Example of a game that works nicely on the deck, and is giving me a great portable replay (other than the EA Launcher): Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
Size of that game: ~110GB
Also, personally, because of the slightly shonky WiFi download speeds and that I use it offline/whilst travelling a lot, I leave a bunch of games on there just in case I fancy them.
To me, more space would be good. I am unsure I’d need 2TB, but it would solve a lot. I’ve also got a few hundred gigs of other launchers (battle net) and ROMs on my SSD currently that are less easy to manage than Steam installs… again, the larger drive would just lighten the worry.
They really should have had them as “free” DLCs for a base game so you could install and uninstall them individually more easily. They are at least separated out into folders that you can just move to some slower secondary storage like a USB drive to free up space of ones you aren’t currently playing then move them back when you want to play those games and it’ll work fine, but an official way to do so would have been nice.
The Steam Deck can play more than steam games. I usually keep about 30-40 Steam games installed, but most are really light little games for casual play with just a couple of large AAA games at any given time.
But outside of Steam, the Deck can emulate up to PS3 and Switch games. And theres not really a good cloud-based solution without having to switch into Desktop mode. So I have my usually about a dozen PS2 games, one or two PS3 games, and my whole PS1 library on the Deck. Then every couple months I’ll go into Desktop mode and delete what I’ve beat and copy over new games from my gaming PC.
I’m also not a dock user. Maybe I would be if I didn’t have a gaming PC, but for me the point of using the Deck is to not be attached to anything. Otherwise an external HDD might help. I’m thinking about eventually building a NAS: I’m not sure if I could have games live there and still playable on the deck though?
Ah I’ve looked into such things before and everything I found started with installing tons of extra software to customize the “gaming mode” UI first. So I landed on just using SMB. I tried adding Dolphin (the file browser, not the emulator) as a non-Steam game but it didn’t work on gaming mode. When I was younger and broker such software solutions were more attractive. A larger internal SSD is the more expensive, but also much simpler and more elegant solution for me. I DO wish there were more basic utilities like a file browser built into the gaming mode OS. And for all I know maybe Valve is looking into that.
Also I use SyncThing to sync my saves: I like how it’s all just stored locally and works on Windows, Linux, and Android. And it works pretty well as a non-Steam game in gaming mode on the Deck.
