Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
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Until more recently when they started getting competion, what other handheld gaming PCs even existed?
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Personally, I think the Deck is too big for my tastes, but the beauty of the ecosystem is that anyone can make one while still having almost all the Deck features.
I'd love to have a Vita or even PSP sized Steam handheld with a great screen for smaller titles, but that comes with its own problems
I think the Deck is too big for my tastes
That's what she said.
Honestly though I love the size of the deck but could even go a little bigger. Agree that as more manufacturers start using SteamOS it will be great to have options.
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What game would I play on a handheld that requires that but doesn’t have any other way to do the same?
Umm... literally any RTS or management game... left click... right click... dragging entities around... multiselecting entities by dragging a box on screen... Good luck with the right stick for that, I'm sure its WAY easier to use it for these tasks than just using a touchpad to point the mouse, right?
LmaoWhere do ou need to jump or press buttons on a controller while controlling the mouse? What is that?
Umm... literally any platformer or side scroller or top down game that has aim controls...
RTSs are unplayable on touchpads. I thought we agreed that touchpads aren't a good mouse replacement for anything requiring precision. Who is out there doing micro on Starcraft 2 on a Steam Controller?
And no, absolutely not true that side scrollers with aim controls need a touchpad. Bloodstained? Maps it to the right stick. Prince of Persia? Right stick. The entire Trine series? Right stick.
I hate when platformers require analogue inputs in the first place, because come on, you want to use a d-pad. But even then I can't think of a single example (since Abuse) that requires you to move and do analogue aim but won't support an analogue stick for that. The common name of top down games with free aim these days is "twin stick shooters", even. Nex Machina? Right stick. Minishoot? Right stick. Oooh, Knight Witch. Underrated. Right stick.
Rimworld, which I haven't played much, IS definitely a mouse and keyboard game. Same issue as with RTSs, though. I would absolutely not try to play that with a controller. Or a touchpad of any kind. Hell, the screen size would be a dealbreaker there.
We're looking for a bit of a unicorn here. It needs to be so coarse and slow that you can comfortably use a dual touchpad setup, but too cumbersome for a single touchpad or a touchscreen. Or somehow not supporting controllers but only for right stick aiming. Which Steam Input can simulate with a stick anyway.
Look, I'm not saying you can't prefer to play that way. You're in a very slim minority but you can absolutely be that guy.
I am saying that your choice is not anywhere near the only choice or the best choice. And for the places where playing with a mouse cursor is a must there is simply no good choice on a controller, with or without touchpads.
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RTSs are unplayable on touchpads. I thought we agreed that touchpads aren't a good mouse replacement for anything requiring precision. Who is out there doing micro on Starcraft 2 on a Steam Controller?
And no, absolutely not true that side scrollers with aim controls need a touchpad. Bloodstained? Maps it to the right stick. Prince of Persia? Right stick. The entire Trine series? Right stick.
I hate when platformers require analogue inputs in the first place, because come on, you want to use a d-pad. But even then I can't think of a single example (since Abuse) that requires you to move and do analogue aim but won't support an analogue stick for that. The common name of top down games with free aim these days is "twin stick shooters", even. Nex Machina? Right stick. Minishoot? Right stick. Oooh, Knight Witch. Underrated. Right stick.
Rimworld, which I haven't played much, IS definitely a mouse and keyboard game. Same issue as with RTSs, though. I would absolutely not try to play that with a controller. Or a touchpad of any kind. Hell, the screen size would be a dealbreaker there.
We're looking for a bit of a unicorn here. It needs to be so coarse and slow that you can comfortably use a dual touchpad setup, but too cumbersome for a single touchpad or a touchscreen. Or somehow not supporting controllers but only for right stick aiming. Which Steam Input can simulate with a stick anyway.
Look, I'm not saying you can't prefer to play that way. You're in a very slim minority but you can absolutely be that guy.
I am saying that your choice is not anywhere near the only choice or the best choice. And for the places where playing with a mouse cursor is a must there is simply no good choice on a controller, with or without touchpads.
I mean that's basically like saying "Who is playing Startcraft 2 on a laptop???" lmao the Steam Deck and Steam Controller touchpads are literally more precise and usable than most laptop touchpads...
And further, in the same messages you accept "using a single touchpad", so like... you agree with me... great. And to satisfy your "dual touchpad" requirement, like I said waaaaaay back up at the top, the left touchpad is great for virtual menus. Pretty indispensable again in any RTS game, or mmoRPG, or pretty much other games designed for keyboard with complex keybinds that a controller cannot support. An analog stick can work with simple virtual menus, but only doesn't totally suck when it is a radial menu.
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No, I get it, no animosity here. I'm just curious about why you think the bar is fundamentally different for the Deck than for consoles in general.
Hell, adjusted for inflation the Game Gear retailed for the equivalent of 300 bucks at launch, which is not far off from the lowest price for the Deck at 399. Plus 90s devices sold a lot less than modern devices. Why would meeting the Game Gear not be a reasonable target for the Deck?
It's the most successful individual PC handheld, but it's also not made it into the same range as most consoles so it hasn't turned this product category into a mainstream device... yet.
I think where I struggle to compare them is that the game gear was meant to be a mass market device that would sell tens of millions of units if not upwards of a hundred million. Handheld PCs have a narrower audience and tend to skew more tech savvy, especially in the case of the Steam Deck. They have much lower expectations for units sold because they’re not trying to do the “sell a bazillion units -> sell a hundred bazillion games for our system” game.
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Until more recently when they started getting competion, what other handheld gaming PCs even existed?
The first one I had was a GPD Win 2, in like 2018/2019-ish. You could do some fairly recent 3D stuff on it at the time, but it was better for 2D games.
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At some point you're going to struggle to put a capable x86 machine in a device that small.
Might run into trouble with UIs as well, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
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I mean that's basically like saying "Who is playing Startcraft 2 on a laptop???" lmao the Steam Deck and Steam Controller touchpads are literally more precise and usable than most laptop touchpads...
And further, in the same messages you accept "using a single touchpad", so like... you agree with me... great. And to satisfy your "dual touchpad" requirement, like I said waaaaaay back up at the top, the left touchpad is great for virtual menus. Pretty indispensable again in any RTS game, or mmoRPG, or pretty much other games designed for keyboard with complex keybinds that a controller cannot support. An analog stick can work with simple virtual menus, but only doesn't totally suck when it is a radial menu.
I have no idea where you saw me saying anything about "using a single touchpad" where I was agreeing with you. I said I wouldn't play those games on any touchpad, single or dual, haptic or not.
You also underestimate how powerful Steam Input is, weirdly. Chords, button combos and controller layers can be combined into surprisingly complex setups. Probably too complex, unless you like playing Steam Input more than you like playing your game, but definitely very capable of doing as much as the left pad. Which, by the way, can be mapped to a radial menu and that's about it. Let's not get crazy with our much real state you have on that thing, especially if you're trying to do anything time-sensitive.
And no, the argument isn't "stop having fun", the argument is "don't force games that aren't fun on a controller to be on a controller". I can't imagine having fun with a fast mouse-driven game on the tiny touchpad on the Deck, or even in the larger one on the Steam Controller. Or on a huge Macbook touchpad or on ANY touchpad. They don't need to be coaxed to work poorly on a mediocre replacement when they work great on the native control setup they're designed for. A few cases overlap enough to make things work well enough, but then the lack of an overengineered dual touchpad setup is not the limiting factor because there are so many alternatives in modern devices, from motion controls to touchscreens and paddles.
The touchpads were always a solution looking for a problem, even when controllers were a lot simpler. Now they're a sub-par solution looking for a problem.
Out of curiosity, what RTSs do you play on the Deck or the Steam Controller? Because I've tried that (it was 2015, I had just gotten a Steam Controller and didn't know any better) and it's one of the least pleasant gaming experiences I can imagine. Did you really do that on purpose or is this a hypothetical?
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Until more recently when they started getting competion, what other handheld gaming PCs even existed?
There's been a handful but nothing I could name off the top of my head and the specs meant anything more impressive than Super Meat Boy might be out of the question.
Just cheap crappy Windows 8 tablets for the most part, with controller buttons tacked on.
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They better release a new one before I break down and buy a new "gaming laptop" because I sometimes game.
What are you playing that needs more then the deck currently offers?
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The legion go s with steam OS should replace it 10000% but I don't know if it will. There will never be a steam deck 2 and the steam deck is already outdated and slow.
Tell me how it's slow? If you turn on fps counters and your goal is to make that number go higher then you're not using the deck to play games.
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I think where I struggle to compare them is that the game gear was meant to be a mass market device that would sell tens of millions of units if not upwards of a hundred million. Handheld PCs have a narrower audience and tend to skew more tech savvy, especially in the case of the Steam Deck. They have much lower expectations for units sold because they’re not trying to do the “sell a bazillion units -> sell a hundred bazillion games for our system” game.
Hah. You're overestimating the potential of 90s gaming devices. No game console, handheld or not, had sold a hundred million units. Hell, the Game Boy didn't crack into the hundreds until the Game Boy Color came around, and it was certainly the first.
Anyway, mild exaggeration aside, I get what you're aiming for, but I guess my question is why people read that positioning on Valve devices in the first place. There's no obvious indication that Valve is any less ambitious than any other first party, or any reason why they would be. They went to AMD and comissioned a custom APU at scale, just like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft are doing. The only differentiating factor is they built the thing on top of a mostly usable pre-existing OS (which I suppose Microsoft also does, but hey). If anything their entire call to fame was to "consolize" Linux for SteamOS, which they'd been trying to do for a while anyway.
I agree that their goal is to set up an ecosystem that works for them, but I find it surprising that people assume they're disinterested in hardware sales. If I had to guess I'd say it's because they refuse to market too hard outside their own ecosystem, so their branding feels different than the more in-your-face releases of Sony, MS or Nintendo products and people assume that's because they're intrinsically or intentionally smaller, which I don't think is true. I do think that image is projected on purpose, though.
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Until more recently when they started getting competion, what other handheld gaming PCs even existed?
GPDwin for example?
I always wanted a mini laptop basically as big as my current phone but actually mobile.
Sadly I didnt have enough F-U money
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I have no idea where you saw me saying anything about "using a single touchpad" where I was agreeing with you. I said I wouldn't play those games on any touchpad, single or dual, haptic or not.
You also underestimate how powerful Steam Input is, weirdly. Chords, button combos and controller layers can be combined into surprisingly complex setups. Probably too complex, unless you like playing Steam Input more than you like playing your game, but definitely very capable of doing as much as the left pad. Which, by the way, can be mapped to a radial menu and that's about it. Let's not get crazy with our much real state you have on that thing, especially if you're trying to do anything time-sensitive.
And no, the argument isn't "stop having fun", the argument is "don't force games that aren't fun on a controller to be on a controller". I can't imagine having fun with a fast mouse-driven game on the tiny touchpad on the Deck, or even in the larger one on the Steam Controller. Or on a huge Macbook touchpad or on ANY touchpad. They don't need to be coaxed to work poorly on a mediocre replacement when they work great on the native control setup they're designed for. A few cases overlap enough to make things work well enough, but then the lack of an overengineered dual touchpad setup is not the limiting factor because there are so many alternatives in modern devices, from motion controls to touchscreens and paddles.
The touchpads were always a solution looking for a problem, even when controllers were a lot simpler. Now they're a sub-par solution looking for a problem.
Out of curiosity, what RTSs do you play on the Deck or the Steam Controller? Because I've tried that (it was 2015, I had just gotten a Steam Controller and didn't know any better) and it's one of the least pleasant gaming experiences I can imagine. Did you really do that on purpose or is this a hypothetical?
Chords, button combos and controller layers can be combined into surprisingly complex setups.
Ah yes, complex and hard-to-remember controller mappings, so much easier than: put thumb on pad -> make selection. Great point lmao. No one is saying that you can't rig up solutions for controller, just that they are difficult to use and less payable than just using the touchpad. This very thing is probably what is driving you away from playing these games on Deck back to your computer or keyboard-lapboard gadget thing.
Probably too complex, unless you like playing Steam Input more than you like playing your game, but definitely very capable of doing as much as the left pad.
I agree 100%
Which, by the way, can be mapped to a radial menu and that's about it
You underestimate how powerful Steam Input is, weirdly. Lmao
what RTSs do you play on the Deck or the Steam Controller?
Manor Lords. Total War games are great too. Civilization is turn based but still the same input mechanics and is much better on the TV due to the touchpads. Management games have all the same input mechanics as RTS but different gameplay, the obvious example is Rimworld, but also things like Zoo Tycoon and Cities: Skylines. All of these are totally playable, and several I, personally, prefer on the couch
“don’t force games that aren’t fun on a controller to be on a controller”
except they are fun and 100% playable, thanks to the touchpads. This is just what we actually disagree on, and MANY people agree with me here and use the Steam Deck to play these games, it isn't some obscure or niche opinion, and its a major discriminator between the Steam Deck and other handhelds that are lacking in these input features
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I love when my hands get dominated
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Tell me how it's slow? If you turn on fps counters and your goal is to make that number go higher then you're not using the deck to play games.
When you are competing with PCs and home consoles. <30fps is slow in my opinion. Or. Turn the graphics super low and get maybe ~40?
The CPU/GPU is subpar
The ram is okay for most games, but soon 32 will be the new required standard.
The ssd makes apple seem generous...I'm not bashing on it, I enjoy the steam deck, but if someone were to say they want to buy one right now I'd suggest waiting for legion go s or "the next steam deck" a few years from now. Unless valve cuts the cost of the steam deck by at least $100 each model, it's not worth it anymore. There are dozens of better handhelds that you can install steam os on instead.
Note. I do also realize the steam deck community is hardcore shilly and everything I said will be read but not actually enter a brain and just passed off. Which is fine. Like I said I like the steam deck overall.
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Chords, button combos and controller layers can be combined into surprisingly complex setups.
Ah yes, complex and hard-to-remember controller mappings, so much easier than: put thumb on pad -> make selection. Great point lmao. No one is saying that you can't rig up solutions for controller, just that they are difficult to use and less payable than just using the touchpad. This very thing is probably what is driving you away from playing these games on Deck back to your computer or keyboard-lapboard gadget thing.
Probably too complex, unless you like playing Steam Input more than you like playing your game, but definitely very capable of doing as much as the left pad.
I agree 100%
Which, by the way, can be mapped to a radial menu and that's about it
You underestimate how powerful Steam Input is, weirdly. Lmao
what RTSs do you play on the Deck or the Steam Controller?
Manor Lords. Total War games are great too. Civilization is turn based but still the same input mechanics and is much better on the TV due to the touchpads. Management games have all the same input mechanics as RTS but different gameplay, the obvious example is Rimworld, but also things like Zoo Tycoon and Cities: Skylines. All of these are totally playable, and several I, personally, prefer on the couch
“don’t force games that aren’t fun on a controller to be on a controller”
except they are fun and 100% playable, thanks to the touchpads. This is just what we actually disagree on, and MANY people agree with me here and use the Steam Deck to play these games, it isn't some obscure or niche opinion, and its a major discriminator between the Steam Deck and other handhelds that are lacking in these input features
I mean, "MANY" in relation to, say, how many people would show up to someone's birthday party. Not "MANY" as in "the size of a videogame audience". We kinda know that for a fact. For reference, Steam does show the most played games on Deck. The first game with no official controller support shows up at 79. It's The Sims 4. For what it's worth, the two most used Steam Input configs do use the trackpads, but they just map the right one as a mouse and have the left one mapped to four directional functions. If your argument for the dual trackpads was simplicity, let me tell you, both of these configs are complete spaghetti, so I don't think that holds much water.
Rimworld is in there, suprisingly, in the 80s. Made me count all the way there, they should really put numbers on that list. Those seem to be the sole two mouse-driven entries. There are no RTS games, tycoon games or city builders that I can see.
In any case, you're right that we agree on whether playing strategy games on a touchpad is fun. It really is not.
By the way, you do realize your counter to the radial menu thing was a screenshot of a radial menu, right? The fact that it's using squares doesn't change how that works (except for how a grid layout actually fits fewer things than a radial menu, but that's neither here nor there).
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I think the Deck is too big for my tastes
That's what she said.
Honestly though I love the size of the deck but could even go a little bigger. Agree that as more manufacturers start using SteamOS it will be great to have options.
Are you kidding me? Steam Deck is so big and clunky. Don't even get me started on the piss poor ergonomics and the thing is fucking heavy as shit too!
I love it because it's open source, but it's shortcomings really leave a lot to be desired in my opinion.
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Yes, you've got a nice deck, okay??
I trimmed the bushes around it so it looks bigger.
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I mean, "MANY" in relation to, say, how many people would show up to someone's birthday party. Not "MANY" as in "the size of a videogame audience". We kinda know that for a fact. For reference, Steam does show the most played games on Deck. The first game with no official controller support shows up at 79. It's The Sims 4. For what it's worth, the two most used Steam Input configs do use the trackpads, but they just map the right one as a mouse and have the left one mapped to four directional functions. If your argument for the dual trackpads was simplicity, let me tell you, both of these configs are complete spaghetti, so I don't think that holds much water.
Rimworld is in there, suprisingly, in the 80s. Made me count all the way there, they should really put numbers on that list. Those seem to be the sole two mouse-driven entries. There are no RTS games, tycoon games or city builders that I can see.
In any case, you're right that we agree on whether playing strategy games on a touchpad is fun. It really is not.
By the way, you do realize your counter to the radial menu thing was a screenshot of a radial menu, right? The fact that it's using squares doesn't change how that works (except for how a grid layout actually fits fewer things than a radial menu, but that's neither here nor there).
I mean... for any game in the top 500 on Steam Deck... That sure would be one hell of a birthday party. You must have no concept of how big of a number 4 million is and how many people are playing these games on Deck...
Do you just not know what a radial menu is? The grid layout fits as many things as you configure it to, and the layout and arrangement of squares are fully configurable, which can be more useful and contextual than a radial menu... you should really watch that video I linked above, especially if you have time to spend counting games in the steam list lmao
