The Steam Deck wasnt born ready, but its ready now
The Steam Deck is my favorite gadget of 2022. I have no hesitation in recommending it anymore. The kind of person who would buy one should buy one. My only question: are you that kind of person?
In February of last year, I truthfully wrote that the Steam Deck wasnt ready, and I stand by every word of that review. But its ready now. And while its still not finished, and may never be finished, Valve has spent nearly a year and over 100 updates showing that an early access game console can actually be worth money. Valve has finally succeeded in proving doubters wrong about Linux, creating a gadget thats spent 35 weeks atop the Steam bestseller list and attracted support from Sony, Microsoft and more. In my eyes, this was a triumph: a dark horse that will shape the gaming landscape for years to come.
I should know. Ive now spent 435 hours playing Steam games across three different Decks, averaging well over an hour per day since launch. Ive torn through all 150 hours of Elden Ring and beat Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Signalis, The Forgotten City, Into the Breach, and Vampire Survivors* on the Deck alone. Im in the middle of dozens more. Plus, those 435 hours dont count all the time Ive spent futzing around with alternative games stores, emulators, streaming games from PS5 to the handheld, or cracking open the case to install a better fan and a larger SSD.
How we rate and review products
And what Ive noticed, having made the Steam Deck my daily driver for gaming, is that my complaints have largely melted away. Valve has delivered so many fixes that, for the most part, I can just play. Its been a minute since Ive had the games on an SD card disappear, waited hours for a game to update, or had Bluetooth or Wi-Fi suddenly vanish until I give the Deck a good kick in the pants.
And while Im still not completely satisfied with the Steam Decks fan, its no longer a constant annoyance. Valve has adjusted the fan curve, added an engineered foam solution to reduce fan noise, and shipped replacement fans to iFixit that you can easily buy and install to reduce whine.
As of today, here is my whittled-down list of complaints:
- Battery life can be short, and it takes a long time to charge.
- The rear paddles are still stiff.
- The bumpers are still awkward to reach compared to my Xbox or PlayStation pads.
- You still cant download games without leaving the screen on.
- The one I bought for myself had some backlight bleed and so does its replacement.
- The screen could be bigger. Its got a lot of unnecessary bezel.
- I still see random game crashes, system reboots, and black screens maybe twice a month.
- Rarely, Ive had the Decks controls quit working in the middle of a game, usually after resuming from sleep.
- Bluetooth audio lag still sucks.
- Theres no support for microphones over Bluetooth.
- I still occasionally get errors trying to transfer games between SD and internal storage.
- The fan keeps kicking on and off in very low-power games.
- Summoning the touchscreen keyboard is still sluggish, and I wish I could use my voice.
- Even on Valves stable update ring, there are still occasionally weird issues, like how my Deck abruptly lost power a couple times in November.
- Duck Game, the game I play most with friends, mysteriously starts dropping frames after maybe a half-hour of rock-solid 60fps.
- Valves listings of which games do and dont work arent wholly reliable.
Does that sound like a lot? I could have come up with a similar, if smaller, list for the original Nintendo Switch. But a surprising amount has been fixed and incredibly, Valve keeps adding new features that make the Deck even better.
Last February, the Steam Deck wasnt just a buggy mess it was also an unproven handheld that simply wouldnt run a lot of your favorite games and one that forced you to choose between battery life and smooth graphics in moderately intensive titles. It was a system youd wait months to buy, with an uncertain future. All of that has changed.
Even at launch, I was wowed by how the Steam Decks open-source MangoHud overlay and Gamescope gave me instant feedback on how games were running, how quickly the battery was draining, and a realistic estimate of how long the Deck would last. I could lock the frame rate to 30fps to nearly double my battery life in some games, too.
But last spring, Valve found a smart way to get more performance out of the Deck as well by letting you refresh its screen at 40Hz instead of 60Hz and adjust the framerate limit accordingly. Suddenly, games that couldnt quite run at a smooth 60fps were no longer instantly limited to a pokey 30fps: you could run them at 40fps for way smoother gameplay. (As Digital Foundry explains, 40Hz is actually halfway between 30Hz and 60Hz in smoothness if you do the frame persistence math.)
Suddenly, games like Deathloop felt playable to me, and my ability to tackle Elden Ring bosses got a big boost in indoor environs where the Deck can consistently hit that 40fps. And Valve didnt leave it at that you can now save per-game performance profiles, uncap your frame rate, allow screen tearing, and see your frame rate, battery life, and temperatures in a new horizontal performance overlay that uses the wasted space when youre running games at 16:9.
The other thing that makes games like Deathloop feel playable on a 7-inch PC: the Steam Decks unprecedented ability to make its touchpads, joysticks, triggers, buttons, and paddles do practically anything youd like. In February, I called it a dizzying array of options twice! but I enjoy it even more today than I did during my original review.
In fact, lets use Deathloop as an example. At launch, I was frustrated with how sluggish the gamepad felt in that snazzy time-traveling shooter particularly because the game also doesnt let you mix controller and mouse / keyboard inputs. My options were A) cobble together an entirely new control scheme around mouse and keyboard emulation or B) play with gamepad controls that felt like crap.
But when I revisited the game in December, I found another Steam Deck user had done 95 percent of the work for me. Theyd uploaded a custom control scheme that felt amazing with gyro aiming, paddles to quickly lean and dodge (helpful for Juliana invasions), plus a right-touchpad mouse cursor to easily navigate menus. And then, I realized I could add one little tweak thatd finally make Deathloops weapon switching make sense: I told my Deck that whenever I double-tap the left or right bumpers, it should switch the weapons or gadgets in my left and right hands.
There are layers upon layers of options like this that Im beginning to add to my games. A single button can do one thing when you press it, another when you release it, another when you long-press, another when you double-tap, and more each with haptic feedback. Any button can be a Turbo button, repeating a command as quickly or slowly as you want: I now use them to quack incessantly in Duck Game, blow away EDF aliens with bursts of semi-automatic fire, and quickly advance text in RPG games that have a lot of dialogue. And in single-stick games like Brotato and Vampire Survivors, Ill make the right analog stick mirror the left one so I can give my thumb a rest.
The Decks UI has improved, too. Its easy for me to forget you couldnt launch multiple apps during the review period, let alone switch between multiple windows now, I can chat in Discord or stream music while playing a game, or virtually Alt-Tab between my Dolphin emulator settings windows without switching to the Linux desktop. And while the interface is nowhere near iPhone smooth, its certainly far snappier than it was at launch. The Plasma desktop environment, in particular, is way more responsive as of a late December update.
Adaptive brightness also now works in gaming mode (though I prefer Quick Access + Left Joystick to set it manually), and theres a dual-touchpad swipe and tap virtual keyboard I vastly prefer to the hunt-and-peck one that originally shipped. Valves also spent time working on the offline mode, refinements when docking to a TV, additional controller support and you can finally use the Decks limitless controller configurations when streaming games from your desktop PC, too.
You can also set a lock screen PIN for your Steam Deck and add awesome 30-second custom boot videos, unmount your SD card, and… you probably dont want to hear about every little UI change, right? You can scroll through this website for Valves complete changelog.
But one of the reasons I feel comfortable recommending the Steam Deck now isnt just because of Valve its how software and hardware communities have embraced the Deck, likely giving it a longer life than other gaming handhelds.
Yes, I mentioned Sony and Microsoft, but Im also talking about the fans building custom plug-ins for the Deck that extend its capabilities, including a set of PowerTools that let you disable CPU threads and adjust clock speed to stabilize performance in some emulators and games. Or this website dedicated to fan-made boot and suspend videos your Deck can play whenever you press the power button or custom art for your game library.
Im talking about the fans who built labors of love like EmuDeck to automatically install and configure all those emulators for the Decks controls without you lifting a finger, who are optimizing their emulators for Deck, turning it into an internet-connected television, and bringing Linux apps like the Heroic Game Launcher to Flathub so Linux n00bs like me can easily transfer our pile of free Epic Games Store games. (I still need to try BoilR, too.) Even Windows is getting better on the Deck, thanks to efforts like ayufans Steam Deck Tools.
And Im talking about the 3D printing enthusiasts whove come up with accessories for the Deck that are good enough to sell, like the RestDeck and DeckMate accessory ecosystem heck, DeckMate will even let you download the files for free.
Im even talking about established companies like JSAUX, Dbrand, and, above all, iFixit, whove decided that serving the Steam Deck community is good for business. iFixit is now selling practically every part of the Steam Deck (now including the battery) to anyone who wants to repair it themselves, with Valves blessing and support. JSAUX was an alphabet-soup-name Chinese company thats developing into an actual brand name because it was the first to seriously serve Steam Deck customers with bespoke accessories. Dbrand decided its reputation among the Steam Deck community was important enough to do a million-dollar recall of its hardshell kickstand case.
Heck, you can even buy drift-resistant Hall Effect sensor joysticks for your Steam Deck now.
In hindsight, the only thing I regret about my original Steam Deck review is I might have discouraged you from being a part of this community early on. If youre just buying one now, you might have missed part of the ride.
So Im glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned
But in my defense, there was no way for me to know things would turn out this well, especially given how rough the Steam Deck was when it first arrived. Plus, it wasnt like you could just up and buy one. It took nearly eight months for Valve to get through the waitlist, and the Steam Deck has gotten better with each month thats gone by.
According to data harvested from Valves servers, the Deck has already accounted for one-third of my total Steam playtime since 2019. Its changed how I play games and where I buy them, just the way Id hoped it would during my first hands-on last year. Now, instead of buying games for the Nintendo Switch, Im paying for PC copies again. I know Im not the only one.
No other company has yet delivered this combination of portability, performance, and price. Im waiting and watching for that to change because we all know that technology marches on, Valve seems happy to let others borrow its know-how, and it intends to (eventually) offer a sequel thatll likely have more battery life and a better screen.
But as of today, nearly 11 months after the first units started shipping, the Steam Deck feels like an excellent deal.
Its enough that weve decided to increase our review score to a 7, which is a bigger jump than it seems. Last August, we decided to begin using the whole 10-point scale; under the new rubric, we would have given the original Steam Deck a 4 or a 5 instead of the 6.5 we did originally. We describe a 7 as Very good. A solid product with some flaws, which nicely describes how I feel about my own Steam Deck today.
Steam Deck: one frequently asked question
If you decide to buy a Deck and youre not sure which, the answer is yes you really can just buy the $400 64GB version. I used the $400 and $650 models interchangeably for months and couldnt find any meaningful performance difference playing games on SD card vs. SSD. I actually slightly prefer the $400 models glossy screen, whose colors come through more clearly, though its definitely faster to download and install games to an internal NVMe drive. But if thats a must, its also cheap and easy to swap in your own SSD its just one more screw than it takes to replace the fan.