Don’t Buy The Steam Deck
Its not for everyone.
The Steam Deck is Valve’s latest piece of gaming hardware. The Steam Deck is a portable gaming pc packed into a Nintendo Switch like body. Albeit in a much bigger package.
You can get the full details here.
The Steam Deck runs Valve’s own SteamOS. SteamOS is based on Linux. Thus the Steam Deck will inherit all the shortcomings of gaming on a Linux-based machine.
Reliability.
From experience, I find that gaming on Linux tends to be unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, games run fine but they tend to break from time to time. Valve acting as gatekeepers for the Steam Deck will improve the reliability by quite a bit but I believe games will still break from time to time. I think that for a mobile device this is a failure.
Imagine, trying to play a game on Steam Deck while on the subway but no matter what you do, the game just won’t launch. That is infuriating. Not exactly a great experience, is it?
Compatibility.
Since the Deck runs a Linux based OS, PC games will not run on the Deck natively. Proton will allow PC games to run on the Deck but not all games are compatible with Proton. According to ProtonDB, 4 of the top 10 games are not compatible with Proton. What’s more, Proton-compatibility will not guarantee a great gaming experience. Proton compatible games may have bugs ranging from visual artifacts to totally game-breaking.
Then there’s the Epic Game Store, it doesn’t run on Linux. Epic isn’t too keen on supporting non-pc platforms. Meaning, no Fortnite. Case in point, Epic just dropped Mac and Linux support for Rocket League in 2020.
Performance.
The community consensus is that Proton has a 5% — 15% performance hit on games (Source: Reddit). Lower performance can also be loosely interpreted to mean higher power consumption. On a desktop or even a laptop, a little more power consumption doesn’t matter but on a mobile device like the Deck it means that your battery life will take a hit when playing non-native PC games.
Windows.
So what about Windows? Can’t I just wipe Linux and install Windows instead?
The answer is yes but there’s a catch.
If you install Windows on the Deck, the SD card slot should work differently than when the Deck is on SteamOS. If you don’t know, on SteamOS you can easily install and uninstall games stored in the SD card. Essentially, you can use SD cards like on the Nintendo Switch. But if you install Windows on the Deck, due to how Windows handles storage I don’t think you can do that anymore. (Note that this is speculation and it would help immensely if Valve could provide further clarification.)
If my speculations hold, and if you plan on installing Windows then you should not get the base version that costs $399. This is because the base version only has 64GB of EMMC storage. After installing Windows you won’t have much space left for anything else. Much less, AAA games. The minimum I would recommend is the 256GB version. However at $529 wouldn’t it make more sense to get a basic gaming laptop instead?
Mobility.
The Steam Deck to be honest kind of looks like a bigger Nintendo Switch. To me, that form factor implies mobility. However, the truth is a little different. The Steam Deck is a mobile device. There is no doubt about that. But the question is, how mobile is it?
The Nintendo Switch (OLED) is 9.5 inches long.
Meanwhile, the Steam Deck is 11.7 inches long.
For context, the MacBook Pro 13” is 11.97 inches long.
Portability wise, the Steam Deck is actually closer to the MacBook Pro than the Nintendo Switch based on the length of the device. This means that you are more likely to use the Deck in the same scenarios as a Laptop. But then, wouldn’t a Laptop be the more well-rounded device to buy?
Why buy a Steam Deck?
Just buy a basic gaming laptop instead.
