The Steam deck is cool and I love mine but it can’t be upgraded other than the storage. There already are new games that run poorly, and sometimes because of linux, rather than hardware. So maybe getting one while saving up for a pc might be your best bet, specially if you are still looking at building a steam library.
I’m going to give you a slightly different take than what I’ve seen so far. I have a Deck and a PC. I game mostly on the PC, but I love the Deck.
The 256gb LCD model is $400. You can buy that, save whatever is leftover, and save up for a nicer PC build down the line. The Deck will be great for you while you save.
Like people said, you might not be playing the newest AAA games, but those are expensive anyway. There are thousands of indie and older games that will run amazingly and will be cheap that you wouldn’t have had access to on the Xbox.
You haven’t talked about how much you care about portability and ease of assembly.
The only reasons to buy a Steam Deck is because you can use it on the go, and maybe because it already comes pre-built and pre-configured with an OS. So it would be interesting to know how important those two things are to you.
If they are not/not very important, then a Steam Deck makes no sense, as you can get the same power of hardware for much cheaper in a desktop.
My rationale for the steam deck was mostly the convenience and broad support. Prior to this thread, portability was more of a bonus than a main draw for me. However, a few people have mentioned how much they like the steam deck for use around the house over their PC and I hadn’t really considered that before. I will say that this prospect does shift me a little more towards the steam deck than before.
I was mostly drawn to building a PC for upgradability and longevity. As I understand it 600-700 for a PC (buying secondhand) is on the line of acceptable and decent. The last time I gamed on a PC was in the days of halo CE on a hand-me-down windows XP machine so my personal experience on the matter is extremely out of date, but I’m willing (and interested).to learn
For Submachine, I was mainly writing down coordinates of locations where I figured I could come back to use an item later, or information from signs that might be useful in a later puzzle.
For Fairune, I had to make multiple maps on graph paper to keep track of all of the things I wasn’t sure how to solve or needed to come back to with new items.
I have also been writing down some numbers for System Shock, but I haven’t finished that one yet, and I’m not sure if the note taking will need to be any more extensive.
Probably because they don’t move around that much and enjoy the much better performance they can get from a desktop. At least that would be my reasons.
I move around a lot but the truth is when I’m not home I am usually doing something else than gaming. I’ve stopped packing my steam deck when traveling. The truth is if I need to keep myself entertained for a couple hours when I am not home, my phone has all kinds of games and apps on it.
Still love my deck though. I occasionally flop on my couch to play Hades, TUNIC, etc. on it.
I do far too many other things with my desktop that I don’t care to even try to do with my steam deck. I know the deck can dock and stuff but it’s just a 15w chip… I am not going to be doing much on that. I often multitask on my pc, watch yt, write, be in Discord call, work in Photoshop, I play ttrpgs online, I could go on. Steam deck just cannot do all that I need it to do if I absolutely had to pick one.
Fair enough! In my instance the PC would be almost entirely dedicated to gaming. My day-to-day computer stuff is either done on my phone or my laptop. I don’t really do anything that can’t be handled by either of these
Even if it was 100% purely for gaming, I’d still pick the desktop. I have a fairly powerful desktop now and that didn’t all happen at once. You can upgrade a desktop, every single aspect of it. You can barely upgrade a steam deck at all, and it already feels dated in some games, and other games cannot run on the deck at all.
Personally my inclination would be building a PC. There are just too many small things here that make a PC seem a better fit in my mind
A PC can be upgraded over time. A PC can run Windows, and from what I understand there’s still some willingness to tinker and adjust stuff needed to get stuff working on steamdeck at times (I say this as an exclusively linux user for the past like 10 years, though I don’t have a steam deck and haven’t played with gaming on Linux). And ultimately the main selling point of the deck sounds like it would be pretty secondary for you
I’d love to tell you go with the cheaper option, but I think long term the PC just makes more sense. Even if you just wanna run linux and use a distro that replicates the steam deck’s configuration and setup, the PC will trade the portability you don’t seem particularly interested in for upgradability that I think is really worth it. If you’re looking to save money my gut says you’d be better served by getting used components, a used case, and a good power supply you can upgrade around.
Thats my 2c as someone fairly unqualified to give advice lol. Regardless, I hope you find the right path for you!
But I think the big consideration is whether to trade portability for upgradability, or vice versa.
Outside of windows, you’ve essentially described my radionale for building a PC. I was planning to build a Linux machine to 1. Save on not having to buy windows and 2. Simply because I like Linux, and (besides competitive games) gaming on Linux seems to be a pretty solid option nowadays. I wanted to buy second hand as much as I could and upgrade piecemeal to keep up with hardware demands and improve my experience.
The convenience of the steam deck is attractive because I’ve never built a machine before and graphics aren’t all that important to me. But I do like the prospect of having something that will last and be able to be iteratively improved for years to come
Yeah, that makes sense. If you have a friend that’s built a PC before that’d help a lot with it being intimidating. I think building a PC and picking used last gen parts that roughly match the performance of the deck would be my choice in your position.
I can absolutely understand it being appealing to buy something complete out of the box though. Maybe it’s worth seeing if anyone is selling complete working PCs they’re ready to replace?
Isn’t the PC the cheaper option? You act as if the only benefit you get is the upgradeability, but since a desktop doesn’t have to be as small, the components are much cheaper individually, which makes a PC cheaper than a Steam Deck simply looking at performance.
It’s not a necessity to upgrade the PC, and if you never upgrade it, then it also never costs more than the Steam Deck.
In essence upgradeability should be almost not a decision factor, since you probably can “upgrade” the Steam Deck in the future as well: you buy a new Steam Deck handheld once Steam releases a more powerful version. Yeah, you’re not swapping out components, but there’ll very likely be a way to copy over your setup/data, and then the only difference is that the upgrade is more expensive, same as the initial purchase is right now.
Price to performance and just outright price aren’t really the same thing. And isn’t a base deck like $300? I could be wrong, I sort of assumed building a PC and buying your peripherals was more expensive 🤷♂️. I mentioned to OP it might be a lot more comparable if you just aim for roughly the same specs as the deck using used last-gen parts, since super impressive specs didn’t seem important to them.
And yes, I just mean that it’s cheaper to replace just one component when you need to than buy the whole thing over again. Its also way less e-waste. To me, upgrading not being necessary seems like a very odd point to make- if you never upgrade at a certain you won’t be able to play anything newer. Which maybe doesn’t matter to op, but that seems like an odd assumption to make. Even if you just use a computer for less demanding productivity tasks, its specs will eventually start to struggle…
It just seems like most of the benefits of the deck seem like things that either aren’t as important to them (handheld functionality) or are short term benefits (no need to build anything, potentially cheaper upfront), where the PC seems like it makes more sense longer term, given they don’t especially care about having a handheld specially.
That sounds wonderful to me, as long as you have fun with your favorite games and the other content. You save a lot of money and, more importantly, time.
This just means you’re figuring out what you like, and refusing to force yourself to enjoy trash.
Remember, 90% of anything is shit, and of that 10%, not all of it is going to appeal to your tastes.
On top of that, AAA gaming is a fucking wasteland right now. Publishers have squeezed all the life out of the medium in search of ongoing profit bonanzas. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a AAA game, unless we count Cyberpunk which had the benefit of being self published, so I don’t really think that counts.
Oh, my bad, Elden Ring would definitely count as AAA. That was awesome (still need to finish it, and the DLC). But let’s be real, Elden Ring is great because it’s so different from the vast majority of the open world games out there.
Anyway, I mostly spend my time on mid-shelf, indie and self-published stuff, and even then the number of games I like is pretty small. My main go tos are Darktide, Warframe, Insurgency, Chivalry 2, The Finals (I guess that’s kind of mainstream?), Stellaris, and Total War Warhammer. I’ve also recently enjoyed VA-11-Hall-A, Slay The Princess, Shadows of Doubt, and Space Marine 2. Those were all pretty great.
I like that a lot of games get more long term support now. That’s really cool. It’s fun to be able to keep coming back to a game I like and finding new stuff.
But yeah, you don’t owe it to anyone to enjoy everything, and you owe it to yourself to not waste your time on things you don’t enjoy.
There’s a guy who was working on a fan build for alternative to Tribes Ascend that had some really elegant collision stuff going on to address what we called “dead stops”
Baldur’s Gate 3 coop, we’re in Act 2. For some reason, my friend started a fight, inside the throne room at Moonrise Towers, while surrounded by 20 enemies, half HP and no spells. We died, and because he hadn’t saved in an hour, we have to do some stuff again.
Then I finished the Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Palace of Ice DLC. It’s definitely the weakest campaign for me (base game and two DLC). The final dungeon was also pretty disappointing, but I liked the very final decision you had to do.
Then I started the Baldur’s Gate - Siege on Dragonspear DLC. I played the base game a year ago for the first time, and I think the game didn’t age well at all, and this DLC doesn’t improve things. I’m close to the end, but I really don’t like how it’s playing out right now, and I don’t care about the story at all.
The SoD expansion was made by Beamdog some 15 years after BG1 was released. It’s admirable that they tried getting the original voice actors back, but otherwise the team behind BG 1&2 (and ToB) had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t get through it, and I have a hard time supporting the Enhanced Editions as is due to Beamdog inserting their fanfiction into them as well - though I recognise they’ve been instrumental in revamping the engine and bringing the games to a new generation of people.
Playing Another Crab’s Treasure - a Soulslike with a humorous tone. I had the game on Xbox, but abandoned that and replaying on Steam. I think having a calmer, more analytical mood to the difficulty is helping me make progress faster.
There’s a region where you need to stick to the path lest you awaken a gigantic and threatening enemy bearing an instant-kill attack. I just returned to that area and killed it.
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