Do you play more than before you got your deck?
Do you play the same kinds of games, or do you play different types of games now?
Do you still play at the same times or places, or have those changed?
Are there any other significant changes to your playing habits?
I work from home 3 days a week. I have a decent battlestation, 5800X and RX6700 with a 38" widescreen and homebuilt ergosplit on a sit-stand desk. During work hours I use a KVM so I can use my work laptop with my setup.
When I built it out, I wasn’t prepared for how little I would want to game at that desk.
The only gaming I did since I built that PC was sitting on my couch with an old Steam Link and Steam Controller. It didn’t matter that the screen wasn’t as good or that I had to timeshare the TV with the rest of the family. It was a change of scenery that let me leave work behind.
Since getting a Steam Deck, I’ve finished more games than I have in years. Not only can I game away from my desk, I can hang out with the rest of the family without disturbing them. And if someone needs my attention, I can put it to sleep without worrying about save points or load times.
The switch did.
All handheld, all the time.
The steam deck means it’s less painful, and I can play more complicated games. My switch is basically untouched since.
Same, haven’t even booted up my switch in months
I’ve been playing more single player games. My PC has mostly been for multiplayer stuff with friends - Siege, Deep Rock etc. My Deck has opened up time to a load of Single Player things - AAA things like Spiderman, Control, Mad Max and indie stuff like Black Skylands.
Plus I had a load of work travel in the first part of this year. The Deck made hotel rooms much more pleasant!
It’s made my Steam collection viable again. I had to box up the PC when we had our second kid, and with it went 400+ games. The Deck has totally gotten me back into that ecosystem again, which is surely what Valve want.
On a personal level it’s totally killed my Switch off (Nintendo exclusives aside). I also find myself playing most of my games on the 'Deck right now, because having the flexibility is apparently something I really enjoy.
I am a father of young children. Prior to my deck, I would be just too tired by the time the kids were asleep to go downstairs in my basement and play on my desktop. That just led to me playing games maybe once a week on the weekend.
Now that I have a deck, I can kick my feet up on the couch and play for an hour or two before bed.
Because of the deck I actually am able to make time to play games. Without the deck I just skip games altogether during the week.
i don’t have a steam deck but now i play on my pc with linux instead of windows lmao
I’ve installed games on the deck that I thought were interesting but I wasn’t in a rush to play right away. And instead of those games getting forgotten I ended up actually playing them.
For me it is quite awesome to be able to play a game on my PC, and take the Deck with me and continue the game on-the-go, then pick back up on PC, without losing progress. It’s pretty seamless.
Also, if I’m just downstairs from my PC, or outside, I can stream from PC to Deck and enjoy reduced battery consumption and faster loading times. I think the graphics look much better too, but that may be optimistic-colored shades.
I was on a decade-and-a-half gaming hiatus (job, kids, the usual) until we got the Nintendo Switch early in the pandemic (and it was a saviour for the whole family). When the Steam Deck was announced, I hesitated a day or two (this probably pushed me three to four months in the delivery queue), but eventually realized that this is the device I’ve been waiting for my whole life (a Linux-based gaming hand held which can also be used as a general purpose computer) and ordered it. I had a dormant Steam account with only Civilization V in it (my wife got it for me on DVD when it came out, and that’s when I made the account). Since then, I bought >200 games and >100 DLCs (I started playing some of the lighter ones on my under-powered Linux laptop before the Deck arrived and continued on the Deck using cloud saves), finished multiple games, and felt sleep depraved for months.
Currently, me and my wife are playing Divinity 2 in split screen mode on the big TV. I also use the Deck for online courses, responding to emails, writing documents, surfing, etc. I created a desktop controls binding for handheld desktop mode usage which allows me to change zoom and brightness, bring up the keyboard easily, copy and paste, open the start menu, alt-tab between windows and go in and out of full screen mode etc. all with one or two motions of the controls. For example, I mapped swiping up and down on the left touchpad to mouse wheel up and down, and swiping left and right on it to SHIFT+mouse wheel up and down, allowing me to scroll in all directions using my left thumb. This allows me to use it for reading illustrated books where I need to zoom in and out and scroll across the page.
Steam Deck is a game changer in so many ways.
I do a lot of flying and travel for work and the Steam Deck has been fantastic for it. My gaming laptop can’t draw sufficient wattage from the airplane’s power outlets so I couldn’t use it for gaming in flight, so I needed another solution that wasn’t gaming on my phone (let’s face it, most mobile games suck).
The Steam Deck gives me that extra versatility when traveling. I find myself playing games that I wouldn’t otherwise normally play due to the control scheme. I’m mainly a keyboard and mouse user so adapting to a controller for most things was a bit of a learning curve, but it’s much easier when playing games well suited for it (Ace Combat 7, American Truck Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2, FEZ). My favorite though so far has been Grim Fandango Remastered. The controls are so intuitive that it’s like the game was custom made for the Deck (despite the original being two decades old).
I haven’t really played FPS even though there’s a gyroscopic control scheme available, I miss the precision that the mouse enables. Hack and slash in TES 4 Oblivion works well though, but not really with bow and arrow shooting.
I also couldn’t really do RTS for the same reason, even with the track pad like functionality.
It’s great though for side scrollers, isometric RPGs, third person action adventure games, driving games, and simulators.
This, the Deck is a godsend on those longer flights where I would be using the switch, but it can’t run current-gen games. And also, emulation. Nintendo devices are in a constant back and forth with people looking for exploits, the Deck just says “You want to run a PS2 in this bitch, here’s the pcsx2 flatpak and another that passes it through the Steam GUI with images so it looks like it fits in your library, I won’t ask where you got that ISO of King’s Field 4 if you don’t ask when Half-Life 3 is coming out, kthxbye!”
I’ve played my Steam Deck exactly once since I bought it when it first released.
Serious question. Why?
I’ve never felt any need to use it. It doesn’t do anything my daily driver doesn’t except be a handheld console, and I don’t go anyplace where portability is needed. I bought it because it was a cool new tech thing, but I’ve never found a use for it.
Honestly I’m kind of in the same boat. Most things I want to play usually are things better done with m+k or otherwise intensive games that won’t play well on the deck. But my partner loves it and has cleared multiple 100+ hour RPGs with it, and that alone was worth the price of admission.
Weird response, but I’ll bite. Sitting at home on my couch is not a place I can play on my desktop computer, so I can play some fun indie games on a machine I can pause and suspend gameplay anywhere and resume at anytime. I literally cannot do that on my PC without using some serious docker type stuff on my games which is not worth it.
I have a fair amount of casual games that I don’t play on my PC as I prefer more indepth games when I’m at my PC. The SteamDeck provides a perfect use case for these games. Anyways, I’m surprised. I also setup GOG and Epic on my SteamDeck through the Heroic Launcher which even lets me play some old school games which is endless fun.
I’m not making any claims that the Steamdeck is bad or not useful for anything. I’m merely stating that I personally have found no use case for it in my own life. I’m happy that you and others have.
Another use that I have found for it is as multiplayer platform on-the-go, either watching movies, video games, or just as a handheld laptop haha. The desktop mode is very cool if you haven’t checked it out.
@HumbleHobo @StarServal have you tried Alan wake? I get this error message in heroic. Also, heroic on mac doesn’t play windows games like the steam, potentially, can.
I only bought the Steam Deck so I could play Windows games without having to give money to Microsoft, or pirate Windows. I’d much rather play games on macOS, but unfortunately, there are way too many games that don’t run on macOS (or used to run, but don’t anymore).
Now that Apple has their own Windows compatibility layer in the form of the Game Porting Toolkit, I don’t use my Steam Deck as much as I did.
@OfficialThunderbolt @Fubarberry wait, does this work on M2 airs? How can one play windows games on the MacBook Air?
With Whisky. It requires macOS Sonoma, which launches next week.
@OfficialThunderbolt what’s this for?
Whisky will allow you to run Windows apps, including most games, on a Mac without needing a VM or Boot Camp. It’s basically a front end to Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, which requires Sonoma, so Whisky also requires Sonoma.
And while most games work well, games with a launcher will most likely fail, as will games that use kernel-level anti-cheat or some other DRM on top of Steam’s. Steam works well with Whisky, but Epic’s store doesn’t work for some reason.
@OfficialThunderbolt have you tried running windows games on Mac? Like a typical windows game on steam or something?
Yes.
- Not really, but what device I play on has changed, more Deck now than main gaming PC.
- I play more indie games and single player games now. More emulated games like my old GBA ones mostly.
- Mostly same times, late lol. But around the house far more because of the portability.
- I play much more casually now. Less sweaty competition online, more zone out & chill games.
It’s made me sometimes wish I had one when I was playing games.