I personally have a huge backlog of games I’m happily playing through on the deck. And, having been burnt a few times (Cyberpunk, No Mans Sky …), I very rarely buy new full priced games anyway (better to wait for a discount and some patches!)
But according to this rather clickbate article …
In the last month alone, we’ve seen three disappointing examples of games that are too demanding for the Deck. Star Wars Outlaws is unplayable on Low settings, even with FSR set to “Ultra Performance.” Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 can’t reach a steady 30fps at the lowest quality setting. And based on the demo, Final Fantasy 16 is unplayable without FSR and Frame Generation, and afflicted with stuttering and horrible frame pacing with those scaling features enabled.
Personally, I just don’t have time or energy to play big AAA games for the most part. I very much prefer smaller indie games nowadays, and Steam Deck has those in spades. I would wager a lot of older gamers are in the same boat.
I don’t understand how Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky were the ones that “burned” you, they’re both great games? GOTY material even?
They both had a lot of issues at launch
Every game has issues at launch, that’s why they launch them
Both mentioned games are notorious for the scale of the issues at launch, and the resulting backlash. NMS for the lack of content and Cyberpunk for the huge amount of bugs.
In 2027 the current iteration won’t be legally able to be sold in the EU, since the EU will require portable devices to have easily replaceable batteries. (Which the Steam does not qualify for due to needing a heat gun). So an upgrade is almost certainly planned by then.
I mostly use the Deck for indie games and emulation so a CPU/GPU upgrade isn’t something of interest for me. A larger, 16:9 screen or better ergonomics on the other hand…
Lol this is an article about how shit optimization has been for the last several AAA game releases. Even quite capable desktops often have performance issues with the mentioned games, because the PC ports weren’t optimized enough and/or tested on a wide enough range of hardware. It’s a real shame, many of them don’t even look significantly better than the last generation or two. It’s just graphical bloat as devs get lazier and lazier the beefier the GPUs get.
I agree, however I think the main cause is studios/publishers just deciding where to allocate the time. Devs are just the ones implementing these shitty decisions.
Oh, go figure. I thought a Steam Deck was a handheld device running off of a battery. Yeah, if you’ve got a desktop computer with a high-wattage GPU you’d expect better performance on the latest AAA graphics, huh? Weird. Cannot possibly be worthwhile to own, I guess.
OMG two games don’t work! How many others do? O yea that’s right, thousands…the library for the deck is magnitudes larger than pretty much every console out there…hell I’ll say it, every console released has smaller libraries than the deck.
I don’t own a Steam Deck. I am a Linux gamer, and I appreciate that it exists.
Internally it’s basically a laptop using its AMD integrated graphics, yeah? No discrete GPU? Which makes it actually pretty impressive at what it does.
It has an APU but the graphics component is quite a bit more powerful than your average laptop.
Still the only handheld PC that doesn’t come with a dogshit OS and an abysmal battery life. The deck doesn’t do well despite its low specs and alternative OS, it does well because of them.
The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me. Then the marketing page is claiming they will make parts available for DIY repairs? Incredible.
If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers. I like it so much that I could maybe accept its lesser performance. But it is locked down, centralized store, some subscription bullshit…
I’ve found a Steam Deck fits really comfortably in the hands. I can settle for having an additional wireless controller to play it from afar.
The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me.
And the default OS isn’t locked down and doesn’t try to prevent you from doing other stuff with it. What you want to do isn’t in the Steam interface? Switch over to desktop mode and you have full access to the underlying OS.
My only complaint with the Steamdeck is that I find using the touchpad on the right side for long gaming sessions hurts my hands. I 3d printed some grips which help; but, I think my hands just don’t like the orientation. Still love my deck though.
If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers
Android phone + Telescopic gamepad + winlator might be what you want…
(Or you can use one of the switch emulators on android…)
If you got a deck and expected it to run the latest AAA titles, you are an idiot.
Ok but outlaws sucks so who gives a fuck about that and not everyone wants to play big AAA games like these.
Right? Some of us buy no AAA games and don’t even kinda care it can’t run them
Do they care to explain the pathetically underpowered, slow, and clunky Switch? We’ll wait.
i mean it is eight years old.
It was crap at release.
that’s always been nintendo’s MO though. with the exception of the N64 and GameCube, their consoles have all been very modest spec-wise. but the games they put out are made specifically for that hardware, so it’s usually fine.
and actually, the switch is underclocked in its stock configuration. if you have adequate cooling for it you can basically double its clock speed with a softmod, which at least for totk removed basically all stuttering for me!
They did.
They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It’s a handheld.
The fact that there are still very few games it can’t run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.
Hell, the whole reason for “deck verified” is because their default assumption is that a game won’t work.
I do think it’s about time for a successor. But that didn’t mean the current Steam deck isn’t viable any more. There are still thousands of games it will happily play. And the others can probably be made to run with some TLC from the developers.
🤷 I’ve mostly used it for MAME anyway.
