They Just Can’t Keep the Steam Deck Down...
Despite many pretenders to its throne, Valve just keeps on finding new ways for the Steam Deck to win.
Come at the King, You Best Not Lose
More than three years on, there’s no shortage of pretenders to the Steam Deck’s crown. But Valve just keeps finding new ways to make the Steam Deck relevant.
To be completely open, since I picked up the Legion Go S, it’s become my daily driver for PC gaming. It offers benefits like a larger screen, better performance, and potentially even more comfort. But despite the roll out of all these fancy new handhelds, there are still so many people who will just tell you to get a Steam Deck.
With conservative estimates putting the Steam Deck at around 8 million units sold worldwide, it’s precisely that scale of adoption that means the Steam Deck doesn’t have to be as powerful as its rivals to compete in a very real sense.
Valve’s Assault on Windows
Valve has been supporting—even directly funding—open source projects like Proton or Wine for over a decade. Because of this infrastructure, developers have enough goodwill with Valve to make sure games run well on their system.
They can have enough confidence to actually target its specs. We now even have developers like Larian Studios who’ve created their own runtime for Baldur’s Gate 3 to really dial in to the Steam Deck’s capabilities.
Indie Games Still Rock on the Steam Deck
We know the Steam Deck is not going to run AAA games at 120 FPS. One area that it does really excel in, though, is indie games.
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Low TDP Efficiency: The Steam Deck is an absolute beast at low power draws. You can get a really good battery life out of it compared to many other handhelds.
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The OLED Advantage: That OLED screen really does a lot of heavy lifting for indie titles. I’ve noticed a trend toward high-contrast design with lots of dark areas—games like Shogun Showdown look absolutely stunning.
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The Experience: Playing Blue Prince this year embodied the essence of the Deck for me. Much like the game, I’ve slowly unpacked different areas of the Steam Deck and found things that really surprised me.
Compatability is King
The Steam Deck’s trackpads offer a brilliant solution for tabletop board game ports like Twilight Struggle that require a mouse. You also get four back paddles and great gyro support.
But the real cool thing is the community controller profiles. If you are struggling to map controls on any game in particular, the chances are somebody’s already done it for you and you just have to search for that profile and you get off the mark.
Valve’s New Hardware Ecosystem
The overall experience of SteamOS just keeps getting better. Now, with the announcement of the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, that support is only going to continue.
The Steam Machine is claimed to be six or seven times more powerful than the Steam Deck. You’ll be able to stream that power over to your handheld and play with really high settings. Valve even pointed out that the Steam Machine will have the exact same SD card formatting as the Steam Deck. You’ll simply be able to take it out of your machine, put it in your deck when you’re on the go, and have access to all your games with no extra effort.
Every piece of Valve hardware is a wedge designed to further embed Valve in the wider gaming landscape and bring about this shift from Windows gaming to Linux or even Android.
While other manufacturers keep striving to push performance and price even higher, the Steam Deck is sitting pretty and maintaining a really good value for money.