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.
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.
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…)
Oh yeah, or like an adapter to use Joycons with a phone might also be kinda similar?
Yeah, but idk if phones can use joycons in the double joycon mode. My understanding is that it requires either root or a physical adapter of some kind.
I find the switch controllers to be absolute torture for anything more than like 20 minutes.
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.
Will the switch 2 outperform the steam deck? Because if not, games will continue to be made to run on lower hardware.
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.
Just taking a look at Steam Deck Top 100 tells me 2025 won’t be a problem lmao
This. To make the claim in the title is to not get what steam deck is about.
IMO that’s more of a problem with the industry not really caring to support lower specs, or generally not seeing the deck as a real console or platform to target. People still make Switch games and the damn thing was already outdated at launch and they even underclocked it for good measures.
At 800p you’ve got to start thinking, is most of the detail those games compute even actually visible the on screen? How many PCs does that make obsolete? If the deck can’t run it at 800p, even at 1080p you’re gonna need what, an RTX 2060 for the lowest settings on a PC?
Some of the example titles don’t even sound like they’re the kind of titles that are made to showcase what your 4090 can do, which logically you’d want as many people as possible to be able to play it.
It’s not even about the lower specs, it’s the optimization in general.
My PC is a little old, but still fine for most games up to medium settings.
But when I tried FF XVI, which is mentioned in the article, I couldn’t get anything close to acceptable performance with everything turned as low as possible and looking like shit.Too be fair. We all now what kind of a trainwreck the ffxiv source code probably is, thanks to the 1.0 -> 2.0 recode. Your point still stands tho
FFXIV runs alright in the deck.
XVI != XIV :)
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I agree with you, handheld can never compete with a desktop when it comes to raw power. So, if companies don’t consider it as a platform to target for, you’ll always have problem with latest games. Maybe not at launch, but you can’t upgrade a handheld “console” every year or two.
That’s the good thing about consoles, you buy it, and you know (most of) the games that come to the platform will just run on it.
I don’t have a SteamDeck so not sure how it works, but maybe they should make a sub-store for SteamDeck, that only has games that are verified to run on it. They can still have an option to search and download game from full steam store, but it should come as a warning that these games aren’t specifically made / optimized for Deck.
Just thinking out loud. Don’t actually know what SteamDeck owners really want. :-)
That is how it sort of works the steam store displays the games the games that work with the deck. You can install other games but you get the a warning that either it has not been testet enough to make sure that it works, or that it is not recommend because that issues with the deck.
I think, that the steam deck is popular enough, so that it can be treated as a console, were you make special “ports” of your game, which has it default settings adjusted for that console (and maybe some other patches to make stuff work)
But maybe this is just wishful thinking 🤔
Easy solution - I just wont be buying games the deck cant run.
Optimise your games for lower end hardware. Problem solved.
The steam deck was lower end hardware when it came out. It’s natural for it to lose support right about now.
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.
The only thing cooler than a living miracle of portable computing is an undead miracle of portable computing that I’d still be playing games on come 2025 🧛
Yeah well my steam deck will survive 2025 unless I break it. It’s a proper nifty little machine, so glad I bought it. I’ve not done any gaming since i had a PS2 so there’s loads of games to catch up on. Recently finished bioshock, wow. I’ve got a long list of older games, but I’ve tried a couple of newer things. It plays doom 2016 just fine, same with deathloop and beam ng drive
🤷 I’ve mostly used it for MAME anyway.
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…
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.
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.
