I saw no GOL links here so far. Great site, it tought me about Reddit 10 years ago
Besides Switch-like form factor (although a bit chunkier) and Steam games on the go Steam Deck offers:
- Insane mount of control custamizability: you can play games that are only for mouse and keyboard from the comfort of your couch, bed, any place really
- Great 3rd party ecosystem: there is a shit ton of stuff for SteamOS that community prepared to be easy to setup like emulators, plugins, non-steam launchers etc. Discovering that can be fun on its own
- Find your own use case, customize hardware and software as much as you like with only sky being the limit.
If that’s not your jam, move on I guess.
I love the concept of it. It’s just the games I enjoy I can’t imagine would translate well to a controller instead of keyboard and mouse. Maybe someone will prove me wrong!
I thought similarly until I tried it out. There’s community control schemes you can copy for games, plus there’s 4 extra buttons in the back you can quick remap them to either keyboard/mouse buttons or controller inputs, along with two click touchpads that can do that and more. Plus you can quick call a touch/navigatable keyboard to the screen. It takes a bit to get used to but once you do, it’s hard going back. I actually ended up preferring using it handheld over using a dock to hook it to a TV with a controller paired to it.
The only games I’d say are hard to use would be like some mmorpg games that are best for keyboard & mouse.
