And if you buy a game on PC, it doesn’t stop being playable in a generation or two like consoles.

But also Valve will support it.

I bought one of those physical Steam Links nobody cared about. They didn't do well and Valve ended it fairly quickly. 10 years later it still gets occasional updates from them and benefits from broader Steam Big Picture updates.

Steam Deck has been a huge success. Of course they'll continue to support it.

i play both AAA and indie titles. works fine, its just not going to run at 120fps with all the trimmings.

in most bigger titles I get like 25-30fps. which to me works perfectly. especially on such a small display.

performance doesn't annoy me. the size of games nowadays annoys me. i can't have more than one triple A title installed at any time because the damn things are like 200 gb now. i long for the days of 30gb downloads. even on big games.

but I can understand how if you're looking for a smooth experience, the steam deck might not be as powerful as a full desktop.

can't agree more. I have no ambition to play graphically intense shooters on my deck. It's for chill controller games, which usually are not very heavy to run.

It's an outstanding machine for little rogue-likes at the bus stop, or some Star Fox, but I'm not even going to try to load something like Expedition 33 on it.

I’d say that’s probably a better use case for a console like a PS5 than a Steam Deck.

While I wholeheartedly agree. I do want to make one small note for anyone that reads this and thinks like I did.

Don't get one if you want to use it for professional audio work. It's a niche use case I know but I thought I'd be able to install Reaper and use it as a little music workstation since reaper is just right in the discover store. Unfortunately, the Steam Deck's audio drivers are basically only good for playing back audio. When trying to do audio work they were unusably buggy and had a bunch of latency.

If you want a little computer to make music with get a raspberry pi instead. Use the steam deck for gaming like it was intended for and don't be dumb like I was.

There's also the fact that even in the future, you'll be able to have a current-for-the-time PC, and still be able to stream to the Deck locally anywhere in the house if you're playing then-modern games.

It just has the perfect form factor and ergonomics to be the champion of that job, and i don't see that changing any time soon.

Can you describe how you do this? I have mixed experience with in-home streaming via Steam (latency, disconnects, inability to connect when the host is running Windows with no monitor) but would be very interested in giving it another go with a Linux host and the Deck.

Like, what's your setup and how does your typical way of using it look like (startup, streaming, etc.)?

In 10 years I would expect a SteamDeck 2 with updated hardware.

10 years ago, maybe? It's a 1 (one) megapixel brick.

They upgraded the steam deck already. And the steam machine already failed once. I just don't think that there exists a console that is high end enough and also cheap enough that pc enthusiasts are interested. I saw a prototype of an old steam machine and just the reactive halo light thingy is seriously so damn cool, but console people look at that and think: well a ps5 is only 600 dollars. PC players look at it and think: i could build something better for cheaper.

It’s a PC, essentially, so the hardware is always evolving, they could upgrade whenever they choose to. The advantage of any console, the Steam Deck included, is it offers a very consistent set of specs the developers can target for years. If Valve iterates too quickly, then two problems arise: One, there’s one performance goal for devs interested in making a portable game to work towards, there’s many. In addition, the Steam Deck Verified program gets a lot harder to maintain if there are too many flavors of Deck to manage. I think Valve is planing on a lifecycle similar to the major consoles.

The upside is it is all PC hardware, and there are other handheld manufacturers out there, some even running SteamOS, so if you want a higher performance rig before Valve’s ready for the SD2, you can certainly find what you’re looking for.