At those price points, it would make no sense to get the 64… get the 512. Unless you already have alternate storage sitting around ready to install.

If you got the 64 with a 512 micro SD card, you’d be in for about the same money, give or take no more than $10. You may as well have the faster SSD instead.

I’ve used it before when playing non-docked (otherwise I have a Blue yeti condenser mic hooked up into my docking hub).

The people I was playing with said I sounded good and clear. I’ve used it both with Discord and with Steam voice chat and I’ve never had an issue.

EDIT: I saw your post about issues with it when using wired headphones. That very well may be, but I can tell you it works fine with Bluetooth headphones (I alternate on a couple of pairs of BT bone conduction headphones).

I said it elsewhere, but it’s almost like they looked at the market research showing Steam PC gamers would buy a gazillion Steam Controller 2s or Steam Deck Controllers if they made and sold either one, or both.

And then they decided to make something that was neither one of those things. It’s totally bizarre.

Why would anyone buy this? You can already do this streaming through the Deck or any of the other handhelds, if Game Pass is your thing.

I’d probably say no from your replies below to people, OP. The screen alone isn’t worth several hundred dollars, and your main concern about portable gaming length seems addressable by an external battery pack and the carrying solution to include it with your Deck out and about for several hundred dollars cheaper.

Really it feels like you’re asking, is it worth spending all that extra cash to make your portable rig gaming setup less bulky when you’re gaming away from home. For me, the answer would be no and I’d put up with the slightly bulkier set up with the battery pack, and I feel like most people would be at the same place, but I don’t know your exact specific circumstances.

Sorry friend, Valve absolutely cratered the resale value of LCD Decks with the OLED launch and restructuring.

I was considering selling my Deck and moving to the Go in the days before the announcement, and the very day I decided to sell, Valve put out that press release. Instantly new LCD Decks were $150ish cheaper, so that just comes right off the top of what you could get for a used one.

It actually did replace my laptop when I got it last year. My dying, ancient laptop finally kicked it just a couple of days before the Deck arrived. I never had one iota of desire to get another laptop.

Of course our use cases are radically different, but I think that displays the versatility quite well.

This is the smallest obstacle, IMO. You could get rid of (or leave a small dual boot partition of) Windows, and use one of the good Linux distros tailored to a Steam OS-like experience, like Chimera or Bazzite, and just keep ticking along without missing a beat.

I love my Deck, but I’m already researching the process of eventually transitioning off of it simply because the screen is too tiny for my 40s eyes, and I don’t get to use it handheld as much as I’d like. This upcoming wave of Deck-like handhelds with 9 and 10 inch screens will be looking very good in this upcoming year.

Save yourself the PR nightmare that accompanies data breaches! Prevent all outside hacking forever by proactively dumping your data onto the internet yourself!

It’s pure genius!

I’ll take a larger screen, the 7" is far too tiny for me for almost any game with text or captioning. Something in the 9" or slightly larger range would be golden, and you could get most of the way there by getting rid of the bezels. The actual Deck itself wouldn’t have to be that much bigger to accommodate the rest.

Don’t sleep on Grim Dawn either. Deep, with a ton of class combos.

You can make the gyro activator any control input on the Steam Deck. Don’t be afraid to experiment to find the comfiest option for you.

It’s a classic. I’m going to revisit it after my BG3 playthrough. I never did complete it previously.

I use it all the time. For everything besides gaming, where I like having the integrated gaming mode UI instead.

Of course, the Deck is my only PC currently, which isn’t the use case that most have for it.

I’m kind of hoping that Larian realizes they forgot this, and just patches a fix to auto-install and run this with the game naturally, so that there isn’t a need to go through this rigmarole.

They’ve been pushing for this launch date for weeks now, and to me, them leaving it out is the developer equivalent of a major league baseball player running out to the field, but leaving his glove in the dugout. Like, how did you forget that? lol

Yep, the name and branding were the problem. Nailed it!

Appreciate the suggestion, I usually set one of the trackpads as the magnifier and mouse. It’s not ideal though, the zoom in is pretty extreme, so you lose parts of the screen.

I play Solasta exclusively on the Deck (as it’s my only PC now), but almost ALL that time is docked.

The tiny text is a deal-breaker for my 40s eyes, re: playing it handheld. I’m working on a magnification screen rig at the moment (awaiting the parts) to address the issue in general, but just by default, on an 800p 7-inch screen, it’s just too small.

I’m hoping that developers work on having clean and scalable fonts and UIs, as a growing percentage of PC gamers are going to be portable.

It can be done right. For example, I bought Inscryption on the last steam sale and played through almost all of it handheld, and every font in that game is either large as a percentage of screen real estate, or it’s very, very clean and easy to read when smaller. That was a great experience on the small screen.

Maybe if they’d stop enshittifying their site trying to strong arm people into buying Premium, and start making the user experience actually bareable for people without ad blockers (I’d happily take a unskippable ad between videos if they’d remove the experience-destroying mid-roll ads), then people wouldn’t go through these measures to block ads and modify things in Google-unfavorable ways.

Yeah, “AAA games on high / beautiful graphics settings” isn’t really the Deck’s forte. FSR upscaling covers up a lot of the worst of docked ugliness, but it has its limits.

If visual fidelity is a huge deal for someone, and they are going to play docked 90%+ of the time, then they’d probably have been better served by a gaming laptop instead of a Steam Deck. And if one picked up the Deck because it was the best overall value for what they could afford, then they should probably be happy with the capabilities it has, and adjust their expectations a bit.

I have a similar issue with a pair of bone conduction headphones I have. Often (maybe every couple of days) I have to go to desktop mode, go into the Bluetooth manager, tell it to completely forget the headphones, and then repair them. That consistently works with mine, but I have no idea if it’ll help with air pods.

Also consider your use case re: the control method you’re using. If you’re ever going to want to use the Deck itself as your controller, then you want a hub like this, for example and a $10 holding stand for when you have to put it down… not a dock. If you have a separate controller or are only intending to M&K while docked, then a dock is probably the best solution.

As I promised below, here’s a detailed report of what I did to make my Deck dockable and also have it be the game controller while doing so.

1. REQUIRED: A hub like this. The plug coming off of it connects to the power port on your Deck; everything else in this setup connects to the hub.

2 ) REQUIRED: Any HDMI male-male cord (assuming that your display/TV has HDMI) that is long enough to give you comfortable distance between where you’re sitting and the display, with some slack. This will plug into the hub and the display to connect them.

You could go with a wireless HDMI setup for less bulk I guess, but that’s expensive and there might be latency involved? I have no experience with wireless HDMI so I couldn’t guide you there.

3. OPTIONAL POWER CORD COMBO, done for longer power cord reach than the included Deck plug, which can be used instead, it’s just shorter (default cable is 6 or 6.5 feet, I think. If that’s long enough to connect you and the power sources you use, and have slack, then just use the included Deck power cord and don’t worry about this optional power setup).

Part one of the power combo is a normal 65W adapter plug that I already had laying around for an old laptop. I didn’t have to buy this, but I guess something like this would work, this very much resembles mine in looks/stats.

Part two of the optional power set up done for longer power cord reach than the included Deck plug: I use this cable to connect the hub to the power adapter. The extra three to four feet this gives is now plenty long enough between me and the power supplies I use and also have comfortable slack, but you could probably find a longer version of this if you needed to.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You now have the needed base stuff (hub connects Deck, power, and HDMI for display all together), but here’s some extra comfort stuff I did.

1. Cable ties can help to keep the power cable and HDMI cable together as they run up to the hub, keeping them from splaying apart, and keeping them neater and easier to deal with. You can get them cheaper and/or smaller quantities than this, I just included the link to show you what the thing is that I’m talking about.

2. You can leave the hub loose and hanging off to the side if you wish (if you do, then a power cord extension to increase the hub-to-Deck distance will likely be needed, as the default hub power cable is short), but I found that the hub being separate was just too inconvenient. So I actually attached the hub directly to the back of the Deck using Velcro tape. The tape does separate the hub and Deck a little physically so that they don’t conduct much heat between themselves, so don’t worry about that.

I have small hands, so I attached my hub horizontally across the Deck on the back, above and not covering the vent, and I still have plenty of room to use all of the buttons and triggers. If your hands are bigger, you might get a little cramped, I’d measure it out first before going with the attachment solution.

3. I didn’t like the way the hub cable had to bend very close to the power port on top of the Deck to be able to plug into it, so I got an adapter to plug into the port from the top, with the female plug redirected to the side, to try to reduce the strain the hub cable was putting on the port. This may just have been a figment of my imagination and no harm was actually being done without the adapter, but I wanted to be better safe than sorry.

My apologies for the novel, but I thought having my whole setup would be helpful since it solved the issue you’re having for me months back. Have fun.

You need a dock, and a power cord that is long enough to have the Deck a comfortable distance from your TV. I used a USB hub dock, and a charging adapter with a long cable. Can’t get into my Amazon account from my phone at the moment so I will try to remember to come back and share what I did tomorrow, feel free to reply to remind me.

Into the Breach is perfect for this. It’s played on a coordinate grid, so giving suggestions on what to do per turn would be very easy without needing a bunch of description to explain exactly what is being talked about.

Been playing a lot of Solasta lately. Also, picked up Inscryption on the Steam sale today, and already hooked.

Others here have probably mentioned it, but I’ve heard the Deck is fantastic in situations where you use a main powerhouse PC to run a game (especially at the Deck’s resolution of 800p), then stream it through your local network to the Deck.

I don’t do that, but I daily drive a Steam Deck and can attest that it’s a fantastic device handheld. It’ll play a TON of stuff at low/medium settings natively, and you have a big PC to handle the top tear graphics-card-melters, which you can stream from (in that scenario the Deck is fine as it takes very little of the load).

My only caution point is the small screen. It’s 7 inches diagonal, so small print in games can be tough, especially if you have 40s eyes like me. Otherwise, it’s exceeded wildly beyond my expectations.