Supposed Steam Deck killers are missing the point

[Redaktion]

There are plenty of supposed Steam Deck killers available in the portable gaming space, from the Asus ROG Ally to the Lenovo Legion Go and all the Ayaneo and ONEXPLAYER devices in between. But none of them have managed to outright slay the dragon that is the mighty Steam Deck yet.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Supposed-Steam-Deck-killers-are-missing-the-point.748556.0.html

[NatT96Z]

The Steam Deck is the safest option thus far, customer support, community mods and build quality keep it above the other options. When I refer to build quality, I have heard awful stories on people shoveling $1000+ on other hardware and having the mlst incosistant quality issues. GPD ruled the streets for a moment, but I never trusted it, I felt like people only bought it for its novelty and not quality.Matter a fact I will predict low sales will cause ALOT of these companies to no longer supporting very expensive handhelds chasing this trend. I doubt we will see AyaNeo or even ASUS supporting there hardware longterm like Valve

[NatT96Z]

The Steam Deck is the safest option thus far, customer support, community mods and build quality keep it above the other options. When I refer to build quality, I have heard awful stories on people shoveling $1000+ on other hardware and having the mlst incosistant quality issues. GPD ruled the streets for a moment, but I never trusted it, I felt like people only bought it for its novelty and not quality.Matter a fact I will predict low sales will cause ALOT of these companies to no longer supporting very expensive handhelds chasing this trend. I doubt we will see AyaNeo or even ASUS supporting there hardware longterm like Valve

Excuse the typos, im using a crappy Android keyboard. But yeah years from now you wont see a majority of these companies supporting or making follow up hardware

[Deako]

Unfortunately however the Steam Deck hardware is a bit unreliable and not the best quality.

After 16 months of ownership, mine has had to go back for an RMA due to battery failure. Valve support has been exceptional, however I think on the next iteration of the Steam Deck, Valve should be looking at how they can make Steam Decks last.

I'm just one of a whole lot of people who has had to RMA their Decks. This shouldn't really be happening and I wonder how much it's costing Valve to rectify all these faulty units, especially when it's common knowledge that margins are extremely tights on the Steam Deck hardware.

[Vadym]

People looking at the deck (or Index at that matter) ignoring the fact that they are first gen product. So some failures and bad component vendors are expected to be (especially if you remember that they wanted to cheap out on everything with Deck). As time comes they changed fan vendor and, if I remember correctly, battery too. As company that cone to stay they should do RMA as a trusted company. Im also glad that ASUS in this market, because their support is excellent too.
At this point Valve are cooking next gen handheld but it will skip another generation of AMD CPU/GPU just to stay relevant a bit longer. At the time of release, RDNA 2 in deck were first introduced to handhelds but RDNA 3 came out recently and just smoked previous gen.

[Dan6]

I really support Valve's approach. I like SteamOS, desktop option, how well though through and efficient steam deck is, to be able to put games to sleep with one click. And trackpads are just dealmakers for me! I hope they will not join this race of meaningless specs bumps like QHD displays, RGB and etc. But I'd like to see some improvements in steam deck 2 like next gen SoC, OLED 800p display with smaller bezels, more efficient cooling and better battery. I don't mind paying more for that, maybe they could introduce some Pro/Ultra/Premium version along with the budget one.

[D.Lovecraft]

While better devices missing just some mythical "point", deck missing everything else: smooth fullHD display, powerful hardware, wide-compatible OS... For any sane person the choice is obvious.

[Dan6]

While better devices missing just some mythical "point", deck missing everything else: smooth fullHD display, powerful hardware, wide-compatible OS... For any sane person the choice is obvious.

I would disagree with you. I'm quite sure you didn't try Deck and made your decision just looking at specs. Why you need a FHD 8" in games? FHD only kills battery faster, helps to marketing team to sell device and that's all it's needed for..

Powerful hardware is only a meter of time when Valve updates it.

As for Windows - yes, on paper it looks better, it's compatible with all or most games out of the box, BUT
anything I cared - runs on SteamOS and overall experience is better, it's more polished, more console-like - just download and play, pause at any point of time and resume whenever you want. I suggest you try first before making a decision looking only at specs. That's why most people who tried RoG Ally are returning to Deck.

Also I'm quite sure Valve's support will last longer than Asus's or Lenovo's, after which users will be left with raw windows experience.

[Mark86]

Ps3 emulation is what I'm interested in.
And the deck just can't (nowhere near the Rog)
Valve needs to release the deck Pro.
Nobody will be mad this is PC gaming we do incremental updates and often.
They also need a bigger battery 50 or 60w and a 1080p screen.
720p is fine for gaming but if you have too read something it's a problem.
If it becomes to heavy don't worries do 2 versions one with a have bigg battery and one for people that just can't because reasons.

[A Rant]

Uhm, maybe it doesn't need to have one cuz it kinda sucks? Maybe it killed itself? They all are. The only decent portables are the switch and the ones Sony made when they were making them. x86 just doesn't work. Until some company starts work on releasing arm ports of games, or a fast emulation compatibility layer like fex, or pc game companies themselves start releasing native arm binaries of their games - They shouldn't even bother making yet another handheld.

I just don't want to download 150gb sized games on a portable device. I don't be forced to upgrade to 2TB which is expensive on smaller form factor storage just to be able more a few games. I don't want to spend several hundreds on a device which in 2 years won't even have the battery capacity to give you an hour of gameplay. I also do not want a large device which weighs as much as a brick, gets hot or has annoying fans.

I'll most likely wait it out and get a switch 2 whenever that is released. Not because I like Nintendo games or modern gaming in general but because knowing it's a Nintendo console it'll get hacked almost instantly, just like all their other consoles. And when it does you'll have a cheap device, with decent build quality, battery life, fairly potent SoC with solid nvidia gpu driver support (required for some emus) and be capable booting into multiple OS's (windows on arm, linux, etc).

Considering there's already an rpcs3 port to apple silicon, it shouldn't be too difficult to have some linux arm or windows on arm native builds soon. But if the performance isn't good enough, no big deal for me as the original switch had quite a few game ports from ps3 era and yuzu should work fairly well.

[JackW]

While better devices missing just some mythical "point", deck missing everything else: smooth fullHD display, powerful hardware, wide-compatible OS... For any sane person the choice is obvious.

I would disagree with you. I'm quite sure you didn't try Deck and made your decision just looking at specs. Why you need a FHD 8" in games? FHD only kills battery faster, helps to marketing team to sell device and that's all it's needed for..

Powerful hardware is only a meter of time when Valve updates it.

As for Windows - yes, on paper it looks better, it's compatible with all or most games out of the box, BUT
anything I cared - runs on SteamOS and overall experience is better, it's more polished, more console-like - just download and play, pause at any point of time and resume whenever you want. I suggest you try first before making a decision looking only at specs. That's why most people who tried RoG Ally are returning to Deck.

Also I'm quite sure Valve's support will last longer than Asus's or Lenovo's, after which users will be left with raw windows experience.

I had the Deck and it just wasn't upto scratch. SteamOS just isn't ready for prime time. Most games don't work on it. Even the ones "deck approved" (like Hogwarts Legacy) run abysmally on Deck. The Asus Rog is lightyears ahead on resolution, game compatibility and performance fronts.

[danloeb]

there's also the issue of consistency in performance on steam deck versus all competitors.  the 1% and 0.1% lows on steam deck aren't even bad, they're incredible and consistent for a low power apu.  every competitor on the other hand, drops to single digit frame rates at times, and thus has wildly inconsistent performance.

[Gallo123]

Handheld PC gaming is just a waste of money and time. There might be a small demographic that enjoys it but  what type of gamer would dedicate PC gaming to only on handheld where they don't have a PC already.

I can't see myself wasting the PC gaming experience by downgrading and forcing low FPS.It's an environment where nothing is better and you are just asking for compatibility issues due to the form factor.

 Whilst console handhelds are not particularly powerful, money is invested in unique games and experiences, I would accept the compromise but PC gaming doesn't offer this.

[Kafeen]

I the price is a key factor for the Steam deck. It provides a great entry level PC gaming platform for a lot less than most entry level PCs.

When you look at most of the competition, they add in hardware upgrades but the price rises too. This pushes them in to a price bracket where in the PC space they're competing against much more powerful hardware.

The Steam deck is great for either an entry level PC gaming system or something you'd be happy to throw in a bag while traveling. I think its competitors price themselves out of both of these categories.

[Pokedut]

I have more games on epic than steam, and valve never even bothered to sell steam deck in my country officially. Asus rog ally is the better option.