Best $400 I’ve spent on a console by far. Including my PS4 and 5. Haven’t touched my switch, PS5 or any other console since my deck came.
The zelda sequel lured me away for a little while and spider man 2 for a lesser extent, but I spend more time on my deck than anything else. Hey that reminds me, I should dust my consoles.
My friend showed me TotK playing better that it did on a switch… on his Steam deck lawl
That TotK runs at all on the Switch is nothing short of a miracle. That’s Xbox 360 era GPU power, running a massive game at 30fps for the most part. Super stable as well, especially after a playthrough of the very crashy, other GOTY contender, BG3.
Sadly this is not applicable in my country. If you want to get a Steam Deck unfortunately you’ll need to shell out more money compared to buying a PS5 or an Xbox Series X.
Exactly my issue as well. An ROG Ally is cheaper than the cheapest Deck. And both are more expensive that the PS5 and Xbox X
It’s pretty much as powerful as the gaming PC I made several years ago and is a decent price. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone even not taking into account how versatile it is
My laptop’s SSD died a while back, so I sent it away for repairs (yay, MSI’s warranty).
In that brief period without a PC, my Steam Deck was a god send - used it as my main machine for 4 days. Was even able to work on it.
That’s such a crazy addition to the value proposition, for me - totally makes it worth it.
Also, being able to play PS5 games in bed via Chiaki is delicious.
I mean, that makes sense, because its just running (a slightly restricted) version Linux of under the hood, which I is what I run on my gaming and work pc
It’s an immutable version of stripped Arch, dunno if that counts as ‘slightly restricted’. You can disable the read-only mode if you want to and know what you’re doing.
That’s why I said slightly, for the average user you can’t do quite as much
How is your latency on Chiaki?
I have pretty decent home wifi and honestly…
It’s just not a great experience.
Although tbf I installed it once on a macbook and the experience was not great. Didn’t do hardly any finagling to improve latency
The latency is so low I don’t notice it at all. Weird that you’re having problems.
My ps5 is hooked up to the router via an ethernet cable, and I use a 5 Ghz network to play on. Never had any issues and never required any tweaking (played most of Jedi: Survivor with this setup).
Why hasn’t anyone else made one to compete that’s cheap? Because, Mr.Author…No one else can make their money back by selling software.
The Switch certainly predates the Deck, and they definitely make their money back on software, but being forced solely into the Nintendo ecosystem is off-putting. Only Microsoft is a likely candidate to make a handheld that uses their Game Pass, and I would bet they aren’t really needing to push subscriptions at the moment.
The Switch isn’t that expensive to make, the chip, memory, and storage are all budget af.
Why are you trying to compare a computer to a walled garden Nintendo switch? Hell, you’re making my argument for me.
I can’t believe I have to rehash this again. A Switch is a computer. My point wasn’t that it’s somehow better, but Nintendo already did exactly what you said: made a handheld portable computer with built-in screen that can play games locally and is sold at a loss only to recoup those losses with software sales.
The Deck can do more than the Switch, but that doesn’t make the Switch less of a computer.
You say it’s off putting as if the Switch doesn’t have dozens on dozens on dozens of quality 1st and 2nd party titles. Also, no one is being forced into the Nintendo ecosystem. It’s a Nintendo product, and you buy a Nintendo console to play Nintendo games. It’s not anti-gamer. That being said, apples and oranges to compare the switch to the deck.
Right, but the original statement was whether other companies have made a competing and profitable “Deck,” and the Switch is already such a device. Portable, plays games locally, has a thriving software ecosystem…
Whether those games within that ecosystem are “quality” or not is irrelevant. Both platforms have examples of good and bad games. My point was that if you buy a Switch, you are forced into their ecosystem. On the Deck, you do not have such a limitation (with a bit of effort, you can access anything a regular Linux machine can). Nobody is coerced in, sure, but that wasn’t the point I was making.
So where you see apples and oranges, I see a small, dry apple vs. a big, juicy apple. A better analogy might be Apple vs Windows.
You have a weird definition of platform “ecosystem”. How is buying a computing device (gaming or otherwise) that locks you down to only running software purchased from the manufacturer’s store not forcing you into their ecosystem?
I guess if you mean no one is forcing you to buy a switch sure. But if you own a switch, you have to procure software through Nintendo. That’s being locked into an ecosystem by definition.
Bingo,I think people forget Valve went out of their way to make their profit margin razor thin, or at a slight loss because they know the benefit of having a device that basically assures a new paying user will be added in their Steam ecosystem. It’s based on Nintendo’s walled garden philosophy after all, just refined really well on PC.
It’s not a walled garden though, Valve made no attempts to lock anything down. You can install something like Heroic Game Launcher on the Steam Deck and play Epic Game Store or GOG games too.
While this is true and works out that way, it’s either put in a bit of work to get a game to run (I have epic games borderlands 2 handsome Jack collection and it crashes a lot on me) or use the store that has all the games and controller settings set up specifically to the deck. Having the option is great, but using steam is still easiest and makes any deck owners default purchase store choice for a game as steam. To the point where if I had to pay $25 for a game on steam vs $20 on epic or any other, I’d just go ahead and get the steam version if I intended to play it on my deck.
No, but they did make it very easy to buy Steam games and installing HGL or any other launcher is going to be both inconvenient and require a level of investigation that most people don’t care to bother with when they can just hit “buy” on the store.
Rate it? Rate it what? 5/7?
“I rate it” is a pretty common phrase used to mean “I rate this thing positively”, isn’t it?
I’m assuming it is from how it was used, I just don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase before. It must not be popular where I live or in my usual internet communities.
Maybe it’s a British thing, or maybe I’m just old and out of touch.
