Thoughts on the Steam Deck

I don’t have a Steam Deck and I’m probably not going to buy one any time soon, but the concept of it is very interesting to me. Being a fan of the Vita, to me the Steam Deck seems like a spiritual successor and one that’s much more designed around the things I liked about the Vita rather than being horribly shitty and locked down without hacking. It’s also facing a real uphill battle by the contradictory nature of its existence.

The Steam Deck is Valve’s next big attempt to try and put Steam into the living room. There’s a big casual market out there that like consoles, notably in places like Japan, and Steam has always been at a disadvantage there due to inherently being based around the PC market. So, they tried crap like the Steam machines (crappy prebuilt PCs), the Steam Link (streamed your PC to the TV), Big Picture mode, whatever else the fuck…

None of it really worked. Steam Machines in particular were a notable failure. Then Nintendo came out with the Switch, and Valve had an idea to basically just copy that but instead of making it a videogame console, they’d make it a handheld PC that’s primarily designed to play videogames.

So, that’s what they did. Effectively it’s the same thing as the Switch, you can dock the bastard to play it on the big screen or carry it around and it’s ergonomics are pretty similar too. Only thing it’s really missing is the detachable controllers.

It’s convenient. Researching PC parts is a pain in the ass and the Deck gives you performance for the price point. Many people were cautious about a Linux based OS being used but then it turned out Valve had made a fairly good Linux emulator which basically matched or even beat Windows performance in most games so it turned out not to really matter.

The problem with the Deck is that it’s just not hitting the audience that it really should, because Valve isn’t putting the effort into hitting that audience. This thing is primarily made in mind for people who aren’t tech savvy enough for PC building or just don’t want to deal with the hassle, but those sorts of people rarely if at all see the Steam store. They really need to try and reach out to this audience more than not at all.

I see this as very important in the DRM online videogames storefront race. So important, actually, that I bet if EGS made their own version of the Steam Deck and properly marketed it to mass audiences that they could easily overturn and surpass the deficit in attention they get in comparison to even Itch.io and Gog, let alone Steam.

It’s frustrating because I can very much see the potential here. Consoles aren’t a particularly easy market to get into, ask Microsoft, but the Steam Deck and things like it offer a sort of convenience that appeals to consumers and was seriosuly lacking with today’s Xbox and Playstation. Nintendo obviously got into this market, but Nintendo is Nintendo and mostly sells itself on its IPs. That market playing indies on the Switch could easily be converted to a Steam Deck or Epic Boy audience if they saw the use in it.

There is a sort of uphill battle any portable PC is going to face however, and that’s the fact that it won’t be treated as a portable console but rather as a PC. Portables don’t have the power of stationary, and the Deck is no exception even with its incredibly good specs. People will expect this thing to destroy their favorite AAA games and if it can’t meet that mark, which it won’t, then people will assume it’s the Deck’s fault instead of that just being the nature of the device they purchased.

This isn’t really an issue that things like the Gameboy, DS, and PSP ever faced because games were specifically developed for those systems. Nobody’s developing Steam Deck centric games unless the Deck really takes off, meaning performance and battery life will always end up being issues for the consumers that will inevitably try running (insert AAA slop here) on it.

So far the big market for the Deck are the people with capable PCs who just bought it to sit on the couch. They like it, so I guess it works for that much.

So putting aside all of the soulless corporate talk that’s more of a thought experiment than anything I actively care about, what do I personally see in the Steam Deck?

Well, I use Vita for emulation. Its specs are pretty good for the time, but it doesn’t always match the demands. To me, the Deck would be ideal as an emulation machine. It’s specs could crush everything short of maybe some particularly demanding PS2/Gamecube titles. SNES/Genesis would never have a problem again. On top of this, I could really make any game that doesn’t chokehold the battery into a portable title.

I’m held back on making a purchase by the price point compared to the storage. I’m vaguely aware that you can swap out the storage for something that’s not absolutely dogshit but that seems like way too much of a pain in the ass and would still cost too much. Literally the only thing you get buying a more expensive Deck is more storage. Maybe there’ll be some point in the future that I’ll give it a try but I’ll let all the current Deckies beta test it first.

Portable gaming is a bit soulless right now. It’s basically sucked up by shitty phone games and the occasional joker that’ll actually bring out the Switch in public. It’s in a weird middle ages period where we’re transitioning from the old ideas to the new. Perhaps there’s a future where the Deck, or something like it, sees real mass acceptance and even gets carried around and used on the go. Frankly I’d say it’s a little bulky for that purpose, but newer generations of the hardware could slim it down and create something more ideal.

On the other hand we could just be sucked up in the terror of low quality mobile games forever, with your only respite being emulation mixed with a strange mobile controller setup. I did that once, it was really strange but it kind of worked. I tacked a mobile phone onto a PS4 controller. Definetly a far cry from the ideal, it was so fucking goofy.