Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
How big is the handheld PC gaming industry?
This article includes sales estimates for different handhelds from market research firm IDC.
They place total handheld PC sales of the Steam Deck, RoG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw at almost 6 million units for the past 3 years. It's estimated that the Steam Deck makes up between 3.7 to 4 million of those sales, more than all the other major handheld PC manufacturers combined.
The Steam Deck arguably created the handheld PC gaming market.
Sure, there were handhelds before, but almost no one gave a shit about them. Gamedevs certainly didn't.
It wasn't enough just having the hardware exist, it's also the massive amount of effort Valve put in to ensure compatibility with a ridiculous number of titles.
The renewed emphasis on controller support in games alone has significant ramifications for the wider community. A lot of players with physical disabilities use input devices that map to controller actions.
Compatibility is one thing and a heck of a important one.
The software and interface is great too. It's not perfect at all. However, the fact that the power button suspends and resumes my games and I can just select from a menu and stuff. It's a big deal. Like, I'm a programmer but I get tired at the end of a work day and just want to play some games without fiddling too much sometimes.
Feels a bit like the iPhone, there were some smartphones back then, but the iPhone took it to the next level.
Not much to argue, it literally did
I still can't stop salivating what an incredible device it is. I have two!
It's a full unrestricted linux computer you can dock seamlessly with any usb c hub. Its crazy what you can do with it and the community is so huge already that most of the things you want to do are already done for you.
Made a fan of Valve for life out of me. Bought like 300 games I don't play already tho so that's a draw back lol
Not enough people seem to get that the Steam Deck isn't just a console that runs PC games, it's also a console that runs mods. The first games I played on mine didn't stretch its graphical capabilities, they were just games like Stardew and Minecraft that I could have played on the Switch, but only on the Steam Deck could I play them my way.
The only catch there is that installing mods can be tricky depending on the game and method. Steam workshop mods and games with integrated mod support (BG3, DRG, etc) are super easy to install mods for, but the mod installation process for many other games can vary on difficulty.
Hopefully this will all change with with the rise of more official Linux mod loaders like the new Nexus mods app.
Many mods were made way easier with a recent Proton update. Lots of games use DLL overrides to load mods, which required setting launch commands to use through Proton. This is no longer an issue, so any mods that work by doing this will now function perfectly out of the box.
I recently nodded GTA and the mod had specific instructions for Linux, which I was able to simply ignore thanks to this update.
Most games that use the Nexus mod manager can also be nodded manually, but I do agree that having a native launcher is really nice. I've already used it with Cyberpunk. Hopefully native Mod Organizer 2 will happen one day!
A year and a half ago, I was looking for a handheld gaming device. I narrowed my search down to the SteamDeck and the Switch. In the end, I picked the Switch as I've had much more fun and entertainment with the Nintnedo environment vs the PC gaming world. I really, really want to love the SteamDeck and its abilities but it's just not happening for me yet. Can someone sell me?
I’ve had a Switch since it launched. For the most part, it collected dust - it saw use around certain major game releases and that’s it.
My Steam Deck has completely displaced my high end (well, for 2021) gaming PC - anything that doesn’t run well natively is easily streamed over the network from that PC. I can hang out in the living room watching TV with my partner.
The emulation capabilities have allowed me to conveniently tap back into my entire childhood of gaming, even extending into some titles that I had missed.
The biggest thing has been having access to the entire PC gaming content library. Sales, free Epic games, Amazon Prime Gaming - it’s all there. It’s a far better value proposition than the Switch.
You can play those Switch games plus a ton of other games on the Deck. Apart from technical capability there are 0 restrictions on what you can do with your Deck. You can play Steam games, GOG games, Epic games, Nintendo games, PlayStation games, Commodore 64 games, Arcade games, etc.
The Steam Deck can behave like a Switch; if you want to stick to just Steam games with a big ✅ verified icon then it will probably be a similar experience, just with a different library of games (and better sales).
The Steam Deck can also be a full PC; you can plug in keyboard, mouse, screens, whatever, and use it to replace your laptop/desktop if you really want.
The middle ground is that the Steam Deck can be an incredibly versatile gaming machine. I can play the verified Steam games, I can usually play the non-verified games, I can install Heroic/Lutris and install all my free Epic/GOG/Amazon games with minimal tinkering, I can install emulators and run all my old Nintendo games at better resolutions and frame rates, and if I really feel like tinkering then I can install whatever else I want and try to get it working, but I always have all the reliable games to fall back on if I can't!
I have a couple of uses for my steamdeck. The vast majority of the time it sits in my living room. I use it while I'm watching TV with my wife. The ability to pick it up, resume whatever I'm playing right where I left off is great.
The other use is when I'm traveling. It's smaller than a laptop, desktop mode is a fully functional Linux operating system, and it connects to any hdmi port with a small dock. That means I can use it to game, and connect it to the TV in the hotel room and watch whatever I want.
The thing that sold me on the Steam Deck: mods. Mods for minecraft, mods for skyrim, mods for stardew valley, mods for SteamOS itself. I can customize it like no other console, and I don't even need to hack it first.
If you only play Mario, Zelda and such, that's perfectly fine and then a Nintendo's own console is obviously superior.
3rd party games usually run much better on Steam Deck (not surprisingly because of its much more recent hardware). I bought Team Sonic Racing again on Steam after I had a very bad experience playing the Switch version in split screen multiplayer. It just stutters way to much and on one course it's IMO unplayable.
Should sif it created a market which seem stable.