin that city, but Skylines is so much geared towards vehicles that I didn't feel this was a proper city either. (From what I remember of a single game I played five years ago.)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say: based on my own and my girlfriend's experience, not everyone plays with memory-hungry mods, or any mods at all
yeah same experience for me, my wife bought me one kinda randomly as a gift and while I'm not a huge gamer I've kinda fallen in love with the Steam Deck. It works well with my lifestyle since I can just kinda pick it up wherever play for a bit and then do something else, also it runs emulators very well so I've had a chance to catch up on some classics as well.
I had the same experience with the Nintendo Switch. I'm not a gamer at all and don't really care for graphics.
As the Switch runs on pretty standard but outdated hardware, every game studio will basically port yesteryears games to it to squeeze some final bucks out of them. Meaning I can enjoy those games on the cheap ($10-30 mostly).
It's an astonishing achievement from Valve. The plug-and-play nature is truly miraculous...I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box. I'm a very happy Deck owner from day one, despite having a relatively powerful gaming PC and a Switch.
As a dad with two very young kids I don't get much time for gaming, but the Deck helps me find that time and I am loving playing through some of my backlog of controller-friendly games.
Also a plug for https://www.protondb.com/ which has thousands of user-submitted reviews and optimization fixes/tweaks for playing games on the Steam Deck.
There's so much discourse focused on playing the biggest games on max settings that it can be easy to forget the sheer number of older or non-AAA games that work just fine on modest specs. Or games that work fine if you bump down to medium/low.
Oddly enough that is partially to the credit and fault of Sony/Microsoft. games have been stuck targeting 2013 hardware for a very long time, longer than any other generation prior. But it was also needed in a way; the cost/speed ratio of storage was woefully behind the power advancements, and we see that with the crazy load times in the mid-late generation games of gen 8.
On the same end, mobile has been advancing in huge strides and there were more x86 hardware that could run on lower wattage. Valve simply saw a hole that only certain Chinese manufacturers were trying to fulfill, and they used their market advantadge to slash prices. Honestly surprised Microsoft didn't try this first, given their dabbling with Surface (I know Sony has long since been burned out on handheld gaming)
> I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box
This was my first sentiment as well, but found myself in the same exact position as you. I almost was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to playing with the underlying OS, but even some of these heavy AAA titles run really smooth considering the hardware they employed for the deck.
I cannot sing high enough praises for the Steam Deck. I am someone who virtually never plays computer games.
One exception is Flatout 2 which is a game I really like and would sit down to play for an hour or two every year or so in the past ten years. But in that decade I have switched to macOS and even though there is a Flatout 2 port in the App Store, it is 32 bit and thus not playable anymore either. I bought the game on GOG so I can get the installer any time and it doesn't require online functionality (it has a multiplayer mode but I doubt it works anymore) but in recent years it was a real pain to get it to work so I could play for a while.
CrossOver is a legend but this year I felt it was too much effort to even download it and set up FO2 in it so I bought the SteamDeck and tried the game on it. It works flawlessly! I have spent more time playing the game this year than I have ever before except maybe the year it came out (2006 I think) when I played it a lot.
Since that experience I have installed Blood: Fresh Supply and I have been enjoying replaying that classic a lot. It has been like two decades since I last played that.
If it wasn't for the Steam Deck and its specific-purposeness and how easy it is to just pick up and go, I would probably give up on gaming altogether. So if you're on a fence and you are someone who likes older games, go for the Steam Deck! It is a joy.
Ah, I'd forgotten how much fun Flatout was! Used to have a blast playing that, Burnout, and Carmageddon. Lately I've been playing Redout Enhanced Edition which was free on Epic awhile back. Bought a new controller to play it.
I considered getting a Steam Deck, but I just don't see myself carrying it around to play it somewhere else. And if I'm going to be here in my comfy chair at my computer with a big screen anyway, it doesn't make sense.
I bought a Steam Deck, I used it a bit but honestly not as much as I expected.
I did however finally manage to dump Windows from all my machines, apart from my VR sim racing rig, and now play everything on my Linux desktop or laptop. If it doesn't run, at this point I just pick something else to play. Steam Deck has pushed the state of the art of Wine/Proton/DXVK/... so far it's mostly just a plug and play experience, I've not had any issues at all. Often runs more reliably than native Linux ports.
I've seen some post that FOSS dev worked for Valve as contractor. It's great that my payment for games finally go for FOSS developers and they develop FOSS. Also they expand real world usage of GNU/Linux (Linux Desktop!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865
I wasn't a big fan of Steam so I've bought games from random store, but I'll buy any games from Steam as possible.
Like you, I have completely switched over to Arch Linux on my desktop and laptop apart from Windows for my VR sim racing rig. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to play iRacing from Linux, but that day is not today. Everything else has been extremely smooth.
Depends on the games maybe, I don't play competitive online games. Most stuff that doesn't work is because of anti cheat or DRM being intentionally incompatible because it's impossible to guard against kernel modifications on Linux.
have you ever tried using a vr headset, wheel and/or pedals with linux? if so, how was your experience thus far, especially in terms of out of the box impression?
The SteamDeck isn't for me (don't care for mobile form factor). But this work also benefits me on a Chromebook using its experimental Steam support. It runs Steam and games in a container that works well with Proton.
The company that’s really behind Proton [1] sells „CrossOver“ as a commercial product to run Windows applications on MacOS, Linux and ChromeOS with enhanced compatibility compared to free Wine. IIRC they started out to selling „CrossOver Office“ running MS Office seamlessly on a Linux desktop. If you want to support their effort you could buy a license for under $100 and run many Windows titles and games w/o emulation or the Steam client.
I bought a license two years ago and the experience was not good. I admire their work quite a bit, but that little tiny extra bit of glue really makes a all the difference.
I only have a single usecase under my belt, which was to play Age of Empires 2 DE - and I was pleasantly surprised that it was just a matter of searching for it and installing a single "bottle". It felt like magic software.
Proton is really quite incredible as a compatibility layer, I've not seen any performance drops (if anything, only small performance gains, which I assume is due to fewer background processes in the OS), but most incredible is the frequency with which Proton is updated and worked on.
I'd tried gaming on linux before and gave up after a week or two of configuration attempts. I had put it off for ages and tried with proton on a dual boot system earlier this year, and instantly had access to everything installed on windows. It also means I can actually recommend linux to people with older machines trying to squeeze a little extra out of their lifespan, without having to tell them it's an uphill battle to get gaming working as expected.
The one very specific oddity depending on how old the system is, at make sure the GPU supports Vulkan. Yes, you can force it down to OpenGL but compatibility is low and buggy. Not the fault.of proton as they are just focusing on the path forward.
Some people say that a thing how Steam Deck performs good is thanks to shader cache. There's only one GPU(SoC) SKU for Steam Deck like normal gaming console, so shader cache can be precompiled for Steam games, unlike PC.
Valve had a sequence of strange failed experiments -- the Steam Controller, Steam Machines/SteamOS, Steam Link.
But somehow these all came together to make the Steam Deck which is an astounding success. I don't know if Valve are geniuses or just incredibly lucky.
Lessons Learned. The Steam Deck is the culmination of previous iterations. Even with the flop of the Steam Machines, The Steam Controller and Steam Link have ended up as Cult Classics, and there is the possibility they'll get revisions down the line, even if they end up minor niche releases.
I LOVE the steam controller, and the deck is essentially a steam controller with a computer+screen embedded into it. But the software for customizing the inputs are extremely sophisticated and deeply integrated into Steam. I don't think the deck would have been as good without the steam controller.
I also love the steam controller but honestly I think its biggest innovation was the community collaboration aspect of sourcing controller configurations. There is a lot less trouble in getting into a game initially if I can browse a ranked list of the best configs and seamlessly switch between them.
I wouldn't be surprised at a Steam Controller successor. I think the Steam Link as dedicated hardware is a finished experiment, though. they long since decided to focus on integrating the software into mobile (and probably the Steam Deck as well).
Yes. They might be a financial failure, but my Steam Link works great for me and still receives updates. The Steam Controller also has a loyal fanbase with them being more expensive now then what Valve wanted to clear inventory.
I don't think it's luck. After the Steam Machines Valve worked for years on proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d) and AMD graphics drivers to fix game compatibility. Experience with selling hardware themselves had Valve with the Index already.
To me it seems Valve correctly realised their Steam Machines failed due to software and too many different hardware combinations, and since then prioritized getting games to run better on Linux before trying again with a single device that's supported well and can run thousands of games at release.
The Steam Deck is a success compared to previous attempts by Valve, but perhaps not as much as the initial excitement would have you believe. To put things into perspective, some source[1] estimates that a total of 3 million Steam Deck units will have been sold by the end of 2023. The Nintendo Switch, which probably inspired the Steam Deck, has sold 125 million units by March[2]. This amounts to 20.8 million units per year.
You're comparing sales of a product in a nascent category (PC gaming handhelds) produced by a company with near zero retail presence with a marketing campaign almost entirely focused on their existing (Steam) user base to Nintendo, a long standing retail giant that has dominated the market for decades who follow an entirely different business model. That's not to say they're incomparable, particularly in how they provide value to consumers, but there's a whole lot of context that makes the business case more complicated.
Valve might not directly profit from the sale of GPD, Aya or Asus PC gaming handhelds, but they still get their percentage from every Steam software sale made on them, other stores notwithstanding but lets face it, they continue to dominate that space. It highlights that it's not specific hardware that Valve care about as much as broadening access to their storefront.
It's not the hardware itself you should be keeping an eye on, but rather how many platforms on which Steam is available.
> Valve might not directly profit from the sale of GPD, Aya or Asus PC gaming handhelds, but they still get their percentage from every Steam software sale made on them
But those handhelds, being quite expensive, almost certainly sold much less than the Steam Deck, which itself didn't sell overly well.
You're missing the point, it's not Switch vs Steam Deck, or even Switch vs Steam Deck and PC Gaming Handhelds.
It's Switch vs. Steam, which is available on desktop, laptop and handheld form factors and in the future likely a lot more (see box86/FEX, Chromebooks, Deckard). Valve doesn't care where you buy your games, they care that you buy them from Valve.
Valve don't need Steam Deck to become as big as Switch, Steam as a whole already is.
When you buy an Xbox game, you're buying a PC game. Both Sony and Microsoft's first party output are available on Steam. You can run Microsoft Office on an Xbox, the Steam Deck by default has the UX of a console. Sony and Nintendo are the only companies sticking close to their roots, but as mentioned, even Sony is letting that slip. "Console wars" is a misnomer, an old label inherited from the Sega v Nintendo days, it's not that simple anymore.
Windows isn't the "winner" because Windows isn't an app store, Microsoft don't get a cut of every game sold on Windows, but from sales through their store. That's the revenue stream that matters, moreso than how many Xboxes or windows licenses they sell.
You're not wrong that a lot of people don't see things this way. But they, particularly regulators, probably should.
Exactly. It's a really big leap for a pure software/services company to start making hardware, and there's no way you get the Steam Deck - at least not a good Steam Deck - without the experience that comes from making those earlier products.
But were they failed experiments if they led to this?
Apple did the same thing with random features like LIDAR scanners in phones that you have no reason to use. Everyone questioned their thinking. Turned out they were doing that in order to make the best VR headset ever made.
Kind of wild that Apple have built up so much of a reputation that you're calling it the 'best VR headset ever made' without it even being released yet. This just proves that good products are like 70% perception, and its why we continuously drink Coke even though there's so many better healthier, tastier drinks
>and its why we continuously drink Coke even though there's so many better healthier, tastier drinks
mostly because it's cheaper and everywhere. Even water these days can cost $2 in a standard 16.9 oz bottle. You don't go out to buy a coke because you want the finest drink in the land.
As individual commercial products, they were failures, yes. They weren't kept in-house or released only as dev-kits; they attempted to commercialize them and failed badly. I'm glad they learned from the experience!
Steam Machines never really launched. Index is still sold and hasn't even had a price cut after half a decade. Steam Link hardware was discontinued not because Steam Link was a failure, but because they moved it to an entirely software/app solution which continues to see active support.
Steam Controller was a bit of a bust, but it sold ~2 million units so not entirely. They probably made their money back.
I think it’s simpler than that. They looked at the Nintendo Switch and decided to copy it, but for the PC. Nintendo was the genius involved. What Valve did is why Microsoft is successful. They executed someone else’s idea very well. Which isn’t that easy to do.
None of them plugged into your TV and worked nearly as well as a non-portable console. Neither did the old handhelds allow you to play two player on the same handheld on the go. Not to mention it pretty much allows you to play AAA games on the online from anywhere you can hold the thing. There’s no shortage of innovation or exceptional execution with the Switch.
The history of handheld gaming pretty much is Nintendo. I fully realize the history (and recognize the innovation. That is the Switch). I had the original Gameboy back when it was a new product in the 80s.
>Not to mention it pretty much allows you to play AAA games on the online from anywhere you can hold the thing
That was simply a tech issue. The PSP in 2004 was capable of playing games from last generation. it was pretty high tech for its time, and sold for about the cost of a Steam Deck's cheapest variant after inflation.
It also fit in your pocket, very comfortably. The one thing I feel handhelds gave up in their attempt to reach parity with modern consoles (and partially why I rarely take out handhelds anymore, in lieu of phones). I ultimately bought a GPD Win 4 because it was the smallest form factor while keeping those specs, but It fits in my pocket about as well as my high school jersey fits on my body 12 years later :(
>either did the old handhelds allow you to play two player on the same handheld on the go
That's a usability issue, not so much a hardware issue to innovate around. Even if the PSP was like a Switch, we're comparing a 4.3 inch LCD screen to a 6-7" switch/SD screen. over double the screen estate.
I think the real let down here was Sony not having the kinds of party game software that let multiple PSPs play with one cart, like some DS games did. Or at least, they weren't well known if they did exist.
Talk is cheap. Executing a complex product like the Switch is difficult.
My guess is that 99% of the people posting here can’t even envision the product that comes after the Switch and makes such a large impact. And they did not envision the Switch either. Even though now it seems obvious because someone more creative already did it.
There’s an easy way to prove me wrong. Create the next Switch and become a billionaire. It’s that easy.
Come on, do you honestly claim that “let’s add a way to connect small screen to big screen” is some grandiose innovation?!
That’s definitely a part of a product, but depending on the specifics it might be trivial/not the most important part compared to, say, the actual implementation.
Also, let’s not start with this nonsense of “become a billionaire, it only needs that good idea” bullshit. Sure, give me all the connections and resources to actually be able to even play at that league. That’s just a cheap way to shut down the other.
You could take that position. It's like mocking the light bulb though as hardly innovative because torches got the same thing done.
I get what you're saying, but I think the key point is execution of an idea. If it were so obvious and so easy, someone other than Nintendo or Apple would actually get it done once every few decades.
The billionaire argument isn't bs. If you actually had a great idea, or knew how to execute things well, you'd have either patents or products under your belt. It's just incredibly difficult to execute an idea in the real world. Most people, 99%, don't even have a good idea. The whole thing seems like if you "just had connections and resources" you could do it. But you wouldn't be able to. Most people actually do less with connections and resources. What would your grand idea be? Buy rental apartments? You certainly aren't going to be taking on Twitter when you can lose your millions doing it, and have no particularly amazing ideas for a competitor. Most millionaires don't invent things or execute complex ideas. They sit on the couch and contribute even less than if they were hungry with ambition. This applies to most of us, most likely including myself.
The millionaires are largely self-made, and were hungry with ambition. That's the portion I'm referring to in the last paragraph. The billionaires that keep doing things and making money like Musk are even rarer yet.
The only lingering issue I've found while playing on the steam deck is that a lot of DX8-9 games are somewhat missing a few shaders and lighting effects, I guess due to the way wine approximates them. Usually the dgvoodoo2 dll wrapper is good enough to restore them.
It's quite hard to find a game that doesn't work at all, the most common cause usually being an external launcher trying to mess with the system in ways that wine doesn't agree with.
I suspect the metrics are actually better than reported.
For example, Skul: The Hero Slayer[1][2] is a relatively popular indie game whose Steam Deck compatibility is officially "Unsupported" because "graphics settings cannot be configured to run well", but if you ignored the warning and installed it anyways, you'd be scratching your head in confusion trying to find anything broken compared to PC. Imagining NEOWIZ/SouthPAW Games is liable to have lost quite a bit of revenue because of this seemingly incorrect compatibility listing alone.
I have the same experience. Skul works great on the Deck. I initially didn't even try it until I saw a comment from someone telling me it works. The "Unsupported" tag is intimidating. Now I'll test out even the Unsupported ones.
For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.
One feature that doesn't get mentioned or appreciated enough is the perfect sleep capability. I have 2 young kids and busy work/family life so I struggle to dedicate gaming time. I might get 20min or I might get interrupted in 30s after I sit down. No problem! You hit the power button and it sleeps instantly, and whenever you have time next you seamlessly and perfectly pick up where you were. This removal of overhead for booting and loading the game makes a massive difference for people like myself.
Otherwise, its interface is great and gets out of the way. There is any number of awesome games available and I've found I've played games I might not have on pc anyway. And a lot of games have seamless cloud saves too - for example I'm playing witcher 3 now and I can play here and there during the day on steam deck and then if I have time for a bigger session I pick it up on pc.
Games I've enjoyed on it include outer wilds (CANNOT recommend that one enough!), steam world dig 2, Dex, into the breach, backbone, and a lot of others.
Edit / p.s.: for me it's size is a plus btw. With Kishi+phone, Nintendo ds and even Nintendo switch, my fingers tingle and wrists hurt after a while. The wider and more natural spacing / angle of the larger steam deck means I can play with no such ergonomic issues.
Outer Wilds gave me plenty of enjoyment, but isn’t a favorite. I got through nearly the entire game on my own. Near the end there were two sequences (the collapsing ground area and the sandy/thorny area) where I knew roughly where I wanted to go, but making a single mistake meant restarting from scratch, then sitting and waiting about eight minutes for the stars to align so I could try again. I finally resorted to a guide to navigate those two paths.
Later, I found the final sequence so frustrating that I gave up and watched the rest on YouTube—and was glad I did, because that ending would not have landed for me, at all. It reminded me (to its detriment) of Majora’s Mask, a game that actually did a good job of convincing me to care about the NPCs and their situations over the course of the story.
Funnily enough, Outer Wilds has been on my mind lately, because I just played through Tunic, a different (and for me, much more enjoyable) take on the “play the game blind” concept.
Fair Enough! I agree with you there, and I did drop the game once for a week or three because I couldn't nail platforming sequences. My memory just erased those bits and focused on fun parts :->
Can you let me know about Tunic? I first heard of it literally yesterday when I googled for "Zelda but on Steam Deck"...
I found the world and exploration very fun, but the “platforming” challenges were extremely frustrating for me, and I didn’t enjoy the random messages and the miscellaneous details that you translated. Basically the gameplay loop was filled with things that didn’t quite ring with me, even though the overarching design and story were compelling.
Interesting; I found the baseline Outer Wilds one of the most original and fascinating adventures of last few years. I can't wait for my kids to get older so we can (re)play it together - I want to see them make the same connections and their eyes light up and feel all clever! :->
(It is a bit of a slow burn; but if you've invested time and it doesn't quite meet the hype, fair enough :)
I don’t mind the slow burn at all! I however did not like being forced to do frustrating platforming / movements while having to start from scratch every time I run out of time or die.
I like it. I use it fairly frequently too.
The killer feature: instant on/off AKA 'Pause'.
I've had a single-player game of CIV5 going for MONTHS now. The Steam Deck is PERFECT for pick it up, play for 5 minutes (or a couple of hours), pause it, and resume later.
I have 2 main use-cases:
-couch-playing. When the Wife-unit is watching her shows, or I get bored but still want to be in the same area as her; I can play this on the couch without it being intrusive.
-kids playground. When the kids are at a playground I'll start playing as a way to pass my time until it's time to leave and/or I need to play with the kids too.
Both situations can have frequent interruptions, IMHO the Steam Decks' ability to suspend the game and then let me resume without a problem is incredibly helpful.
I also LOVE that because it's a "real PC", I don't need to fight with config oddities with linux on a laptop. Plug in an external monitor/keyboard/mouse and you have everything you need.
The main feature I notice to be lacking on Deck in this regard is that you can't download updates while the device is "off." This doesn't really affect me personally because I can do background downloads with the kind of games I play without issue, but if I played AAA FPS type games I would probably find this quite annoying, since those games generally have large downloads and also require as much disk performance as you can muster.
I've been on the fence about getting one. The one thing that's slowing down my decision making is whether or not the matte anti-glare screen is worth the premium price, or if the regular screen glare is fine enough inside. Also seen some people say a screen protector works, but can bubble with the heat.
Happen to have any insight on this? $360 vs $540 on sale right now is tempting. Upgrading the storage to a larger NVMe is likely to happen either way, so the premium price would just be for the screen.
I have the 256GB version which has regular screen. Glare hasn't bothered me inside at all in the year and a half I've owned it. However, I have not played it outside - in the shade / twilight it may be OK depending on your personal threshold. In sunlight, forget about it :)
FWIW I've added a microSD card and it's fine. Updating the internal nVME is not on my radar, because the whole point of SteamDeck, for me and my personal use, is for it to be "play and forget", as opposed to a hobby in and of itself :). YMMV :-)
Note that there’s something like 30x difference between SD and NVME performance. Not an issue for smaller games, but definitely something to keep in mind for games that stream data. On the other hand you’re likely not using the largest textures and models games come with anyway.
That was my understanding as well of the upper limits of bandwidth of the two technologies.
But several folks around the interwebs have done practical tests of loading actual games from internal nvme vs external microSD in steam deck, and actual differences were far lesser than specs would indicate.
I'm about to disagree with another user.
The 512GB version (The one I own) is best described as 'semi-matte'. You can use it inside and not worry about 90% of potential glare. Outside use: depends/sometimes able to use.
Based on videos I have seen online, the 'glossy' version is almost mirror-like. So ANYTHING would be an improvement over that.
I’ve had a good experience with an anti-glare screen protector so far. And there’s also the possibility of swapping the screen later, as it’s only something like $100. Although changing the screen is a bit of work, I think.
> For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it?
It's one of the best hardware purchases I've done in years. It's surprising how well it managed to balance "It just works" with "You can still customize/modify/install things you need.". It's not perfect (screen could be better, battery life could be better, it's a bit chunky).
> And how do you use it?
I use it as a "secondary" gaming device. I have a gaming PC where I play games with a Steam library. Since Deck shares that library and seamlessly syncs save games, I can sneak in some game time before sleep, when travelling or when commuting with a lot of game time. When I have more time, I usually move back to my PC where the games and saves are waiting for me.
The fact that it goes instantly to sleep and suspends games is amazing - it really reduces a lot of friction for short gaming sessions because you don't need to wait for games to load.
If you don't play games though... it's probably pointless to get one.
You can install GOG games the same way you do on any Linux desktop from the Deck's handheld mode (usually through Lutris or Heroic). After that, you add the games to Steam as a "non-Steam game" and it'll show up in handheld mode just like any Steam game.
Installing new GOG games from the GOG library isn't quite as easy as installing Steam games is, and you don't get the extra testing and verification for running games on Linux that you get on the Deck.
You do get all of the benefits from the Steam UI, though, like controller remapping and game specific performance profiles.
Not all games from other platforms work out of the box, even if the steam version does. Although my main issue there is with epic that doesn’t provide Linux versions even for games that have them. But then again the launcher is also a windows executable.
Like others mentioned, it’s totally possible to use another launcher. I have Cyberpunk on GOG for example and a couple games installed I bought on Epic.
But, the Deck absolutely 100% works the way Valve intended: I find myself preferring to purchase games on Steam because it’s easy, even if it’s a couple bucks more or I have to wait for the Steam sale. It’s just a better experience.
My Steam account is possibly most oldest active account anyways and I have always preferred it, but if you primarily use another store it might be a bit annoying to have to do all the manual steps for the majority of your games
> My Steam account is possibly most oldest active account anyways and I have always preferred it,
You just made me feel old. I think my Steam account is even older than my Gmail account. It has accompanied me through several phases of my life... I first created it using a very silly username, later I grew up and became extremely ashamed of it. I remember frequently checking if it was already possible to change the username, but they never allowed it. And now that I'm older I just laugh about it as a memory of my teen years.
Mildly annoying to setup sometimes, use Lutris or Heroic as others said but once it's done it's more or less the same as the Steam version. Lutris and Heroic let you easily setup shortcuts to Steam so it will appear in the game UI, you can use all the same features as you would for a Steam game, framerate limit etc.,. Occasionally you can run into issues with the GOG version that don't crop up with the Steam version but usually the Lutris installer does a good job. Heroic is a bit hit or miss IME. Epic and EA games work too but sometimes DRM adds an extra layer. It's about as complicated as getting a game from say 2005 working on a modern PC.
Seconding Lutris. Just install Lutris from the Flatpak store and login to your GOG account.[0] I have played a couple of games this one. The only one that wouldn't install was the first Jazz Jackrabbit which I didn't debug. I have a feeling it was because by default it used the Linux installer rather than just running the Windows executable via WINE/proton.
Installing them can be annoying (switch to desktop mode, run Heroic Launcher, find the right Proton version that works), but after initial setup they run seamlessly. Heroic Launcher also now supports GoG Cloud Savegame sync so it hasn't been seriously problematic.
(About half the games I play on Deck are from GoG.)
I have had mine since April 2022 so I have ~14 months of usage on it.
It has become the only way I play games now. The single USB-C is great, I plug it into the same dock [a Dell WD19TBS] I use for my work MBP and personal XPS which provides dual screen, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, additional USB ports, power, etc over a single cable.
I use it any time I'm travelling which can be anything from 20 mins to 15 hours. Depending on which game I'm playing, I can still get ~6 hours of battery in a single charge and it still charges quick enough. It uses the USB Power Delivery 3.0 standard so any >=45 W charger from a phone or battery pack will work.
This is a bit like the original Switch adverts when it first came out. Where people are playing a game on their sofa at home, then take the console with them to a party on a roof somewhere.
I thought I would never use the trackpads but they are probably the killer input. I use them extensively, they've very sensitive which makes them perfect for fine input controls, and they have rumble motors in them so it feels like you're physically moving something.
The suspend-resume is fantastic, it's very quick and works even though games were not designed for this usecase like they are on consoles.
One complaint I've heard a few times if from people who have already spent a lot on a powerful PC to play games, and are then disappointed that games are less impressive on a device optimised to run at 10W. I was already used to running AAA games on low->medium graphics so in some cases the Steam Deck was actually an upgrade for me.
I’ll go against the grain and say I don’t actually like mine very much and here’s why. I’ll caveat it with saying I got it for trips.
- it’s underpowered. I knew that going in but so many games have to be played at either a really low setting or you chew through battery life quicker than i can manage.
- battery life is pretty poor. Most games give me an hour or two of use. While I rarely game that long in a stretch, it means that on a trip I’m always thinking about battery. The charging port is in a location that shifts the ballance in an unfortunate way.
- you can’t download while it’s asleep or in the background. So if a game needs to be downloaded or updated, you have to leave it lying there, turned on and doing nothing. You can opt to have it download while you play but it stutters a ton if you do so.
- screen is mediocre. I knew that going in but it’s really hard to appreciate how dim and dull it looks compared to my phone screen for example.
- it’s loud and hot. It’s not something I can play silently therefore. The fans are really working overtime to relieve that poor SoC
- the ergonomics are so so. This one is really subjective. It starts out feeling pretty good, but I find the weight distribution makes it really uncomfortable for me after a whole. I feel a lot more cramping in my fingers and wrists.
Now, it was relatively cheap so I don’t mind, but I find myself not wanting to use it unless I’m on a solo trip or my partner is using the TV.
Just to add some context here. Some of this doesn't line up with my experience.
- my battery life is roughly 2-4 hours depending on the game. I'm playing Yakuza like a dragon right now and the battery lasts close to 3 hours
- my screen is plenty bright. I don't play in direct sunlight, but I do sit out on my porch during the day and it's fine.
- I've not had an issue with it being underpowered. I played Harry Potter on it which is a pretty demanding game and it seemed comparable to the performance my daughter had on the PS5 with her copy.
- I've never noticed an issue with downloads and stuttering while playing.
- Loudness is about the same as a laptop or console while gaming. Same for temp.
- Ergo is a small issue for me as well. The size and bulk of the deck can make my wrists hurt after some time.
I’m glad your experience is better but I’d just point out a few things.
Battery life is heavily dependant on the games being played. Yakuza isn’t typically that demanding so I’m not surprised you’re getting more. Playing something like Forza kills my battery pretty quickly.
The screen is 400nits. It’s also not got great gamut coverage. That’s what I mean by it being dull and dim. It’s usable but it’s really dependent on the content and context what clarity is like.
Yes it can play Harry Potter but at what settings and frame rate? The capability to play a game isn’t an issue, it can play most things. But it’s essentially a mobile PS4. Which is great, but it’s also only capable of playing games at settings comparable to a downclocked PS4. Again, something I knew going in but I figured they’d have better thermal management if I was giving up more contemporary performance.
I played Harry Potter on medium-high settings. If you keep the resolution at the native screen resolution and turn off things that aren't needed on a smaller screen (eg AA or super sampling), the performance is better than PS4 and roughly the same as a PS5. Performance isn't really a concern for me unless I'm plugged into an external display.
But that’s exactly it. You’re playing at a lower setting by turning off AA and playing at low resolutions
I’m glad performance is fine enough for you though. I still find it quite underpowered, where every game I play requires both feature and resolution compromises. Playing without AA is just not acceptable to me in this decade. At least not unless I’m getting significant battery life or thermal freedom to compensate.
It's not needed on smaller screens. The switch does similar things. It's a common tactic on handhelds to disable those sort of features as they add no noticeable improvement.
The switch does it for *some* games when running portably and then enables most things when docked. A lot of that is battery management.
The steamdeck does not really have a concept of dual modes, per your own statements about playing on a bigger screen.
And I completely disagree that AA isn’t needed on smaller screens. You can see aliasing at any screen size.
Again, perhaps it meets your threshold of quality. That does not mean it meets mine nor does it mean that the form factor somehow obviates it. It just means that we have subjectively different preferences.
But again, I disagree that “it’s not needed”. That’s not why games will disable AA in handheld mode. AA is expensive and a cost they try and mitigate with art direction that tries to avoid much of the losses.
The steamdeck is not just playing games designed for a small screen. Many games suffer from shimmering and shifting. Whether that’s an issue for you or not is independent of whether they exist and might be issues for others.
I just checked and I have the newer fan. My deck is only a few months old as well.
It’s not that it’s making an unpleasant whining sound like what the older fan was meant to be, it’s that it’s trying to push out so much heat all the time that it’s perceptibly loud.
It’s the difference between tone and volume.
All my other devices in the house are relatively quiet compared to it. My switch, my Macs, even my PS5. None of them are fanless but they’re pushing out much less air at any point.
The steamdeck is fine for some games, but once it hits the thermal ceiling it gets so loud.
> - you can’t download while it’s asleep or in the background.
Are you saying this is something unique to the Steam Deck? If my Linux desktop is anything to judge by, you should be able to enable background downloads in Steam settings. I'm also fairly sure there should be a way to get logind to inhibit sleep during the download.
It’s unique to the primary non-desktop mode of the steamdeck.
If you put it to sleep, it pauses downloads. Out of the box, it pauses downloads when you play games unless you enable a checkbox that says it will degrade performance.
If you switch to the desktop mode instead, you can download things as you would on a Linux desktop with all the other requisite performance state management caveats, and it’s very much now how the device is designed to be used.
As a parent working a full time job - I can finally play games again. As weird as it sounds, there was always a pychological hurdle to go and sit at my desk, boot my pc, select a game and play it.
With the deck, I just sit on the couch and play games - the sleep/standby function is amazing.
Caveat: I'm not a frame rate chaser and I'm not obsessed with graphics quality, so a lower end GPU running at 40hz is perfectly fine by me.
The huge win for me is sleep mode. The fact I can pick up my deck, play during some downtime, then put the thing to sleep and pick it up later, is huge. Couple that with the fact I can play anywhere and it allows me to play during those fragments of time when, previously, it was just too much of a pain to trundle off to my desk, fire up my rig, and get a game going.
And the range of control options means short of a fast twitch FPSes, where I still prefer m&kb (tbf I was never that good, and a lot of folks do just fine with stick+touchpad+gyro or a flick stick setup), there's little I can't play on the deck after some tweaking to get the controls the way I like.
I love it and ended up using it a lot more than I expected (and a lot more than I used the Xbox Series X and PS5 that I bought a little bit before).
Something about how quickly you can turn the device on and off and just start playing really makes me want to play more.
I've been playing different kind of games I play on console (Hades, Vampire Survivors, Hollow Knight, Brotato), just because they also help with the quick sessions.
I find myself picking it up several times a day when I need a break, and even when I'm stuck in some task at work.
As others have said, it is truly an outstanding achievement by Valve. Most things just work.
Of all my electronic purchases in the last 5 years or so, the Deck is by far the one that had the best cost/benefit. And the one that surpassed my expectations.
As a counterpoint to the other comments here - I’ve been quite disappointed with mine.
It’s a wonderfully flexible device, and extremely fun to tinker with - but the ergonomics are shockingly bad. I don’t know if it’s the size, weight or shape to blame, but it quite reliably gives me the worst hand/wrist pain I’ve ever experienced from a device like it. I’ve tried plenty of purported solutions - adjusting my grip to various positions, attaching grip tape to the handles, etc - and none of them have made any difference.
I played it for two hours last week and it gave me such severe hand cramp that I wasn’t able to fully close my fingers without pain for three days. The only way to fix the pain is to simply not use the console.
There are scattered accounts along these lines on places like /r/SteamDeck - I gather I’m not really unique in this respect.
It’s tremendously unfortunate, really - it’s excellent at what it does, but I expect I’ll have to just sell mine and hope that a future revision to the hardware makes it a little less painful to use.
I have the same issue if I try to hold it suspended unfortunately. It gets very painful very quickly. If I lay my wrist on something, like a cushion on my lap for example, then it is fine.
Same issue, I now lie on my couch and rest it on semi-folded legs to alleviate the weight. Works a lot better, but not as great for action games in my opinion.
It's great, just not fantastic (yet). I'm kind of eager for further hardware revisions, but on the other hand, I've already used it a lot when I otherwise wouldn't have had the option to start up the big desktop for gaming (commuting, or even just to use some time in between things). And while I bought a Switch before, the main benefit here is of course the entire Steam library being available, so no buying the same title more than once.
Biggest dislike is the on-screen keyboard. On the one hand it's usable with the two trackpads, but, I still take way to long to enter text, even compared to a phone screen. It's also very slow to appear and bugs out too often. I really hope that that can be improved so it can pop up and disappear without noticeable delay.
I'm not sure about underpowered, I was actually quite happy to install some rather resource-intensive (Windows!) games and while it's getting quite warm, I never ran out of battery immediately, but yes, if you've got to save energy, better turn on all the options for that. And that's actually quite cool to be able to turn down energy consumption on a whim, or with per-game profiles, etc.
As long as they're going to optimise the experience more and not just keep it as-is, because "it works fine", then it could be a really good platform going forward.
Same question for the dock though, is it worth it?
It's absolutely amazing. The screen is the only weak point and I don't mean the resolution, as I'd rather have 1280*800 native for that size than FHD and the associated performance hit, but it's a bit uneven in lighting, especially in a place near the top where it seems to be affixed and I have a hot (permagreen) pixel. Of the rest, the form factor is brilliant, it's very ergonomic and nice to hold. Scaling of battery drain with performance demands will seem like magic to someone used to Windows laptops. The software stack and the amount of control it affords the end user is easily the best part, nothing is locked down.
I REALLY like it. It feels great for a lot of reasons.
I like being able to detach from my gaming computer but still make progress on my RPG games. The device is very hacker friendly—- valve has done an amazing job creating something that is user friendly (versus user hostile e.g. Windows). The device is able to render good graphics without (much) slowdown. I like connecting it to my TV and using it like a console. I like knowing the games I buy for it are accessible on my PC. It’s great.
Screen is kinda small for newer, high res games but still enjoyable. More suitable to PS2 1024x968 era so perfect for emulator PS2 and earlier. For indies or 2d like stardew it'll be no problem.
Form factor is good, no problem so far with controller position. Rather big and rather heavy, not as portable as psp or nds but definitely portable.
Battery lasts only 2 hours-ish for AAA games though, much longer for lower specs.
Suspend and continue works wonder, though anticipate for hang or freeze that you'll need to save before if can.
Controls can be mapped freely for each game which is amazing, 4 back buttons works wonder to add more functionality to already limited buttons. Moreover the radial menu with trackpad is superb.
If you don't have gaming pc or laptop, you'll definitely like this, though maybe you'll need usb hub, keyboard and mouse if you want to enjoy games that doesn't support controller (sim city). If that's the case, slap an external monitor too since you'll need a bigger screen to play those games.
Otherwise you can lie sideways on couch, or I read you can lie on the back with pillow to rest your hand to play deck. Perfect for open world and action games.
Haven't really tried sd card so I don't know how flexible it is to play from it, but I guess it'll works wonder for less than latest AAA games.
> Screen is kinda small for newer, high res games but still enjoyable.
Agree. When rewriting an older game for Steam I ended up in-biggening the artwork a touch to look good on the Steam Deck. Of course the game now looks positively Duplo on a normal PC monitor now.
Can't really blame anyone, nowadays monitor really ranged from small, deck sized to big, dual monitors sized with resolution ranged from 1200-ish for older or smaller monitor to 4k.
Without adjustable ui size the text will undoubtedly be small in some instances.
Just to pile on with everyone else, it's my main gaming device.
The only times I pick up my Switch is for Tears of the Kingdom. I put my old gaming PC to storage because I hadn't turned it on for 6 months (too shitty to bother selling).
I own an Xbox Series X, but the times I can hog the only big TV in the house are rare. The Deck I can just pick up and start playing where I left off. I also take it with me on commutes and sometimes play it at the office to wind down or keep the front of my brain occupied so the rest can think in peace =)
Even if new games became too resource intensive for it to run starting tomorrow, I'd still have literal hundreds of games I can play with it. And that's not including emulation. Combine that with the readily available spare parts and upgrades, I'll be keeping this for years.
People (rightly) talk about how great it is at playing steam games. One thing that’s often overlooked is that it is excellent at emulation too.
I’ve played with emulators in the past but they’re always a little laggy, or the controls aren’t quite right, or there is some other nagging issue. EmuDeck isn’t perfect but it handles a lot of the hassle and is the only setup where I have 100% completed the old mario and zelda games of my childhood.
https://www.emudeck.com/
really liking it myself. I used to not have much time to boot my PC to game anymore and the Steam Deck made it easier to get back into gaming with short sessions - the sleep mode is perfect to leave a game paused and start again whenever you are ready.
Have you done any ie- PC-98 emulation? I've been debating whether to just host a VM dedicated to that and remote in or try running natively on the deck.
Steam definitely has porn games but publishers usually need to cut the actual R18 content from Steam releases of eroge. For some games, you can restore those removed parts with either official or fan patches, but those usually require you to run some kind of an installer executable. And since applying patches is such a pain in the neck in a Wine environment, the Steam Deck actually makes for kind of a bad device for eroge/nukige.
I need to apply a translation patch to my Steam copy of CHAOS;HEAD NOAH, but running the installer on the Steam Deck seems like a massive pain. I think I need to try to just copy over the patched game directory from my Windows PC to my Steam Deck to get it done without losing my sanity and installing a bunch of crap on the Steam Deck.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. I haven’t played one of those games in at least two decades lol. But while on Steam, I did click on a “gameplay” video for some popular game recently, and the gameplay definitely looked very graphic to me. Not that I’m opposed to it lol.
(Also, not a direct reply to your comment about trying to install something on the Steam Deck, but the comments here about cloud saves working seamlessly don’t compare to my experience. I mean, it wasn’t hard to fix. I’m a software engineer and could follow the instructions on some wiki to move some specific file in the terminal. It only took like 2
15 minutes max, including finding the wiki itself and a workaround without having a Bluetooth keyboard. But still, it was more than I wanted to do and I initially thought I was going to go down a rabbit hole. The device is still really good though!)
I think the issue with cloud saves is that developers are pretty free to use them as they wish, and some of them wish to use them in craptastic ways.
I spent a couple of hours diagnosing why I couldn't get save files for a particular VN sync via the cloud between my Steam Deck and my gaming PC. Turns out that they implemented cloud saves so that Steam syncs the cloud saves to Location A on the file system, and when the game boots up, it checks if there's a save file in Location B, it loads that, and if there isn't, it copies the save file from Location A to Location B and then loads it. The end result was that all of my Steam Deck saves were on my gaming PC immediately after I installed the game on my gaming PC, but neither device ever refreshed the saves because the actual save location was different from the cloud sync location, and there was no mechanism to override local saves with cloud saves.
My only real complaint: My eyesight isn't good enough to play on the built-in screen, and using USB-C to connect to a monitor leads to an overly fragile connection when you're using gyro control and just in general moving the "controller" a lot. Often the cable "logically unplugs" for a second.
I fear my Deck's USB-C connector is going to fail in a year, and think I need to use an external controller to let the Deck sit stationary on a desk. I wish there was a sturdier hardware connector.
It's literally the best piece of hardware since the iPhone; and unlike the iPhone it proves that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to "usability for regular people" AND "hackability for geeks."
Even if you have zero mobile use cases, it’s a comfy way to lay back on the couch and stream games from your PC. The controls are very nice and some games feel nicer in a small form factor embedded thing than desktop/TV gaming.
It's been great, as a new dad with a young kid, I no longer had time to boot up my gaming pc. Now that I have a steam deck, I play a lot more games. It's also by far the game console I fight the most over with my wife. She loves playing with it.
I don't mind the ergonomics. I find it comfortable to hold. Battery life is not great but I mostly play at home and I don't mind.
We also have a switch but don't play it that much. The steam deck is just more convenient because of the steam integration and the fact that games on steam are much cheaper and there are a lot more games.
I love mine. I use it both in handheld mode and docked to a TV. It's great for playing games anywhere around the house if you have a few spare minutes. Also great for travel. The openness is really cool. I've added several non steam games to mine (e.g. Plex). It's not perfect though. I find I get a decent amount of lag using bluetooth controllers while docked and some games don't play super well (even "verified" ones). Occasionally I'll use it as a linux desktop too, but not often. I like that it has the option though.
Absolutely love it. Between work travel, doctor's appointments, and just not being locked to the desk or couch, the portable nature has completely changed how I play and think about playing videogames.
I've barely played games the last 5 years or so, but the Steam Deck has been much better than I ever thought it would be and it has brought back gaming for me.
The instant standby/resume from inside any game, from anywhere, is a true game changer. If I have 5-10 min somewhere I can jump into a game and be back in a second.
Another use-case is playing some mouse/keyboard games in the bed or sofa. I've been playing tons of FTL and the trackpads work exceptionality well (for slower games or games you can pause).
Or just emulate almost any older game (and many newer switch games).
Do you want to game away from your computer? That's the use case. Think of it like a big Sega game gear that runs steam and plays most steam games. You could do other things with it but it's literally purpose built to run steam, it's form factor is set up for gaming, and it's big and chunky not throw it in a bag and forget it sized.
It doesn't replace a gaming desktop or even an ipad. It's a mobile gaming console that plays steam games for the most part.
Similarly, I ended up using mine docked a lot of the time. Performance when docked, and outputting more than 720p is pretty lacking. I really liked having a second input on my monitor to switch to for my games, so I ended up getting a 2nd PC with ChimeraOS (basically SteamOS) installed on it. I played through the entirety of Diablo 4 with that.
I like the hardware, but yeah I've had a harder time recommending it to some of my friends because my first question is "do you go anywhere?". Plenty of them say no.
It's great, I've been using it for my long hour 45 commutes by train and I can usually get there and back without a charge (but cutting it close).
I've been playing Nier Automata & Devil May Cry 5. Both on pretty good settings but I've locked the refresh rate in the decks settings to 30fps and lowered the TDP of the processor per game so they both run at a smooth 30 while drawing as little power as possible. It's great for the commutes.
I guess I’m a naysayer but I hate mine. It’s so big in its case that’s it’s impractical to take on trips with me. The games I happen to want to play don’t work on it without hacks and I find it pretty uncomfortable to hold.
I recently got both a GPD Win 3 and 4 and I’ve found they’re much better in all the areas I care about. They’re more expensive of course but better to spend more on something that you use than spend less for something you don’t.
It's a (kind of) portable PC. A much clunkier version of the Switch, which for some that might be a good thing as the Switch is mostly a toy.
It's not for everyone for sure, but it's an excellent way to have every PC game, including emulators, on the go... Which is basically 90% of all games ever created.
Personally I wouldn't take it outside my house, but I could see myself bringing it with me if I were to travel a lot.
I use mine as a desktop replacement since I don't want a full PC sitting around. I dock it via USBC, use desktop mode, and it's pretty good. It has more than enough power for me, and it's nice to be able to undock it and just take it somewhere
I do wish the desktop mode was slightly better when portable. It was a little inconvenient issuing CLI commands from my bed last night. Still better than doing it on a phone screen though for sure.
I love my deck. It's my preferred way to play games these days. For better or for worse, it's also been the reason I've spent more time playing games this year than the years before.
The console like quality gives it a different feel compared to a controller hooked up to a gaming PC in my opinion. The fast sleep/resume also makes it super easy to pick up and play for a short while without having to worry about not making it to the next save point in time.
SteamOS/HoloISO is so good that I seriously consider installing it on my next gaming computer when the time to upgrade eventually comes. It has tons of issues with Nvidia hardware (as with any kind of Linux distro) but other than that it's one of the first times I've seen Linux for the mainstream done right. Read only system images, all software installed in the user directory makes for a very stable hassle free update experience. You can unlock the system partition if you want, but I intend to keep it read only for as long as I can.
It's not some kind of magical machine that will make you experience fun, though. If you're already happy with the amount of game time you're getting and you don't think you'll use it, don't get one. It is what it is, a handheld console. I bought mine knowing I'd probably spend a significant amount of time on it playing games in bed and on the go, and that's where it has really shined for me, especially when I was too sick to sleep for a few days.
If you've already got a gaming PC or console and a tablet/large smartphone, consider getting a comfortable controller grip for that instead and stream the games over your network. I've got pretty good experiences streaming games over WiFi and even over the internet this way. It's fiddly to set up, but it'll work for significantly less money than a separate game console.
If you've got money to throw at your gaming hobby, also consider more powerful alternatives. I think the 1200x800 screen is fine for the Deck screen size, but some people don't like it. The machine is also clearly optimized to play games at that resolution, hooking it up to a monitor can quickly show the limitations of a 15W chip. There are more powerful gaming handhelds out there, often running Windows and some kind of homebrew console environment, for a significantly higher price.
If you know anyone with a Deck, ask them to try it out for a few minutes.
I bought one about a month ago. It's portable around home which is handy. It's quite big so it's less portable outside of home - but I've got books to entertain me there!
I agree with the standby / sleep modes. Super useful if you need to stop gaming and run for whatever reason.
I think there's a big sale on them right now (I do wish I'd waited a month!).
One underrated use case that hasn't been mentioned here is that you also have the option to install Windows on it and then it's just like any other gaming PC but portable. No need to faff about with Proton and Steam or worry about compatibility, every game on every storefront just simply works.
It's much more ergonomic gaming from the couch or moving around the house, than hunching over a PC. Persona 4, Phoenix Wright, Tangle Tower, Halls of Torment, older action adventure games. Going through a lot of my backlog as it's easy to just pause and come back in small increments.
I love it. In fact I haven't turned on my PC with the intent to play games since I bought the deck. I highly recommend it particularly if you have a busy schedule and want to be able to jump in and out of a game once in a while.
I have a huge steam library but only has a macbook, steam deck enables me to play a lot of those games. For some games I even prefer to play it on the deck over my PS4, for example I had a great time playing Sekiro on the deck.
I really love it. Though I barely play outside, it's still fantastic as a portable console. Amazing compatibility backed by (almost) butter smooth UI. Some people pick SteamOS as the number one reason to buy Steam Deck.
Best gaming device ever. I find it funny that some are complaining about the heat. When I am cold I fire up Dune Spice Wars and now I have a portable heater for 2 hours.
Sometimes I find the Proton version of a game working better than native. For example Pathfinder Kingmaker which has some kind of interface bug that makes it difficulty to progress after a certain point because the kingdom management interface doesn’t work correctly. Loaded proton version, no bug and the performance is waaaaay better. Smooth gameplay.
I’m guessing here that native games are often linked to some SDL version or something similar and might not work well with a considerable newer system.
So far I have played a bunch of old classics I brought 10 years or so ago which worked flawlessly, now playing “Return to Monkey Island”.
I cannot spend time sitting at a PC playing games these days with kids around, being able to pick it up and put it down on demand is frankly amazing. It is the best thing I’ve owned for years.
Having written even basic tools in native code for Linux and run into compatibility issues (glibc versions, ugh), I'm not surprised.
Wine is probably the best cross-distro Linux platform, especially for closed source products that don't get compiled for every specific repo. Flatpak/AppImage would also work but that lacks the raw system access that many games depend on (even if that system access is secretly emulated by Wine).
Which makes me both happy and concerned. On one hand, I am finally able to use my main computer for gaming without having to deal with dual booting nor emulation (in the VW sense). On the other, Proton completely kills native Linux porting. Amnesia The Bunker being released only in Windows despite the developers' long story supporting Linux was likely influenced by this.
I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that the win32 API is simply a gaming runtime now. I’m okay with this situation because A) I don’t have to give up any performance (or at least none that I’ve been able to measure) and B) the Proton/WINE stack is still open source all the way down.
It could certainly be argued that I’m doing some mental gymnastics here, but I look at Proton/WINE as simply being part of the game engine. Traditional engines like Unity/Unreal have all kinds of translation layers and indirection.
If it works, it works. Proton isn't going anywhere; even if development is abandoned old versions of Proton will still exist, so games that forewent native Linux support in favor of Proton will still work.
On the other hand, I have Linux releases from GOG which no longer run (sadly, I cannot remember the specific example where I first encountered this). It is expecting some specific version of library X. Theoretically, I could run it if I booted up an older Ubuntu release (assuming I could still install all of the dependencies/drivers?).
According to other sources (ProtonDB), about 80% of a much larger subset of Steam games run on Linux (some worse than others) - next milestone is 90% I guess, a couple of years down the road.
Some of those games 'require' an unofficial version of Steam's Proton which includes support for features in the underlying components that the official version can't ship.
Mostly it's an issue for video codecs in games (patents are the issue here), or games that use a less popular API. (From windows! Which has ~3 decades of APIs from multiple vendors. Let alone 10s (10-100 IDK) different ways of playing back audio or a video, or both at the same time.)
Some of the changes are simply more bleeding edge patches or game specific tweaks that are included faster than official releases include them.
In theory it doesn't matter, but in practice there are issues. On other distros like stock Ubuntu you won't have Flatpak out of the box and would need to set that up. Likewise on some distros you would have to worry about alternative repos or package architectures.
You get a recent kernel + mesa + vulkan which means a recent proton shipped with steam can use all the extensions it wants for efficiency.
Recent kernels also contain a few features specifically designed to aid wine.
No, Steam comes with everything you need for games. Other launcher work great using Lutris.
Apps like Lutris, Spotify Yuzu are on the Discover app store which uses flatpak. Flatpak is on many distros already installed or can be installed manually.
(PS: The Steam Deck's OS isn't even Arch Linux. It's based on it and uses Arch packages, but updates come from Valve through their own update mechanism with a read only file system. It's like calling Ubuntu Debian just because Ubuntu pulls packages from Debian Testing.)
The steam deck is great, but I still think it's lacking in support for peripherals. For example, racing wheels, yokes and rudder pedals are inconsistent. My Saitek yoke works, but the rudder pedals cannot be detected. I wouldn't be that bothered if neither one worked, but the inconsistency makes it a lot worse. A "no maintenance" sign on a dirt road is far superior to a well-paved road leading to a sheer cliff.
It's an impressive technical achievement, no question, but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE).
So I wonder about the metric for "playable" -- is a 4x greater chance of crashing when using your Steam Deck vs your PC still "playable"? And I wonder if players, who can't tell if a crash is related to emulation or a bug in the game, will blame the game developer when it isn't really fair to hold them accountable.
Depends on how much it's crashing in the first place. The difference between a 1/2500 event and a 1/10000 event is probably not going to be noticed, but the difference between a 1/2 and a 1/8 event probably is.
> but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE).
Do Windows games work on Linux? No, there's little Valve can do to change that, bless their hearts. But it's a very Reddit Social Media friendly statistic. It doesn't square with the reality from people like you, who actually make games with an audience.
And anyway, if you want to build for Linux, use Unity, so Proton is kind of a moot point, and also, you'll be doing that to sell on Switch anyway, porting your game like Vampire Survivor, Slay the Spire, etc. did, if you care about that audience. Vulkan will be fully deprecated before Proton can substantively reimplement enough Windows for non-middleware games. And anyway, Vulkan is awful, it's poorly supported by all the vendors, including Valve's own, but again, it doesn't matter.
The bigger picture: Steam already sells so many copies of games to so many people who spend 0 minutes playing those games. The idea of playing a game is enough to sell it. So in a sense, does it matter if your game doesn't work for the people who bought it? Like in the sense of objective reality?
RGB? People buy that stuff. It wouldn't be on everything if it didn't sell.
The Steam Deck is a cozy idea of gaming people like to buy. They could also blow $300 on a video card overpowered for playing Overwatch and League. These trends don't make sense in an objective reality, but the product is already psychological for so many people.
Brad Wardell, pariah and guy who was, ultimately, totally utterly right, figured this out ages ago:
> You focus on people who buy your stuff... One of the jokes... is how "ugly" WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place.(https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/303512/piracy-pc-gamin... 2008)
And anyway, who cares? At the end of the day, you go and buy Windows on your handheld. Would people spend $15 on an OEM license of Windows for the Deck to have their games not have this problem? Probably. It is good for the planet that Valve is trying to make WINE emulation work, but it's not doing anything for the consumer - Unity is, middlewares are - and it's not doing anything for the game developer - more games would sell if it was just Windows - so really, pass your judgement in an objective reality. I really don't see the point of DXVK.
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but also not kidding. I realize the deck is not a desktop, but this is by far the most penetration Linux has had on something that is actually a consumer facing computer (vs an appliance).
The Linux desktop is still a subpar experience compared to Windows 10+ or macOS - that said, it is definitely now a viable platform for "PC gamers" who want to move away from Windows for whatever reason - or eg. devs like me who use Linux to code and who may be tired of dual booting.
That said for me if it works 95% of the time, I still prefer dual booting. I spent a few months trying Steam on Ubuntu and it was great - I was surprised just how transparent the experience was since Steam handles Proton/Wine etc for you.
But after seeing limitations like Oculus software to do some Quest + LInk PC VR, or Steam VR etc. I was like, I 'm just going to keep Ubuntu as my daily OS to surf and code etc, and I will reboot into Windows for gaming. Then I dont have to worry about any of the small print.
But I am hopeful. Those are great developments and within a few years we might see all the VR as well supported with no hassle in Linux.
BUT... interestingly with the recent developments on macOS, and their own "proton like" API - the macOS platform may also become a viable one... who knows.. if it works with external GPUs for example.
This is amazing news, and I've found that thanks to Proton patches being upstreamed by Valve and CodeWeavers, not to mention the Wine community, that games that run on Proton tend to run using vanilla Wine as well, thus improving compatibility for Wine in general!
As someone who doesn't use Steam and Steam Deck, what's the difference between "playable" and "verified"? I.e. what kind of bugs or unsupported features am I likely to encounter when I play one vs the other?
Cannot speak for Steam Deck, but now in July '23, pretty much all games work with Proton out of the box, (with between -10% and 15% performance loss) unless the game maker purposefully made the game unplayable on Linux (some AAA titles anti cheats for example).
And then, as a Linux user, you can just return any game you like, past the return window, by marking 'doesn't work on my system ' in the return wizard.
Sad thing that often the games that have the 15% performance hit are the ones most demanding of your hardware. It's also wierd playing some games on Linux, because clicking both left and right mouse button causes a middle click.
There's usually some description of why a game is marked playable, I think by clicking on the yellow symbol you'll get the lost of reasons.
The most common reasons are requires using the on-screen keyboard and small fonts. Some playable games are completely fine: Occasionally I find a game that only requires using the keyboard once or twice but is still marked 'playable'.
The difference is not huge. The big one is that, to be "Verified", there are some usability criteria that need to be met (the game's text needs to be legible on the Steam Deck screen, you need to be able to launch the game without any hacky tweaks like clicking around in a launcher using the touch-screen or something, the game needs to basically work out-of-the-box with the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, etc) and if those aren't met then they will provide a 'blurb' which explains which ones are missing.
Other than that, I have found that lots of games which aren't "Verified" play perfectly, and some games which are "Verified" don't launch at all (because Valve said 'hey! it works!', gave it the Verified badge, and then a month later the developers pushed out an update for the game which broke something for Steam Deck users).
Playable most of the time means "this game requires a keyboard, so remember to press Steam+X for the on-screen keyboard when you're asked to enter your character name", or "fonts are a bit small on the small screen", or "there's no built-in performance preset, so you'll have to set it to medium manually".
Essentially, complete non-issues most of the time.
It honestly varies by game, but in my experience "Playable" is usually a great to okay experience but has small text, a launcher you need to use a touch screen for, or maybe only partial controller support.
Game breaking bugs are rare in playable titles from what I've seen.
The majority of games I play on SD are "only" playable and it's still a great experience.
It varies quite a bit, and there are some items that are pretty minor that will cause a game to not be officially verified. For example, some of the 2D Final Fantasy games run very well without any issues on the Steam Deck, but are only listed as playable because they require the use of the on-screen keyboard to enter in character names.
Not all the time, but sometimes, it's as simple as the game having a dialogue or launcher that is awkward to control on the touchscreen - but the game runs fine.
Forza Horizon 4 is Playable rather than Verified because of the Xbox Live sign in window at the start, but after that goes away it's flawless.
I have the 'higher' version and I was frankly astonished at how well it handled Kingdom Come. Absolutely ridiculous. Yes, it does get hot when I do that. Normally, I use it to play path of exile when I am down.
I can only join the praise for the Steam Deck. For the launch of Diablo4 I bought a 3k gaming laptop which I returned because the Steam Deck was the superior experience for me.
Do you know: titles with a native elf/linux build which does not run in the official steam runtime won't be validated.
Some titles are getting c++ ABI/glibc issues because if they build "outside" the steam official steam runtime they will be hit full frontal by c++ and glibc planned obsolescence (they would have to control in a fine grained way the symbols/versions they link their binaries with... feature not provided by the sourceware binutils...).
I mean, Steam/linux32 is the "platform" to release games on for linux. As much as I'd like to compile random game binaries on my own machine with my own glibc that's probably never going to happen.
Some devs do link their elf/linux binaries on arch elf/linux, and then have symbol version issues once running in the steam runtime.
They have to link with the steam runtime and not with the arch elf/linux binaries.
I'm very curious about the Steam Deck (especially because it runs Linux), but it's just too big for my taste. There are other companies making very similar devices (which are often more powerful too) that are smaller (like Ayaneo [1]), but so far they are all running on Windows. (Seems like they are making their own Linux-based OS though.)
If you have a friend with a Steam Deck, I highly recommend just giving it a shot.
I thought my Switch was too big and even got a Switch Lite, then when I got a Steam Deck (“worst case I’ll just dock it”) it was so much nicer. The grips cancel some of the size out, and it’s more comfortable (to me) than my (full size) Switch, despite the weight differences.
I wish there was a Switch Lite-sized one capable enough, though. But so far it’s all either: throttle, low battery life, no support, or extremely expensive (e.g.: the $1000+ ones).
I have the body of a large 13 year old, and I'm so glad I got a switch instead. What Valve has accomplished is amazing, but my friend has a Steam Deck and it's just too heavy for me. 5 minutes in and I could feel the strain.
The switch controllers, when decoupled, fit my hands perfectly without weighing anything. It works much better for me and my puny wrists.
This is really cool for Linux! Hopefully as people figure out the SteamDeck is a PC running Arch and KDE, the Steamdeck will become some folks' computer. Of course, the Steamdeck doesn't have a screen reader, so I'd have to put Windows on it, which kinda defeats the purpose, but I'm glad other people can enjoy a mainstream Linux machine.
I think they were planning to support the first generation fairly long-term, so you probably don't want to wait for a Steam Deck 2.
I think I've seen people that can't get their hands on it through "official" means get their own by arranging a delivery through someone else on Reddit for instance. I don't know if you'd be comfortable with that solution though.
EDIT: they are planning to support the Steam Deck long-term, but they said nothing about the first generation -- my bad[1].
The long tail of Steam (PC) games aren't really made for small screens and controllers. For a game to be "verified", it needs to fully support controllers, have readable text on a 8" 1280x800 screen and run well on Deck's hardware using Proton.
As more older Steam games went through the process, less % of games actually fulfill those conditions (main reason I'm personally seeing is either "small text" or a launcher that requires use of mouse to click "Play" before the game starts).
I believe too they don't even waste time verifying indie games that have too few sales. My game was written for the Steam Deck but I don't hope to ever get my title "verified". I inly sold maybe 200 copies, ha ha.
I did for the Linux port (using CLion and CMake files). But as I've said, I ended up dropping it before shipping since Proton on Steam Deck ran my Windows port so well.
In the end, perhaps sadly, the Steam Deck was for testing only. I rarely boot into the Desktop any longer.
CMake, BTW, was a great way for someone like me who does not know Visual Studio to get something working on Windows. (Xcode is familiar to me so I didn't bother trying to generate the Xcode project from CMake.)
SDL2 is the amazing framework I found for cross-platform development. Just the right level of abstraction for my code-it-in-C game projects.
Funny enough I am also working on a game project and use SDL2 for the cross-platform aspects (I don't need to learn some incredibly specific IDE, I get the control, but it abstracts away all the more boring stuff), but I specifically want to target the Steam Deck for my next PC game project.
It seems like a lot of games that would be green/verified are classed as yellow/playable solely because of small text, which is equivalent to being verified if you use your docked Steam Deck as a cheap gaming PC first and a handheld second.
They probably have put the most effort into making popular games work, but as time as gone one, they've tried to “verify” more and more less popular games. I'm assuming here that there is a missing “not previously reviewed” segment in the graph, i.e. there are less games at the start than at the end.
There's a finite amount of validation effort available and presumably in the early days there was a focus on highlighting the games that best demonstrated the Deck's selling points. It stands to reason that as time goes by and the low hanging fruit has been picked, validation effort instead goes into more and more obscure or less obviously Deck friendly games.
Because the ratio of verified was too optimistic in the beginning - and potentially the current ratio is closer to the reality, with a minority of games released on PC actually made to work well on a smaller screen.
Note that requiring a launcher, or keyboard input also make the games land in playable territory even though it works perfectly otherwise.
1. Hardware requirements increase with time while the platform being verified against remains the same. They may run... just not well due to hardware limitations
2. Varies depending on how many games implement incompatible things like certain anti-cheats. Admittedly, this may only account for a small amount. They come/go in waves -- eg: looter/shooter trend
3. Steam Deck verified is a more strict qualification than Linux in general; tiny screen/resolution, gamepads, etc.
4. Finally, inconsistency between the rate-of-verification and rate-of-addition - these are not locked
Probably more, these are what immediately come to mind
My theories: (1) Steam got a lot of new games. (2) Compatibility issues found deep inside games. (3) No compat issues, but issues with Steam Deck specifically.
I'm currently using a Steam Deck to play through Diablo IV and it's absolutely amazing how well Diablo IV runs. Once you get it working, it works great.
That being said it did take me an unbelievable amount of tinkering to get it to work. And unfortunately SteamOS comes with all of the typical bugginess you would expect from a Linux OS baked into a handheld device (keyboard disappears, trackpads stop working randomly, UI elements overlap with no way of removing them, etc.)
Still, the Steam Deck is a freaking achievement. The battery life is unbelievably good for a device of this kind. If a new Steam Deck comes out with an OLED screen it's a day 1 purchase for me.
Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? There are some tutorials to follow online which makes it easy.
For non-SD users reading this: you can get D4 running in about the time it takes to download Battle.net and the game itself. You basically install Battle.net on the deck, and then create a launcher from within Steam. That's it.
Okay, I'm on Hacker News, what are the odds I don't know what I'm doing?
You don't "just install" Diablo IV on the Deck. You have to add the Battle.net Setup binary as a non-Steam app, or go through Lutris. I chose to not use Lutris and instead go through Steam which requires you to go to desktop mode, install it, and then change the paths from the setup binary to the Battle.net Launcher binary, which means going through the file system to look for it, and the paths could differ depending on whether you installed it on an SD card or the SSD.
Apologies for being defensive. I want to make sure people who read this thread take the positive reception with a grain of salt. I had to do all of this as a brand new Steam Deck user. All of this was made more complicated by a couple of UI bugs in the Steam UI and the fact that desktop mode has a bug where the keyboards and trackpads stop working randomly unless Steam big picture is enabled. I had to discover all of this through Google searches.
A couple more problems: one of the tutorials online forgot to mention you have to change the launch directory as well. That was about an hour wasted trying to figure out why Battle.net was not launching. Additionally, you can't download games with the screen off. That's because pressing the power button behaves like a computer, in that it makes the entire OS go to sleep. You have to literally keep your Steam Deck on in order for it to download the game.
I’m pretty sure you have to install the launcher through wine and then install it. Then you have to configure the right capability layer through the steam launcher IIRC
I did everything from within Steam. Set up the installer as a Steam app, then set up the BNet launcher as a steam app, and done. It took a few minutes, basically waiting for the installation and download.
Is this supposed to challenge the switch? Personally, as a lifelong PC gamer, I've never been able to get into handheld/mobile stuff, or even consoles - its not even the screen size, but the controls and overall experience. I want to be upright in a chair, with a full keyboard + mouse in front of me. I like to use my dual screens to research stuff in downtime or check on settings/optimizations. Is this primarily used on the couch, or in public whilst out and about?
You can play switch games on the Deck but I wouldn't call it a Switch competitor. The Switch is targeted at family gaming with colorful multiplayer games and inoffensive titles.
The Deck is just a handheld console. It's a successor to the PSP more than it's a competitor to anything else. The fact it's implemented as a laptop with a weird keyboard makes it very flexible, so things like emulation become easily available without having to resort to hacking your console or jumping through dev mode hoops.
The Deck is great for use in circumstances where you can't get behind a full desktop, like in public transport, or when you just want a quick session without having to boot/update/log in/load/save/quit/shut down. The sleep/resume functionality is very good, so quick five minute bursts in games that would otherwise take half an hour to load are suddenly a possibility.
It works for gaming on the couch, in bed, in public, anywhere but at your desk, really. I suppose you could also use it as a desktop computer if you attach it to a USB C dock, but I don't think that's the primary intention of the device.
If you're content with your desktop gaming experience and don't see yourself gaming anywhere else, the Deck is probably just not for you.
I see, appreciate the breakdown. I could see this being popular with upcoming CS2 and similar games. The price tag seems a bit steep though. But I guess they need to make money on the hardware.
It's very likely that at least at launch they weren't making much if any profit on the 64gig model, instead looking to sales on the steam store later on as a sort of loss leader. You're really underestimating the amount of hardware they packed into a comparatively small space for 400 bucks.
A friend gave me a Switch as a gift and I really-really struggle finding games for it that I would actually like.
There is one game that I had played elsewhere that I enjoy (Sniper Elite) but other than that I really wish it would have a more AAA catalogue. Most of the games are childish and/or arcade, just not for me unfortunately.
You can drop the Steam Deck into a dock (Steam Dock?) and have your desktop monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk-chair.... But at that point what is the point, I guess.
As someone that has probably used my deck docked at my desk more than anything…
1. Suspend and resume. If I’ve got a quick 20 minutes I can hit the button, change the input on a monitor, pick up my controller and play. No need to shut a bunch of stuff down to free up RAM, wait for the game to start, wait for a save to load, etc. And no need to worry about getting to a save point, finish a cut scene… just suspend.
2. It doesn’t heat my office up a bazillion degrees like my desktop.
The actual percentage is higher. Steam has a lot of games they mark as unplayable that are very much playable with only a few tweaks, but since they don't just work right when you press play they say it's unplayable.
ProtonDB is better, though it does move slowly. Basically if protonDB says it isn't borked, the game will run.
I have yet to not be able to run a game. I have had a couple that didn't launch, but when I configured them to use Proton Experimenal, they started right up. This includes demos for new games that are not at all intended to be run on a deck. I have been so impressed.
In year 2021, it was more a rule than exception that a Windows game would not work on Steam.
In year 2022, it switched. I haven't found a Windows game that doesn't work on Steam. And amusingly, I have found a few Windows games that don't work on Windows.
Honestly, if Valve gives their Steam Machines concept another go with their much improved compatibility and operating system, I think they may have an actual chance. They'll need to come up with a replacement for their terrible Steam controller that tried and failed to be a mouse, but if they just stick the two sides of the Deck together I think they're already almost there.
They'd also need to keep costs down like they do with the Deck and that's going to be a real challenge, but if they can get a controller + desktop out for about the price of the Deck but without the handheld performance restrictions, I think they can gain popularity.
Out of curiosity, did you personally actually use the steam controller? From what I've read/heard, it was a bit tough to get used to, but appreciated by many. My impression was also that the steam deck touch pads were just the next step in [the steam controller]'s evolution, rather than something else altogether.
All of that being said, I've unfortunately never had the opportunity to try it myself, so I don't really know.
I have one. I wanted to like it, but it just lacked. The feedback on the large directional buttons is limited, the controller isn't terribly comfortable to hold, and the ABXY buttons are at quite an awkward position. The trackpad to play PC games was an interesting idea, but it just didn't work for me because it lacked precision or range.
My biggest issue is that the touchpad lack precision that a normal joystick would provide, and you need quite some force to push the directional buttons underneath the DPAD.
It wasn't a complete design failure. I do miss the button on the end of the triggers, that was a smart choice. I find the Deck paddles a lot harder to press than the ones on the Steam controller.
The deck took everything the Steam controller tried to do and just did it better. The trackpads is still there, including the force feedback, but it's no longer used in place of usual controls.
With these lessons learned, I think Valve will be able to design an awesome controller!
It is for me, personally. I moved over in 2022 to PopOS and haven't looked back once. Gaming is good (even better than Windows for some titles, like Elden Ring). Coding is better. Web-browsing is identical. OS annoyances are vastly better. I can stream myself playing Cyberpunk on Twitch, I can edit images in Krita.
There's nothing I want to do on desktop Linux that I can't anymore. That's really kind of insane for me to accept, but it's real. Well done guys, it took like thirty years but you made a good OS.
The caveat is I don't do anything highly specialised like high-end video-editing, which is where I hear the big gaps still are.
The easiest thing to do would be to just try it as long as your distro packages or otherwise manages the nvidia driver (which PopOS does). I don’t use desktop Linux anymore, but when I had a 2060 I dual-booted it with Arch (btw) and it worked fine except for the whole EGLStreams-instead-of-GBM-for-Wayland thing - and that’s since been resolved.
Android is based on Linux but it's still not open source, got a lot of closed source stuff on top of it. I wouldn't exactly call it "Linux" which generally means GNU/Linux
Ha ha. In fact I started out building my game for three platforms (MacOS, Windows, Linux). I have a CMake file and all was good.
But after CLion's free period ended and they wanted to charge me, I started just testing my Windows build on the Steam Deck and was surprised at how seamless their Proton layer was. I ended up not shipping a Linux-only version of the game.
Honestly too, even supporting the two platforms is a bit of a pain — a third would be unwelcome.
a massive asterix for the title - the 75% is out of the 10k or so games tested by Valve thus far.
as someone who's been trying to run games on linux for almost a decade, we are still a long way away from being able to just launch games on steam (in linux or with steam deck) without thinking twice.
despite the progress in emulating windows code in linux, you need devs to step in for weird cases such as anticheat or another layer of DRM companies like Ubisoft and EA put on their titles.
given steam deck's success tho, i am hopeful to see some effort from developers to make it more accessible to just launch a game on deck and have a good experience. even if it might be down to just supporting less powerful hardware.
it might also be a blessing to only have a limited subset of titles given how vast steam catalog is. my library is already too big to catch up on.
Even if it is was available in Norway, it'd probably be cheaper to order it from abroad anyway. I was baffled by how expensive "niche" gadgets are here. For example the Kinesis advantage 360 is 8k NOK[0] compared to $479 in the US, so it was actually less expensive to order from there and pay the customs than to get in locally. This was last December, before the NOK value fell off a cliff.
Disclaimer: I ordered both a Steam Deck and an ROG Ally at the same time, and ended up returning the Ally, mostly because of the reports of the SD card reader frying up cards. If in 2 months it turns out it was all a software issue, I might rethink my option.
That being said, I think the Ally has great potential and some of the problems listed can be solved/mitigated;
> - Windows as the key interface
You can boot straight into Steam Big Picture. It will show you the desktop for a second, for now, but surely there will be solutions to make it boot almost instantaneously. And then Windows remains as your Desktop Mode.
> - very poor battery life (even worse than the Deck!)
There's a tool called Handheld Companion (FOSS) that tries to do a lot of what the right hand side menu in SteamOS does, FPS limits, power control, etc.
It has a feature called AutoTDP which basically modulates power to target a certain FPS average, and it works surprisingly well, shaving off enough power to make the SD and the Ally battery comparable in situations over 9W. Below 9W I agree, the ROG Ally chip just eats more power for sometimes lower performance.
It even emulates a DualShock 4 controller so you can stream PS4/PS5 games to it via Sony's app. (that also enables gyro in Steam games, which Asus didn't care much to add, even though the hardware is there)
> - no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads
Nothing that can be done about that, except maybe yet another Handheld Companion tweak which adds virtual gamepads on the edges of the touchscreen. Very customizable, not perfect, hard to reach with smaller hands, but hey, it's an option.
> - none of the SteamOS goodness
See Handheld Companion above
Stuck buttons were apparently a review model issue; The Verge reported on it originally and a month later, ASUS shipped a much-improved unit. (Hardware and software)
The problem specific to the Ally right now is that it seems to get too hot where the SD card reader is, causing SD cards to fry for some users: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-ove... . I'm sure this will be fixed in a future hardware revision, but for now it seems worth waiting on the Ally for them to hammer out the first-generation kinks.
Still, I'm happy that the Ally exists, both as competition for Valve and to help prove that this PC form factor has legs.
The steam controller customizability is an incredible feature that I doubt any other manufacturer will be able to compete on. It is bananas how fully-featured it is. The flexibility of being able to pop open a radial/grid menu with any input and map the items to hotkeys or other actions... just that alone is kind of nuts, but then you can have buttons that change "modes" and all of the inputs can have secondary effects.... you can toggle between "flight" and "ground" setups...
I have myself barely scratched the surface of the steam input features, but there is nothing that I have been unable to do with it. And that is so important when you are emulating games.
> no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads
Personally I like the Ally's gamepad a bit more. The Steam Deck makes the buttons just a bit too small to make room for the trackpads. When I compared them they were about the same size as a Joycon's buttons.
There's no way I would ever do this. The Steam controller overlay is my killer feature! The Deck controller is brilliant. If they issued a v2 controller that copied the deck I would buy it in a heartbeat.
FWIW you can use the Steam UI to configure any controller if you launch big picture mode on desktop. I've used it to remap my Stadia controller and an Xbox controller and it works almost as good as the Deck configuration.
I say almost as good, because the "Steam button + joystick" mouse controls don't work for very long; the Xbox button gets mapped to the Steam button, but holding that will turn off the controller...
Oh awesome. I suppose you can also do the menu overlays? Obviously there's no track pad to put them on but I imagine could work well mapped to eg a left joystick.
Purchased a rog ally yesterday. The setup isn’t for the faint, as it’s basically a fresh windows install. Tinkered with it and got Diablo 4 running real nice.
To my knowledge the ROG Ally is more of a gaming laptop replacement. Only get it if you want to play online shooters where anti-cheats don't work reliably on Linux/Proton. Or if you want the absolute best resolution and graphics in portable format.
For single player games and people who don't expect their portable gaming device to be 4k/240FPS SD is better in every way.
Yea, I getcha. I wonder how much repair-ability limited the design. Chunkier components is probably much easier for the common person to repair. I wouldn't want to open up my iPhone or Switch as an example, but feel like I'd be super comfortable taking apart the Deck.
Purchased the base model; overall impressed with the quality of the device too. So much more comfortable than I was expecting, I just rest it on my lap. Its great.