I play pretty much everything on my steamdeck. For price vs usability, it’s incredible. It’s also nice that you can get an idea of how games work on it before you buy them, so you don’t get stuck with a game that won’t run on your computer.
It’s also nice that you can get an idea of how games work on it before you buy them
Oh interesting, you mean like the “verified on deck” thing? Or are performance stats accessible easily? I don’t have one so I’m not exactly sure, but this does sound nice. I feel a lot of stress sometimes if I need to spend a long time playing with graphics options during the 2 hour refund window
So, you have deck verified vs playable vs unsupported and you have protondb scores to let you know how playable the game should be. Beyond that, developers try to hit steamdeck playable as a development goal. They won’t try to optimize for your computer, since they don’t know what you’re running, but they have the specs for the steamdeck, so they try to make it run on that!
That’s definitely an added bonus. Having been a console player for the majority of my life, learning and researching parts and compatibility has been a bit confusing for me. Especially since I was planning to build a Linux machine. I like that building a PC offers versatility and an opportunity to upgrade parts down the line for a better experience/ longer lifespan, but there’s something to be said for the convenience of knowing that something will just work out of the box
I had a steelseries mouse with some vibration settings. But I don't think it took game data, more like a few programmable bumps you could set up to trigger x seconds after you hit a mouse button.
Same, SteelSeries Rival 700. It could be used by games in the same way as a controller, but the game had to implement support specifically for it, and developers aren’t going out of their way to support a single gimmick mouse.
I think it had a few options to use the vibration for kill tracking or health alerts in CounterStrike, but that’s all I can remember, and I still never used it.
A steam deck is my recommendation. I have a £2000+ gaming PC that is now practically collecting dust because of my steam deck. Being able to just game anywhere in my house, from my bed, from my couch, from a chair in a sunny spot in my garden, has been a game changer in a way I didn’t expect. I’ve owned handheld consoles before but none of them have hooked me in the same way.
The fact that I have my entire backlog of PC games available to me and don’t have to buy into a new ecosystem (like the switch or previous handhelds) is a huge bonus, but the absolute winner here is the variety of input options and the degree of customizability, as well as the fact that its a PC, so I can fuck with the refresh rate and the clock speeds and all that - extending the battery life!
The portability also has me being a bit more social with the other occupants in my home. I can play some low-focus game on the couch while they watch TV, for example, and we can chat and so on, as opposed to being isolated to the room where my PC is.
If you think there’s any chance you’ll get a kick out of being able to just grab your deck and go loaf somewhere comfortable to game, its a no-brainer to me.
Even when trying to limit myself a Ryzen 5 7600, RX 7600 build with 1tb m.2 storage and 16gb ram, a non modular bronze 750w psu and a cheap case ends up outside your budget. (about $950 to buy over here). You could lower that by going for older AM4 components but then you lose most of the upgradability benefits.
Personally I would save more before buying and increase the budget. You mention having a decent laptop, so use that one for some indie gaming while saving up.
There will be ways to force your Windows 10 machine to pull down the continued updates meant for government and extended support contracts, just like there was for Windows 7.
Not a good or particularly safe way to keep your PC, and even the extended updates will stop eventually, but worth knowing in case anyone is afraid of making the full switch to Linux.
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
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.
Fun fact for those interested the STALKER series was partially inspired by the book A Roadside Picnic. A movie was released in 1979 that was also inspired by it named Stalker.
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