All hands on Steam Deck - Valve's handheld PC

Yes. You’re better off continuing to stream on your LAN to the TV then asking the Deck to push higher resolutions.

On the back of the closure of the eShop that’s perfect timing. That thumbnail choice too…

EmuDeck has Dolphin already, pretty easy to install and make work.

I logged into my Steamdeck today and it’s redownloading the entire Marvel Midnight Suns game of 58 Gig. Anyone know why the Steamdeck does that? Seems like I get a lot more updates for it than I do on my PC for games.

The developer controls what is downloaded in updates. Some of them don’t pay attention when they update and don’t set it to only add changed or patched files, but rather your entire install. I’ve had this happen with Midnight Suns on earlier updates on my PC as well. Sometimes though if you wait to update they are made aware or change the settings and it will adjust to only the changed files.

Is it actually redownloading the entire thing, from what you can tell? I’ve had Steam report an update being X gigs in size but when the download starts going it ends up being quite small (I see this on PC Steam fairly often).

Yea, it actually was the entire thing. It took an hour.

That was just a stupid large update of Midnight Suns – probably screwed up by the publisher. Same giant update on my desktop PC, nothing to do with the Deck.

Games do update more often on the Steam Deck, because of the shader cache it uses.

I’m trying to get Dungeons of Dredmor to work on Steamdeck. It runs, but is too tiny. How can I force it to run at 800x600?

In the game properties in Steam you can force a resolution.

Looks good, but it kinda looks like take the Steam Deck, use the next generation of hardware, profit?

Having to use Windows is going to make it more expensive, and the trackpads are very useful for mouse emulation and all sorts of other uses. Might work, but IMO, unless it’s running it’s own thing, if it’s just another Windows machine, it won’t be as exciting as a Steam Deck.

It looks really good. I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the Steam Deck style and this is faster than I thought it would be. Lots of progress on the display/screen. I also don’t like how flat it is, they need to emulate the humps on the bottom of the ends, because the Steam Deck feels extremely natural with them.

I wonder how much this (and probably other) announcements are going to push Steam to reveal tidbits about Steam Deck 2.0 (hopefully with OLED or something comparable)

He is 100% correct though, if they don’t price it right, it won’t have any chance against the Steam Deck.

It’s great to see competition in this space, I hope it keeps up. The Steam Deck is just a fantastic device and having competition in the area is the best part of PC gaming: play your library wherever you want, you get to choose what hardware to run it on.

Unless I still had tons of time to tinker I wouldn’t trust any of these Steam Deck competitors from even the major Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers or Logi. You just know the community and support knowledge base will be so much smaller and/or the devices will be discontinued before you know it.

Yeah, these things already existed before the Steam Deck, and we weren’t buying them then. Not really much more reason to buy them now. The Steam Deck is cheap, powerful (relatively), “just works” 90% of the time, gets us the fuck away from Windows, open to the user to tinker with, and the physical design is very ergonomic.

I appreciate the competition, though, and hope these pretenders to the throne keep Valve on their toes and innovating.

If that ASUS lacks trackpads, that’s pretty much a non-starter imo. I use the trackpads on the SD all the time, particularly for point-n-click adventure games.

Yeah, the trackpads are sweet. They feel like Steam Controller 2.0 pads. I always wanted to like them more than I did on the Steam Controller, but I genuinely like them here. It helps that they’re supplementary to the thumbsticks instead of trying to replace them, which I think was a mistake.

Definitely a big upgrade since the Vive/Steam Controller days. They just feel right now. Like gamepads on PC were always supposed to have these.