Now that Valve is shipping current Steam Deck orders in some lucky parts of the world, a lot
of people are wondering if they should buy one. I’ve been using my Deck almost daily for the last
three months, and I feel like this is a question that I can answer for anyone that is on the fence.
To be clear, there are a lot of reasons why you should buy a Steam Deck,
but there are also reasons why you shouldn’t, and I am going to
include both sets in this video so you will know if this is the right device for you.
If you like content like this, a sub would be massively appreciated.
I was originally interested in the Steam Deck because I thought it would be a great way to
work through my backlog of Steam games. I have had Steam for over 15 years, and I have picked up a
lot of games directly, or through game bundles in that time. The good thing about these old
games is that they typically run flawlessly on the Steam Deck given how much headroom we have
on the device. I think if you are someone that has invested in the Steam ecosystem already,
buying a Steam Deck makes a lot of sense because it is tailored to the games that they offer. Now,
not every game is fully supported, so you’ll want to check any specific ones that you are
interested in, but I have found that I have completed or played through a lot more games
from this platform that I already owned than I ever did just using a PC. A lot of titles that
I wouldn’t bother with on a desktop are a lot more appealing when played on mobile.
Part of the reason for that is that this device is more enjoyable to play on than a PC with a
keyboard and mouse because of how ergonomic and comfortable it is to use. I’ve already mentioned
that this is something that I did not expect, and I think it is something that doesn’t seem like it
would be the case if you do not own a Steam Deck and you’ve never used one. The best thing I can
say to this point is that the Steam Deck has been my most used handheld since I bought one, and that
use was not tied to making videos on YouTube, which is an important distinction to make.
I used this device in my free time because it provides one of the best gaming experiences
possible. The controls are great, the screen is decent with good minimum brightness levels
at night, and the front-firing speakers are awesome. It wasn’t until this last
month that I also learned the Steam Deck is a great travel companion. This also might seem
counterintuitive given the size of the device, but I found that the Steam Deck
could fit inside the bottom of my backpack inside the protective case without issues.
The Steam Deck weighs about 2 pounds, so I didn’t find this to be an issue,
especially after carrying one around for a full day. That day also included two cab
rides and two high-speed rail trips, and I was able to pull out the Steam Deck and
game on each of them. The screen being as big as it is helped here because I could
easily play this from my lap while still being able to read all of the things on the screen.
Those first two points are important to most people, but I think the price vs. performance
of the Steam Deck is one of the biggest reasons to consider buying one. If you are new to this
market, I can sum up the current situation to help you understand why the Steam Deck is as good as it
is. Valve purchased exclusive access to a custom APU from AMD. This APU combines a very good GPU
with a middle-of-the-road mobile CPU. When the Steam Deck was in development and when it
launched, AMD only offered mobile APUs with older Vega GPUs to commercial customers. Those APUs come
with better CPUs, but the Vega GPUs do not hold a candle to the newer GPU in the Steam Deck.
On top of having exclusive access to newer GPU tech than competing products, the APU in the Steam
Deck also operates at a much higher performance threshold at lower power levels. This means that
it cannot only outperform older PC handhelds based on AMD 4000 and 5000u series mobile chips,
but it is also able to destroy them while having significantly better battery life.
Currently, AMD widely sells mobile APUs with better CPU and GPU combos compared to what
is in the Steam Deck, but those APUs, namely the Ryzen 6800u and Ryzen 6600u,
do not compete with the Steam Deck in the sub 12w TDP range. In some cases, the Steam Deck
can see double the FPS of those processors in the same workloads at low TDP. Why is low TDP
performance so important in a handheld? The lower your TDP is, the less heat that you have to cool, and the less
power you consume. This can mean that the Steam Deck can easily win out on noise performance and
battery life compared to other products that don’t have exclusive access to the Steam Deck
APU. If those are the most important things to you, the Steam Deck will no doubt have the
best price vs. performance ratio on the market. This is even without taking into account that
it is in many cases the most compelling product dollar for dollar at $400 for the base price.
When people buy products like this, they tend to care about potential resell value
down the line. Earlier this year, a lot of people scalped their Steam Decks for
well over the cost they paid, but those days are long gone with resell prices near MSRP.
In a market with ever-evolving technology, one of the biggest impacts to resell value
can be performance improvements from future generations. Consider for a moment that you
bought a Ryzen 5000 or 4000u series handheld for a set price and can now buy a Ryzen 6000
series handheld for the same price. What do you think will happen to the resell value of your
older handheld? Given that the 6000 series comes with a much better GPU that wipes the
floor with the Vega GPU in the 4000 and 5000 series, your resell value should take a huge hit.
It might be too early to say, but I do not think we will see the Steam Deck become obsolete to this
degree by the next generation. The Steam Deck may still have the best low TDP performance on
the market until we get to the Ryzen 8000 series mobile chips. If this is the case,
the resell value should be held up by the sheer fact that the Deck can
provide a good gaming experience vs. other options for the next year or two.
This is without even considering all the other compelling reasons to buy into the platform.
If you are someone that likes to tweak and customize your device, the Steam Deck offers
one of the best platforms available. What’s more, a lot of these controls are easy to pick
up even for novices. A single press of the right menu button will open an overlay menu that gives
you access to performance stats, framerate limits, refresh rate limits, TDP controls,
GPU clocks, and scaling filters. The best part about all of this is that you can enable
per-game profile settings to tailor all of these options to the game you are playing.
Even though I can do most of this on other PC handhelds, the ease of use is a big reason why
the Steam Deck is my preferred handheld for PC titles. I play the Deck a lot at night and I
have created a bunch of profiles that make the most out of the Deck at low TDP levels.
This ensures that my fan is always quiet, and the games are as smooth as possible.
Beyond this, the Steam Deck offers unparalleled customization when it comes to controls and
nothing else even comes close in terms of ease of use and scope. In any game,
a single press of the Steam button will open a game menu that gives you access
to controller settings. Once here, you have countless options available to you
from programming the back grip buttons, to changing how the gyro and trackpads are used.
This customization is what made me like the trackpads as much as I do. For some
of the games that I play, these have replaced my analog sticks because of
how precise I can be with them compared to relying only on the sticks themselves.
For the first month of owning my Deck, I did not even bother with emulation,
because I was happy with the performance that I could get from other handhelds that
I own. When I got my second Steam Deck, I decided to delve into emulation to see if
the Deck could completely replace all the handhelds that I use for emulation
and for PC gaming. I recently did a video on this and I was very surprised to learn that
the Deck is one of the most capable emulation machines out there, especially for the price.
If you are interested in emulation, you should look at that video to get a good idea of what
this device can and cannot do. The big takeaway that I have after filming that video and playing
all of the games that I have is that the Steam Deck can do a lot more than I expected at low
power levels when it comes to emulation. Unlike PC gaming, emulation benefits from a powerful CPU,
which is not something that the Steam Deck really has at this point, but it is more than capable of
handling some of the big systems like GameCube, Wii, Wii U, PS2, Switch, and some Xbox and PS3.
Depending on what you are interested in from that bunch, there really aren’t that many competing
options on the market that are near the price of the lowest config Deck or cheaper. The Odin
handhelds can do some of these systems on par with the Deck, but Android lacks access to a lot
of the emulators that are available on PC at this point. If you are mainly interested in GameCube,
Wii, and PS2, there aren’t many compelling reasons to go out and buy a product that is
more expensive than the Deck, because you’ll have only minor improvements to those systems.
On the other hand, if you are more interested in PS3, Xbox, and Xbox 360,
I would say that you may find the experience on the Deck to not be quite up to scratch,
and that may be a reason to consider something based on a 6800u or better.
There is something that I have not touched on in any of my videos, and it is the fact
that the Steam Deck holds up very well as a PC in times when you need one with the purchase
of a dock. This allows you to gain a bunch of ports that are missing on the Deck and
allows you to use an external monitor. Given that I have a lot of PCs available for use,
this is not something that I have given much thought to, but there were times in
my life where I could see myself using the Deck as my only PC given how capable it is.
The Deck runs a full Linux distro and you can pop into it by using the Steam menu. Once here,
you’ll be in a traditional desktop experience that is a bit easier to use than some other
Linux distros out there. If there is an app you need that is not preinstalled,
you can head over to discover and browse for a free option.
Back when I was in college, I would have been able to do everything that I needed
with a Deck and a few open-source apps like LibreOffice. Everything else that
I needed was web-based, and you can easily install Firefox and or Chromium for that.
Valve now sells and ships its own dock for this device, but like the Deck itself,
it is not available where I live. Thankfully, there are a ton of 3rd
party options that all have various features that make them stand out, but the main thing
is that there are a lot of affordable options out there if you are on a budget.
If you want to use the Deck in this way, but you don’t like to use Linux, you always have the
option of installing Windows on your Deck. I think the only disappointing part about the Deck is that
it does not gain any additional performance while it is in docked mode. It’s hard to complain given
what we have here, but I think it would have been cool if we were able to push the TDP up a bit
higher while the Deck was connected to the dock to get some extra performance out of this APU.
That brings me to one of my final points and most important points. There's one thing
that I like to use to describe the Steam Deck that I think encompasses the product
very well. The Steam Deck is currently a winning team product, and I like to use this to describe
it because everyone knows what it means to be on a winning team. You win games,
you get notoriety, and things are generally more fun because you are surrounded by people
that are good at what they do. That is what the Steam Deck is right now.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a winning team product,
and most of them are things that I’ve already described in this video. Valve hasn’t publicly stated
how many Decks they have shipped, but it should be well within the 6 figures now,
with rough estimates pointing from anywhere between 250k to over 1M.
Having a user base that big comes with some tangible benefits to consumers of this product,
and I want to go over a few. The first one comes in the form of direct support from Valve. This
might be an instance of counting your chickens before they hatch, but this volume of sales should
have been more than enough to guarantee that Valve can comfortably cover the salaries associated with
continual software support for this platform for at least 2 years. And for the record,
it is highly uncommon for any company in this market to provide software support for their
products after they sell them, let alone for more than the initial month of sales. There are
probably only two companies that do this from the products that I review on this channel.
So far, anyone that has owned the Steam Deck has received frequent software updates to the various
channels that you can select on the device. These updates have been a mix of fixing bugs,
updating security issues, and adding new features. I like when I see these updates
because it is a clear sign to me as a customer that Valve continues to value this platform.
I'm sure many of you have been on the opposite side of this
where updates completely fall off and it sucks. It's very easy to
tell when a company has given up on supporting the thing they sold you.
Even if we ignore Valve's direct support for the device, the Steam Deck is an attractive
platform for developers, and there are a lot of awesome projects that enhance the
Deck and make it more accessible. Are you into emulation, but you don't know how to
get everything set up? You can use Emu Deck to handle most of the grunt work.
There are a lot of cool community projects for this device, but I like the CSS loader
for custom theme support, and the VibrantDeck package to increase the saturation of the screen.
On the hardware front, Valve opened direct supply channels with ifixit for replacement parts,
and this is very beneficial if you end up having something on
your Deck break after the warranty is over and you want to repair the device
yourself. This is also something that is not common in this niche.
This is also an interesting platform for 3rd party products given the market size, and you
can find just about anything you could want from skins to protective cases and the aforementioned
docks. I went out and bought a bunch of skins locally due to how cheap they are, and I like
being able to upgrade the dull stock look of the Deck with something new. This is possible on other
handhelds in this niche, but your options are a lot more limited than they are with the Deck.
So far, we have talked about some of the biggest reasons to consider buying a Deck,
but I want to talk about some of the reasons why this might not be the best option for
you. I think the first and biggest reason why you might not want a Deck is due to the size,
but I have an interesting take on this topic. I am not of the belief that the Deck is too big for a
gaming handheld, but it may be too big for you to get enough use out of it to make it worth buying.
The best way that I can explain this point is by pulling up an anecdote that I got from a
subscriber about another handheld several months ago. That person worked long hours
on a night shift and did not have a lot of free time at home to game. They had
some downtime at work that they could game, but their gaming device needed
to be small enough to pick up and play before quickly going back into a pocket.
If you are in a similar situation, or you live a life that cannot accommodate a gaming device as
big as the Deck, you would probably be better off looking for a smaller option. I think if I were
working long hours at an office job without a lot of free time at home during the weekday,
I don’t think I would get enough use out of the Steam Deck to make it worth it for
weekend use only. I would probably get a lot more enjoyment out of something
small enough to carry in my pocket and pull out on breaks or during a commute.
My next point is on the topic of high-end performance. The Steam Deck is a very capable
product, but if you are the kind of person that needs your device to work at maximum graphical
options with very high screen resolution and you don’t want to stream games to your device, I don’t
think you’ll be happy with the Deck over something with a Ryzen 6800u. That chip would also have some
compromises depending on the game, but it has a far higher performance ceiling than the Deck and
you’d be able to access much higher graphical options if battery life wasn’t a concern.
My final point is an interesting take for me to have, but I would not buy the Steam Deck if
I lived in an area where it was not officially available unless I already owned a Steam Deck
that I could use for comparison, or the Deck that I was buying was factory sealed. As many
of you will know, I did not do this and I ended up buying a Deck that seemed to be decent enough,
but it was a measurably worse product compared to the sealed second Deck that I got. Now,
this only applies when the price you pay is over the official MSRP of the Deck. If you live in
an unsupported region and can buy a Deck in the future for under the cost that it was brand new,
it is probably worth taking the risk if everything seems fine when you test it.
But, that’s going to wrap up this video and I hope you have a good idea of whether or not
you should buy a Steam Deck if you are currently considering one. It is a great device, and I think
you’ll really enjoy it, especially if this is your introduction to PC gaming handhelds. I have had
a blast with mine and I think it was well worth everything that I had to do to get one. If you
have any questions, you can leave them down below or on Discord. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.