Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The SteamDeck is Incomplete But Fun!”.
Oh [ Applause, ], hey, what’s up mkbhd here, all right right off the top shout out to the new water bottles that are finally in the mkbhd.com store, solid metal, double insulated, 18 ounces and we did make a light mode and a dark mode. And normally i am a dark mode type of person, but i think this might be the first time i’m actually a little more drawn to and have been using light mode. Just saying i’ll leave that up to you guys to choose i’ll, keep an eye on which one sells more but choose wisely either way they hydrated, but either way this this right here is the valve steam deck teased it a little while ago. It turns out.
There’S a lot of hype around this and now that i’ve been using it for a bit. I can clearly see that there’s not a lot of people that i would actually recommend this to, but for those people they’re going to have a lot of fun with it. So the steam deck is a 399 dollar handheld gaming console with a screen surrounded by non-removable controls with basically a mini pc inside.
If you haven’t heard about it, it can kind of be difficult to understand what a steam deck is. I guess the natural reaction is. Oh, it’s a like a nintendo switch on steroids, but it really is a lot more than that now valve isn’t exactly known for making a ton of great hardware like we know steam, of course, and they make some games, but they have made some less successful hardware Projects like they made the steam controller, which was eventually discontinued and the steam link, which was also discontinued, and, let’s not even get started on steam machines.
And it’s not even clear at this point how long the steam deck will last, but i’m rooting for it. So the challenge for the steam deck is: this is meant to be able to play any of the games in your steam library wherever you want, which is an amazing goal. But the problem is a lot of these games.
All are designed with different controller mechanics in mind. Some of them are for mouse and keyboard. Some of them are for a controller.
Some of them are just a keyboard. Some of them are hybrids, whatever you want, and so the steam deck is trying to. Let you play as many of those games as possible by adapting to them.
Now i don’t know what kind of gamer you are, but for me personally, i get like really heavy into one, maybe two games at a time and then i play them a ton until i’m sick of them and then i move on you know some other people Have a bunch of games and rotation for either person, though, basically i don’t think you’re going to be able to be quite as good at the game as you were on pc, but that’s often outweighed by how fun it is to be able to play this game. In all these new places that you could never play before, so let me just say ergonomically, i think the steam deck is pretty great, it’s much much bigger than a switch, but it’s still impressively light. It’S 688 grams. Basically, it’s like one and a half times the switch it’s made of all plastic here, but there is not much flexion at all, no creaking. The thing feels very well built and then there’s just tons of controls. So, first of all, it’s a glass touch screen up front.
Seven inch diagonal 1280 by 800 60 hertz ips display, then there’s abxy buttons, there’s a d-pad. There’S two thumb sticks with this nice texture. There’S also two touch pads with haptic feedback.
There’S a menu button top right and a view: button top left the steam button that brings up the steam menu on the bottom left and the quick settings button on the bottom right that gives you things like battery life and frame rate limits and brightness, etc. Then there’s four shoulder buttons on the top r1 r2 and l1 l2 and there’s four more assignable grip buttons around the back, so r4, r5 and l4, l5 and they’re all pretty well laid out. I mean those back buttons sit comfortably where your fingers usually sit.
The grip is nicely curved. It feels natural to hold. The speakers, of course, are up front facing you and then up top is the volume buttons, a headphone jack for some headphones and a usb c port for charging.
But then at the bottom is a micro sd card slot, which is surprisingly important, see the 399 is the baseline version and that will get you 64 gigs, the lowest amount of storage, and that also is the slowest storage. If you haven’t just check your steam library, real, quick, there’s, a pretty good chance, you’ll find at least one game – that’s more than 64 gigs. So this 256 gig version i have here is 529, and then there is a half terabyte 649 version coming later, which apparently also has a nano etched display, but yeah.
I only have two games that i’m playing on my steam library right now. One is called dirt rally: it’s about 40 gigs and the other is nba 2k 22 and it’s 117 gigs. And so i don’t really have much room for any other games. But the nice thing is, like i said, there’s that micro sd card slot, which just pops in and out like normal, like that and you can just add a terabyte of extra storage and impressively and thankfully that actually will give you totally normal performance playing games off. Of that card, so i would recommend saving a little bit and getting one of these too, but yeah once i got the steam deck really. All i wanted to do was just play some games, so i got my two good games going and immediately was playing them in places. I had never played those games before. Typically, i have to sit in the one room where the gaming pc and monitor and keyboard and everything is set up, but i was playing dirt rally sitting on a couch or just in random other rooms. This could easily extend out anywhere the back of a car or on a flight the waiting room at a doctor’s office. I don’t know basically anywhere where you can catch a spare hour or two. You can play a game now. There is a tiny bit of latency that you can sort of mentally calibrate for again.
This goes back to me, saying: you’re not going to be as good in the game as you would be on a pc, but i was able to get used to it enough to make it enjoyable, and i think that’s where focusing on the numbers on paper will Get you kind of lost, you know it runs a custom amd apu. It has 16 gigs of ram. You might be tempted as a gamer to say, oh well, what, if, what, if it had 90 hertz or 120 hertz display or focusing on faster storage, to reduce latency a little would have been nice, but the battery life, the battery life. It’S rated for two to eight hours and i’ll just say: you’ll definitely get closer to two a lot more often than you’ll get close to eight.
So 60 hertz is fine. 1280 by 800 on a 7 inch display is fine and the controllers and ergonomics are really good. They’Re comfy, the other game that i mentioned.
I play a lot. Nba 2k works great again. You got to take a few games to calibrate for the slight delay between moving the controls and then the actual player moving, even if you’re not playing online like it’s most noticeable when shooting free throws or really any type of shooting, where that’s timing related. But once you get the hang of that it’s fun, i mean i’ve. Never i’ve literally never played nba 2k anywhere other than on my couch, with the playstation in front of me or on a gaming computer in the studio.
So i’m out here sitting on a random couch with no tv in the room playing 2k on a flight playing 2k anywhere away from the normal setup is so new. It just felt like unlocking a level of fun that i couldn’t access before, but here’s the x factor these games, that i’ve been playing work really well on the steam deck, because those controls are already mapped great because those are games that are typically played with controllers. I mean you could get a wheel for dirt, but those are games that are already mapped great, so you’ll notice, if you try to go into the menus in 2k or something with a different part of the deck like the touchscreen or the touch pads yeah. Those things don’t really work very well. They’Ve tried to map it, but it’s pretty bad.
It’S inconsistent, it’s imprecise, you’d, never use them, but at least the controls that are supposed to work. Do that’s why it’s in the great on deck section in the steam store. They had to make a specific section for games whose controls map over perfectly but there’s a lot of games whose controls don’t map over well or have unknown compatibility where it’s really a toss-up and there are games in the steam store that are just straight up.
Unsupported on steam deck and they won’t work so anytime. You search the store you can leave verified games only which works really well or you can risk it a little and include games that are playable, but not perfect and that’ll just be up to you as of right now, apex legends, pubg, destiny, 2 fall guys and A bunch of others are completely incompatible with the steam deck. So in that sense, it’s pretty rough, but this isn’t really meant to be looked at like a switch on steroids. This really is much more of a full-on computer shrunken down to be more portable.
So the hard carry case that it comes with. I really like it. I think it’s very good. The fans and the exhaust vent at the top are pretty much constantly working.
It takes like five minutes of gaming before it’s spitting out hot air and the 45 watt charger that it comes with you pretty much have to take it everywhere if you want a game for more than about three hours, but the reward for dealing with all of These trade-offs is being able to play these games in all sorts of places that you’ve probably never been able to play these games before and that’s the fun of it. So, even though they’re ergonomically similar – and it’s like tempting to compare this to a nintendo switch they’re, not even in the same category at all and they’re for completely different audiences, too, the steam deck already has a pretty hardcore community. That’S mapping the controls to various new games. This thing has gotten a ton of software updates from valve. Since i first got it bug, fixes extra features, experimental stuff, there’s people out here, plugging it into a monitor and a keyboard, and a mouse and it’ll happily run linux like a straight up, portable pc and apparently, if you take it apart, there’s enough room inside for A whole air tag so, instead of waiting for a lost and found feature to be added, you can just do that. But probably my favorite, as you can see, is my white steam deck, there’s of course, no actual white steam deck, but i’ve got a skin on it from our channel sponsor dbrand and they also sent over their steam deck glass which is available. Now it is a precisely perfect fit screen protector that keeps the screen sensitivity on point and they’ve got a whole line of steam. Deck accessories under the project name, kill switch, which is hilarious, so the steam deck is fun, even if i’m not the biggest gamer in the world.
Just being able to take these couple new games to new places and play them in places, i would never ordinarily be able to that’s the fun of it. If you want that experience, then you should try to get a steam deck, but there’s not a lot of people in that group. But if you are yeah check it out, even if half the games don’t work yet thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one. Peace, .