and I say yes, without caveats.
I’ll probably still be using my Steam Deck in 2035 lol. It’s just so perfect for the types of games I play - mostly older stuff and modern pixel art / 2D games. I just beat Spiritfarer on it after beating Graveyard Keeper, and I’m nearly to the “end” of Stardew. I’ve played through FFVIII, FFIX, and FFX on it. My gaming time has quadrupled now that I can play all my games in bed or on the toilet or at the park. Just an amazing little machine.
Wtf kind of question is this? Of course it is. And in 10 years it still will be.
In 10 years I would expect a SteamDeck 2 with updated hardware.
10 years ago, maybe? It’s a 1 (one) megapixel brick.
I think an important factor people seem to forget about the steam deck is that it won’t simply cease to be supported like sony or nintendo do with their consoles. If a game comes out on steam and works on linux, it’ll work on the deck. Considering the amount of people developing wonderful but lightweight games, I doubt you’ll ever think 'this platform is dead".
But also Valve will support it.
I bought one of those physical Steam Links nobody cared about. They didn’t do well and Valve ended it fairly quickly. 10 years later it still gets occasional updates from them and benefits from broader Steam Big Picture updates.
Steam Deck has been a huge success. Of course they’ll continue to support it.
And if you buy a game on PC, it doesn’t stop being playable in a generation or two like consoles.
Speaking of consoles, if you buy a game for PC then boom, it’s also on your Steam Deck.
I pretty much always consider games through the lens of my Steam Deck. If it’s a cross-platform game that would run well on the Deck, then I get it for the Deck.
And this is primarily because I can freely install those games to other PCs. If my Nintendo Switch were to get destroyed, then I lose my games with it (outside of emulation, of course). I don’t want games being so temporary. I still play games that are nearing 50 years old!
Well, Valve may drop support for the firmware. Edit: Gaben simps need to accept that vendors do drop support at some point.
The Deck is a regular computer and you can run any OS on it.
Not having firmware updates doesn’t mean software suddenly stops working on it.
And on the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if software still gets updated as Valve keeps its minimum requirements as low as possible. As long as the drivers work, there isn’t a reason for different editions of the Steam Deck to run different versions.
You‘ll need a community effort to continue driver development.
Yeah, that’s called the Linux Community
Thats kind of a “yes, and?” sort of statement though.
486 and first gen Pentiums are still supported, though I’d expect not for much longer. But you’re still talking 35 years after release.
No they won’t
source: literally everything Valve has ever made still works.
hugs Steam controllers
It may work, but there are software dependencies that will become end of life. The first to go will probably be the GPU drivers. In 10 years or so, Linux will discontinue the GPU drivers and you will not be able to run the latest Linux kernel.
It seems there’s a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about how linux works and upstream drivers being in the kernel works. If it works it works, it will keep working.
Valve can stop develop wtv they want and it won’t change a thing.
Weird, my ten year old laptop still works.
Linux will discontinue the GPU drivers
It’ll be community-maintained at that point. If it’s worth updating and there’s demand for it, someone will bother, just like any console, and made all that much easier running open software.
I’d actually willingly bet anyone here $1500 that the Deck will be able to boot a mainline Linux kernel in 2035.
Yeah i agree with you, but there is a limit to community support. The Steam Deck specifically has a big community, but most hobbyists don’t like to spend a ton of time maintaining ancient hardware drivers.
I believe my 11 year old Thinkpad T540p still runs mainline kernels too. The GPU is not supported by the 2018 Intel Iris userspace driver though, so I would need to run a legacy driver that does not support vulkan. Its still packaged by Arch, but it does limit my options.
I’d say 10 years until new games stop running with all features, and 20-30 years until it stops running mainline kernels and loses network access to Steam.
Other handhelds with closed-source drivers probably stop running mainline in 5-10 years.
That’s no guarantee. It‘s naïve. And Steam stopped working on Windows 7 machines, so—
Microsoft is generally far more savage about dropped OS support than Linux. The latter undergoes fewer forced overhauls.
Yes, but this has nothing to with my initial statement.
Steam stopped working on Windows 7
You’re trolling, right? It wasn’t exactly up to Valve lmao. The world stopped supporting Windows 7.
Plenty of software still supports Windows 7. So literally not everything they made still works, there is no guarantee.
True, but they make their money via game sales.
Other OEMs make their money via hardware sales.
Valve has a much bigger incentive in keeping their firmware supported than AYANEO or ASUS…Yes but thinking a piece of hardware will receive support for eternity is naive. That’s all I‘m saying.
The entire point was that you don’t have to rely on vendor support. With proprietary consoles, unless someone hacks it, you won’t get any support when the vendor drops support.
Bro it’s fucking Linux based. Did you not think before speaking?
I wrote and didn’t speak, did you think? The drivers will need maintenance.
The drivers will need maintenance.
And guess what the Linux Community is known for?
Exactly. He is doubting the autistic driven obsession the Linux community makes to ensure old forks are still updated. And bless them for that
Depends on what your usecase is.
My brother wants to play demanding AAA games on a big screen. He doesn’t see the point of a Steam Deck and is about to sell his.
I play indie games and emulated retro games. The Steam Deck is perfect for me to play. I can sit with my kids when they play in the back yard. The hardware isn’t going to go out of date for me for a very long time.
i play both AAA and indie titles. works fine, its just not going to run at 120fps with all the trimmings.
in most bigger titles I get like 25-30fps. which to me works perfectly. especially on such a small display.
performance doesn’t annoy me. the size of games nowadays annoys me. i can’t have more than one triple A title installed at any time because the damn things are like 200 gb now. i long for the days of 30gb downloads. even on big games.
but I can understand how if you’re looking for a smooth experience, the steam deck might not be as powerful as a full desktop.
not going to run 120fps with all the trimmings
Requires a separate gaming PC, but with Steam Link / Sunshine / Moonlight it can!
Don’t really see a reason to run games like Cyberpunk on low settings at 30FPS when I can pipe it in from the other room at 60FPS+ high / ultra settings
Came in clutch with the poor optimization of MH:Wilds. It was a struggle to run at my monitor’a resolution, but running at 1080P to send to my deck made for a decent experience.
indeed. if I owned another PC I would absolutely do it that way, but I install files locally for the time being.
but yes that is a great way to get insane fps on a steam deck. you just have to own more than one gaming computer lol.
can’t agree more. I have no ambition to play graphically intense shooters on my deck. It’s for chill controller games, which usually are not very heavy to run.
Graphically intense games can be good too, especially in bed, streaming from a PC in the other room.
It’s an outstanding machine for little rogue-likes at the bus stop, or some Star Fox, but I’m not even going to try to load something like Expedition 33 on it.
I tweaked the settings for Expedition 33 and played it on the steamdeck beautifully. Did nearly everything. Runs great.
Oh it’s possible, and it runs well, but I’d never recommend the SD for that.
But it’s all in your expectations I guess. I don’t use my SD for serious game sessions, I use it to goof off in bed, or on a plane or ferry.
A lot of people I’ve spoken to seem to think it’s a replacement for a ps5 or a full sized gaming computer. It’s enough to get by, but I wouldn’t tell anyone to chuck their setup and get one.
I’d say that’s probably a better use case for a console like a PS5 than a Steam Deck.
Steam Deck? Oh, you mean the Balatro machine!
Yesssss
I just wish Slay the Spire worked as well. I mean it works, but you can tell controller support was definitely an afterthought. But those 2 games are probably most of my played hours on it.
Slay the spire works fine on your previous phone. You know, that 3x lighter machine with 2x the pixel count you already carry everywhere anyway.
Not sure why you specified “previous” phone. I don’t tend to carry that around at all. The battery lasts a few hours if the screen stays off, said screen is cracked and it runs nothing “fine”. Everything haha and glitches around. It remains useful as a cat TV mainly.
Assuming that’s some kinda typo, the current one runs it much better, but getting the correct card when my hand is full is very unreliable, and the UI is cramped to hell since it is a smaller screen but can’t be scaled down as much due to readability. It does come in handy when the deck is at home though.
I’ve specified that because I’ve mainly played it on a 2013 Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (yes, wit a stylus), a FullHD beast that Steam Deck can’t even dream of matching even a decade later.
The controls for STS are very simple, you could get away with mapping keyboard keys to the controls or using the touchpad.
If you wanted to get fancy you could even map the touchpad to the card selection area (for easy card peeking) and use the buttons for everything else.I’m more talking about peeking itself doesn’t let you see everything. As in, everything is frozen in place while peeking, so if I’m checking enemy HP, it usually blocked by whatever card is selected, and you can’t back out of the selection you’re peeking through, so you’re stuck. That is just a problem with the game itself though, not the controller support.
But selecting a card should be visually more obvious, at least for non attack cards. I can’t count how many times I’ve selected a card intending to consider my move but accidentally playing it because I didn’t see it was already selected quickly enough. Now that’s maybe my fault for going too fast sometimes, but a better visual indicator would be nice.
Also, defaulting the enemy selection to the one I targeted last instead of the one closest to the left would also be super helpful.
I only play on the deck now since I found out about the recent Intel microcode issue the hard way, and I can’t afford to replace the 2nd and 3rd most expensive parts of a computer. Fixed disability income means I won’t get that done until I get my next job.
Ohhhh… yeah, fair enough.
I’ve faced both of these, especially the playing cards by accident bit. Hope they fix it in STS2.I can’t wait. I’m no expert player, I only have around ascension 4 done for each character. But it’s because I’m too greedy lol.
Got one last year for my bday
It’s 100% worth imo
Even if you don’t play games, it’s a fully functional linux computer for like <$400 that can play most modern games and handle anything less intensive than gaming no prob
While I wholeheartedly agree. I do want to make one small note for anyone that reads this and thinks like I did.
Don’t get one if you want to use it for professional audio work. It’s a niche use case I know but I thought I’d be able to install Reaper and use it as a little music workstation since reaper is just right in the discover store. Unfortunately, the Steam Deck’s audio drivers are basically only good for playing back audio. When trying to do audio work they were unusably buggy and had a bunch of latency.
If you want a little computer to make music with get a raspberry pi instead. Use the steam deck for gaming like it was intended for and don’t be dumb like I was.
yeah you’d probably want to run JACK instead of PipeWire if you’re doing audio workstation stuff, and with its immutable core there’s no good way to swap them.
The steamdeck still holds up well halfway through a console’s generation.
I have about 100 games i have yet to play on the SD - so, yeah, it holds up.
I use it to stream from a gaming PC, super long battery life and no loud fan. Amazing way to use the deck.
Can you describe how you do this? I have mixed experience with in-home streaming via Steam (latency, disconnects, inability to connect when the host is running Windows with no monitor) but would be very interested in giving it another go with a Linux host and the Deck.
Like, what’s your setup and how does your typical way of using it look like (startup, streaming, etc.)?
You can install Moonshine on the Deck, then install Sunlight on the desktop. Sunshine is an alternative streaming server software and Moonlight is the client. The setup has lower latency and is capable of 4k 60fps if your desktop and router can handle the throughput
Can you recommend a good router for it? Even with an RAXE500 dropped packets are a nuisance with both on wifi.
My brother has a Lenovo Legion Go, and I can’t lie, the much bigger 144hz display and more powerful chipset make the Steam Deck look outdated when side by side and running more graphically demanding games (RDR2 for example).
However, the ergonomics of the Steam Deck are superior. SteamOS as well, but that doesn’t really count since you can get it on other devices now. Also the fact that you can actually buy replacement parts for the Deck is amazing.
The sooner we get another Steam Deck, the better. Pls Valve, bigger display and more power. And a second USB-C port. That’s all I ask.
It’s over 200% of the price though, comparing the cheapest options. I payed 320 for a refurbished SD. Cheapest Legion go I could find was 700+.
Bigger screen and another usb C would be great, agreed, but im gonna ride this Steamdeck all the way to hell if it’ll let me .
The Steam Deck was never supposed to be a powerhouse. It was intended to be extremely high efficiency and long-lasting and to this day no one competes with them on that. Nor do they compete on peripherals or cost effectiveness.
We won’t see another Steam Deck soon, and I think that’s a good thing. Gives developers a hardware target for their games.
the steam deck fits a different market than a lot of PC gamers. they’re used to upgrading every 2 years. they’re used to obsessing over even the smallest fps or slight performance increase.
the fact that the steam deck wasn’t made for that kind of consumer but is being consumed by them is why we get people crying out for an upgrade constantly.
they’re trying to buy a compact version of their huge desktop gaming rigs. or trying to force a future where Valve releases a new model every year. that (as you said) is not what the steam deck was made for.
i am also glad that Valve is sticking to this model for as long as they can.
That’s true. I guess what I’m saying is, I personally want a powerhouse Steam Deck. If it costs twice the price of the current one, I’d still buy it.
Yeah, I have no problem running the games I’m interested in and no interest in buying a new handheld if it’s not a steamdeck 2.
I hardly play newer games anyway, so maybe I’ll just get a new battery for the steamdeck in a few years.
I have both and my biggest gripe about the Lenovo is the abysmal battery life. It feels like a portable that constantly needs to be near a plug.
Yeah I’ve played it a bit myself and its dreadful. Its portability feels limited for this reason.
And a USB-A wouldn’t hurt. Having just one port means you’re charging and that’s it unless you have a dock or splitter handy. Crazy.
I have a decent desktop with a wide screen display, but I love the portability of the Steam Deck. It just works with syncing save files and continuing my game when I am not at home or want to lie in bed.
I know what I’m getting when I’m not at my desk, and want usability over specs.
Time for a successor, though. Sometimes I think Valve really doesn’t like money. They could make a crapton by bringing out a new Steam Deck and a Steam console.
It’s a PC, essentially, so the hardware is always evolving, they could upgrade whenever they choose to. The advantage of any console, the Steam Deck included, is it offers a very consistent set of specs the developers can target for years. If Valve iterates too quickly, then two problems arise: One, there’s one performance goal for devs interested in making a portable game to work towards, there’s many. In addition, the Steam Deck Verified program gets a lot harder to maintain if there are too many flavors of Deck to manage. I think Valve is planing on a lifecycle similar to the major consoles.
The upside is it is all PC hardware, and there are other handheld manufacturers out there, some even running SteamOS, so if you want a higher performance rig before Valve’s ready for the SD2, you can certainly find what you’re looking for.
The steam deck is getting long in the tooth and will increasingly have trouble playing newer titles. In PC gaming, you can’t have console-like product cycles.
I would argue the Steam Deck was never really meant to target the newest and greatest.
Sure, but at some point it’ll be just too outdated.
Maybe outdated for future CPU and GPU hungry games.
The same emulators that run now will continue to do so as will very likely indie titles.
In the end it depends on what you want to do with the SD.
Do you have a steam deck?
Yes.
