Steam Deck: Worth Getting in 2023?

[MGA_Gamer]

I have been having thoughts of getting myself a Steam Deck sometime this year. However, I'm a bet apprehensive about it, mostly because of its high price tag.

That's why I decided to start this new topic, so people can debate weather or not its a good idea to buy a Steam Deck in the year of our lord 2023. Help and advice is welcome.

[GX -The Spindash-]

It all comes down to this simple question: What do you want to do with it?

It can be a... generally seamless experience if all you want to do is play Deck Verified games. You might run into an issue or two, but most games are absolutely fine. It might as well be a more traditional console at that point.

But if you want to try to get non-verified games to work, or play non-Steam games, mods, or emulation, that's going to require a bit of familiarity with Linux, a lot of tutorial searching, and a lot of patience. You will have to treat it as a gaming PC, with all the benefits and drawbacks of using a gaming PC.

Also, with it using Windows emulation, there are a few games that will simply be unplayable, such as games with root-access protection, and PC Game Pass (though Microsoft actually offers instructions on how to run XCloud on the Deck).

 

I got mine a while ago and absolutely adore it. I've played 50 hours of Vampire Survivors exclusively on the device, and it's changed how I prioritize what platform I buy games on. But I'm also a tinkerer, and I like to mess with settings and install experimental versions of Proton to get other games to run, and jam a bunch of emulators on it. I will, in the long term, get $650 of value out of the high-end model I got, but I can only say this because I know how I'm currently using it, and how I'll be using it in years to come.

[MGA_Gamer]

I'm not interested in emulators or mods particularly. I just want to play steam deck verified games on it really, like a traditional console.

[GX -The Spindash-]

Then the question is purely:

How much is having your Steam library available on a portable device worth to you?

 

That said, it'll still take a bit of work and settings management to get some more intensive games to run smoothly. Sonic Frontiers for example.

[MGA_Gamer]

I'm not sure its worth it if some games still run like garbage on it without a lot of work. It's one of the reasons I prefer console to PC gaming in general, less hassle to get the "Perfect" experience.

Some of my games, like Tropico 6 for example, I prefer using with a keyboard and mouse. Games that predominantly use a controller, like Wreckfest and Fall Guys, are the type of games I want to play on my Steam Deck.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

6 hours ago, GX Echidna said:

Then the question is purely:

How much is having your Steam library available on a portable device worth to you?

That said, it'll still take a bit of work and settings management to get some more intensive games to run smoothly. Sonic Frontiers for example.

 

6 hours ago, MGA_Gamer said:

I'm not sure its worth it if some games still run like garbage on it without a lot of work. It's one of the reasons I prefer console to PC gaming in general, less hassle to get the "Perfect" experience.

This is not true.

Some of the more unoptimised titles might require a bit of settings fiddling to get working, but that's about it, and there's already community made resources there for the express purpose of giving people the optimal settings for playing these games, or explaining how they run (Said website being ProtonDB, which has ratings for all games based upon how well they run on Deck).

In Frontiers' case, the trick to getting it to run well is run it at 560p resolution, then use Deck's built-in FSR to upscale back to 800p, granting a solid 40fps with good visuals, which takes all of a minute to do upon starting the game.

For the vast majority of games, they'll default to a graphical quality it thinks the Deck can hold. If you think it can go higher (and in a lot of cases, it can go to High settings with no problem for older titles, and even some more recent things like Multiversus).

For the games that don't work, or has problems, often times, it's just needed to bring it down to low/medium settings. It's a very powerful piece of hardware capable of handheld modern gaming, that doesn't mean it'll be playing everything at max settings 60fps, obviously.

For the remaining games that exhibit issues, there's a good chance Proton GE will fix it - it's a version of Proton that Valve could not include out of the gate, but is a open-source Proton version that includes fixes for Windows features, therefore meaning it can fix a lot of games with problems (IE - Arkham Asylum) and only takes about ten minutes to get (Go onto the Discovery store, get Proton Up-QT, install and get whatever the latest version of GE is).

The only games that will exhibit problems is other launchers, or games with Easy Anti-Cheat, because both Epic and most developers cannot be arsed trying to get the Linux compatibility to work. In that case, you will either need to think about dual-booting with Windows on a SD card if you are absolutely desperate to play any of these games. Mod support and such is also where things might get tricky, but if we're talking strictly about getting regular old Steam games to work, then it's nowhere as bad as them 'running like garbage' or the newer stuff requiring leg-work to get running.

But in most cases, games run perfectly fine and playable, and for the ones that don't immediately work out of the box, there's numerous sources out there that has optimal settings and reports for how to fix it so that it is playable. 

[GX -The Spindash-]

25 minutes ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

In Frontiers' case, the trick to getting it to run well is run it at 560p resolution, then use Deck's built-in FSR to upscale back to 800p, granting a solid 40fps with good visuals, which takes all of a minute to do upon starting the game.

XD Pretty sure that still counts as "a bit of work and settings management," especially if the goal is having the console-like experience. I play enough PC games to be fine with trying to mess with settings, but there are simply a lot of console owners who are console owners because they -don't- want to deal with having to research the community's favorite balance of resolution and framerate.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

11 minutes ago, GX Echidna said:

XD Pretty sure that still counts as "a bit of work and settings management," especially if the goal is having the console-like experience. I play enough PC games to be fine with trying to mess with settings, but there are simply a lot of console owners who are console owners because they -don't- want to deal with having to research the community's favorite balance of resolution and framerate.

Again, even if that's the way they really wanna go - for most games, it will be just as easy as starting it, and going with whatever default settings pops up for it, or at most - going in and switching the setting prefix to high, and that's it. It's nowhere near a lot of work, nor is it close to games running like garbage, which is what I was more so responding to. In 9 out of 10 cases, it's a quick google search and a minute of settings fiddling, which even for console gamers nowadays, you usually end up fiddling around a little bit between quality/performance modes, and finding out what those differences is as well. I just did that earlier today when trying to find out if the new Kakarot upgrade is upscaled 4K/60fps on performance mode or not.

Otherwise, it's a PC, and it's a PC that's running Linux on top of that, and there's a reason Valve have advertised it first and foremost as a portable gaming PC, and not a portable console. You get a much larger library of games to work with, but there might end up being a small amount of tinkering that goes with getting them to run absolutely flawlessly. I'm just saying, in most cases, that amount of tinkering - as long as it's strictly your own library and not trying to jump towards the likes of emulation, modding, fan games, or what have you - will be a search in ProtonDB, and a quick few settings changes at most, if not having to attempt Proton GE, and that's for the games that's not just the usual case of start game, put settings to high, and be on your way.

[JezMM]

My experience is that, impressive as the Deck is - and it's so impressive - it's still ultimately a product for PC gamers who are okay with the drawbacks of PC gaming.  If the idea of having to ever fiddle around for a couple of minutes to get a game working perfectly doesn't sound okay for you, the Deck isn't there yet and you're better off sticking to consoles.

Even some of the Verified games that run "perfectly" out the gate still took a little bit of tweaking for me to get the controls the way I wanted them.  For example, I just can't get used to Valve's default of "keep your thumb on the right stick to use gyro aiming in FPS games" - I had to manually change it to a toggle on/off with right-stick click to more closely resemble Nintendo's style of gyro aiming, since it was annoying me to have it stop working every time I wanted to push a button.  Left 4 Dead 2 is a game that is supposedly verified, but unlike the Half-Life 2 games where I was greeted with a lovely reworked menu system for the Deck version of the game, in L4D2 I had to mess around with the control settings for a minute before the menu would even respond to any input.

And ultimately, you need to be prepared for an overall experience of... imperfection.  It won't feel like you're playing a console.  It's weird to scroll through your library of games and having icons to tell you whether they should work, sorta work or don't work. It's kind of unfathomable compared to the console experience.

All of this is to say, from my experience as someone who plays plenty of PC games?  The above is all negligible issues for the sheer fact that so many of my PC games are now available for me to just play on the couch in my hands.  But if you want a console experience, well, the Deck is amazing at what it is, but it still isn't a seamless console experience, even if it might seem to resemble one.

 

Things will definitely only improve as more people get into the Deck, more new games are built with it in mind, and more old games receive official support.  But it does feel slow going, I think.  Valve's big deal games might all be verified and mostly were since launch too, but it's kind of surprising to me that once those were done, they didn't bother with the rest of their catalogue.  Why, a year after launch, is the original Half-Life and Left 4 Dead still not verified?  If they can't be bothered to get their old stuff working perfectly, why should any other developers, y'know?

[Ryannumber1gamer]

2 hours ago, JezMM said:

Things will definitely only improve as more people get into the Deck, more new games are built with it in mind, and more old games receive official support.  But it does feel slow going, I think.  Valve's big deal games might all be verified and mostly were since launch too, but it's kind of surprising to me that once those were done, they didn't bother with the rest of their catalogue.  Why, a year after launch, is the original Half-Life and Left 4 Dead still not verified?  If they can't be bothered to get their old stuff working perfectly, why should any other developers, y'know?

Put simply, the Deck is meant to be a gateway for console gamers into the PC landscape, and I say that as someone who has barely done much PC gaming, let alone fan-games, modding, and what have you, all things the Deck is slowly easing me into trying.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

I can't really say for certain if the Steamdeck is worth getting, as I just went directly into PC gaming without bothering with it.@Ryannumber1gamergives a good analysis of it, but from what I hear, it's basically if a PC was shrunk to the size of a Nintendo Switch...I might have that wrong, but that's my take on it.

That said, if you're trying to get into PC Gaming and aren't trying to break the bank, I would certainly recommend it given the sheer versatility of PC Gaming alone. With computer's getting smaller and more powerful, micro-PC gaming might become more mainstream in the future to the point that consoles might become more inconvenient when you computer can essentially:

• Play TV Shows and Movies
• Do work
• Watch, Record, and Edit Videos (I saw a video of YongYea doing this with his Steamdeck)
• Play Video Games
• And a bunch of other stuff that I'm only scratching the surface with.

Given the price tag for the basic model, that's far cheaper than the standard Gaming PC which can be around $700+ for just the basic requirements for just a decent PC that can run the games you can play on console.