this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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I love my steam deck, but it is not consumer friendly in the slightest. It needs massive improvement from the UX front, especially switching between handheld and desktop mode. And don’t even get me started on how updates work out the box. If you are not on your home network and aren’t prepared for an update it can make it unusable.
It’s a great device but it is for a slightly higher floor of tech savvy users who are willing to tolerate jank and somewhat enjoy problem solving.
The steam deck isn't competing with consoles. It isn’t even competing with the switch. It’s enticing to people who are already in the steam ecosystem and want a handheld PC to constantly tinker with.
I think it’s pretty comparable to consoles. They don’t even have a desktop mode and most often they need an update when you take it out of the box.
If you treat it like a console and just buy from the Steam store, then it’s exactly like a console.
Of course if you want to do more, sure there is a little effort, but then it would not be a good comparison to a console.
It plays half as well as a console and compatibility is pretty impressive but far from consistent. Each game requires research just to see if it’s worth playing on it and will always look worse/play worse than on console by a large margin unless it’s an older or incredibly stripped down indie game.
Anybody who chooses it over a console wasn’t seriously considering a console in the first place. They don’t fill the same gap. The same way even switch and Wii owners often still got a PlayStation or Xbox. The libraries and the entire play experience are wildly different.
I really really like the deck but I don’t recommend it to most people because it’s fun like having Linux on your personal computer is fun. You like to tinker and see what it can do, you like a specific kind of ecosystem, and you like that the restrictions on it are few and far between (aside from performance). But this comes at a cost of UX. The fact that you need to reboot it 50% of the time you swap between handheld and desktop mode is emblematic of the entire experience. If I’m on a switch and dock it, I press a button on a controller and I’m instantly going. Deck? Controller might need to be reconnected to Bluetooth from scratch, the aspect ratio might be completely wrong, the game might panic with the change, lots can go wrong and often does.
Again the fact that a simple update can soft lock your deck until you connect to home wifi is terrible. You have to deal with a lot of little frustrations that no other system has and it just isn’t seamless like other experiences.