Valve introduces Steam Deck

[Gatdam Animal Person]

Gonna be switching to a job with a weekly hourly commute and tempted to get a cheap steam deck and upgrade the hard drive. Have any of you guys had experience with doing such a thing or do you just put a few games on and routinely wipe the cache?

It's super easy to disassemble and swap out the drive. Just make sure to:

1. Install a 2230 NVME drive (SATA doesn't work).
2. Don't fully remove the tin foil covering the heatsink screw.
3. Clone the previous drive with the newer one. Otherwise, just flash the recovery image on a USB drive, and off you go!

 

[Nitro!]

I'm a fool that liked the Steam Controller, so probably biased here, but I can't imagine using a Steam Deck (or Deck-like device) without the trackpad. It opens up so many options to work with games that were made for a mouse. Especially if you emulate trackball mode, it's surprisingly usable.

It's not just you. Any SD clone without a left trackpad is completely worthless. Losing those extra nine buttons for games that make use of keyboard shortcuts, or as a scroll wheel in desktop mode, turns the device into an oversized controller and nothing more.

 

[Slav Power]

As much as it's nice to see competition in the PC handheld market, all offerings fall flat compared to the Steam Deck due to a simple reason: Valve is the only one that sells their hardware on the console business model. Because they own the largest game platform on PC.

The reason consoles are so much more affordable than PC's is because they are all sold at a loss. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo make up for it by selling games, which are also more expensive to accommodate for that.

PC hardware on the other hand needs to hold up on it's own, therefore it is sold at a markup price, because otherwise the companies that make it wouldn't be able to turn a profit on them. And that's why the ROG Ally and all the other handhelds before the Steam Deck are/were so expensive, and why Steam Deck became such a massive success.



Also the fact that consoles are sold at a loss and games are developed primarily for them results in game devs not optimizing shit and expecting everyone to have PC's with specs matching current gen consoles which costs much much more in the PC world and barely anyone has rigs like that in the first place but I digress, that's a different issue.

 

[Betonhaus]

Will we ever see an Xbox portable?

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

The reason consoles are so much more affordable than PC's is because they are all sold at a loss. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo make up for it by selling games, which are also more expensive to accommodate for that.

Pretty sure Nintendo usually doesn't sell at a loss, and I'm not sure each PlayStation did either. Not sure about Xbox.

 

[Slav Power]

Pretty sure Nintendo usually doesn't sell at a loss, and I'm not sure each PlayStation did either. Not sure about Xbox.

What I mean is that the hardware is sold at a lower price than it costs to produce it, because the real profit is in the games sold for the systems. It's basically the razor and blades business model. Try to build a PC with the exact same specs as a PS5 or XSX and see which one is cheaper.

The console will be cheaper, because to have the same level of performance with the same high speed and high capacity storage and every other detail of the specification you need to pay the full price with a margin in the PC world, because PC part manufacturers don't sell games or other good to base their business model on.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Will we ever see an Xbox portable?

If it looks and plays better than the PS5 Portable coming soon, then I think I wouldn’t get shocked if MS tried to do a Valve Steam Deck clone with that portable idea.

 

[Betonhaus]

If it looks and plays better than the PS5 Portable coming soon, then I think I wouldn’t get shocked if MS tried to do a Valve Steam Deck clone with that portable idea.

It'll probably run Windows 11 or a customized version, and so can play Steam games plus games from any source. Maybe an Xbox Surface or Surface Xbox?

 

[Pissmaster]

Pretty sure Nintendo usually doesn't sell at a loss, and I'm not sure each PlayStation did either. Not sure about Xbox.

iirc the PS3 costing $800 to produce and selling for $600 & $500 was one of the laughing points when it was new. Wii was always sold at a profit, and I think Xbox 360 was sold at around cost, maybe a slight loss.

As much as it's nice to see competition in the PC handheld market, all offerings fall flat compared to the Steam Deck due to a simple reason: Valve is the only one that sells their hardware on the console business model. Because they own the largest game platform on PC.

Yeah, pretty much. Any Steam Deck owner could easily tell you how the whole experience of the system is very much designed around using Steam. If you aren't a technical person, you can still figure out how to buy and install games directly from Steam, but running anything else will be some level of nightmare. Even installing pirated games is a big hassle. I really don't think anyone's going to give Steam Deck any real competition unless Microsoft pops out an Xbox handheld.

 

[ZipDisk]

There is no PS5 Portable. It's a streaming shitshow. Less features than the Wii fucking U.

 

[ShitLurker]

iirc the PS3 costing $800 to produce and selling for $600 & $500 was one of the laughing points when it was new. Wii was always sold at a profit, and I think Xbox 360 was sold at around cost, maybe a slight loss.


Yeah, pretty much. Any Steam Deck owner could easily tell you how the whole experience of the system is very much designed around using Steam. If you aren't a technical person, you can still figure out how to buy and install games directly from Steam, but running anything else will be some level of nightmare. Even installing pirated games is a big hassle. I really don't think anyone's going to give Steam Deck any real competition unless Microsoft pops out an Xbox handheld.

Got the echo the pirate sentiment. Only did it for Octopath Traveller, seemed easy enough to set following a guide for Lutrix, then after a few weeks of playing it just shit itself and I was never able to get it working again on the deck no matter the clean installs or fucking around with Lutris settings.

 

[Epoch]

Gonna be switching to a job with a weekly hourly commute and tempted to get a cheap steam deck and upgrade the hard drive. Have any of you guys had experience with doing such a thing or do you just put a few games on and routinely wipe the cache?

It's really easy to swap, just make sure you slide the shielding wrap off the original ssd instead of damaging it and slide it on the new one. I reinstalled SteamOS from the boot ISO and it gave me a minor issue with Discover in desktop mode and I had to manually reset the servers for it, usual Arch stuff, but if you want to avoid that you can clone the existing SSD.

or as a scroll wheel in desktop mode, turns the device into an oversized controller and nothing more.

It looks like there is a scroll wheel built in to the right controller on the back, along with a bajillion extra buttons ONLY on the right controller, fun.

Got the echo the pirate sentiment. Only did it for Octopath Traveller, seemed easy enough to set following a guide for Lutrix, then after a few weeks of playing it just shit itself and I was never able to get it working again on the deck no matter the clean installs or fucking around with Lutris settings.

You should be able to add it to Steam as a non Steam game and then use proton through that, you might have to put a text file with the SteamID which I had to do for one game I pirated, it made the actual Steam version show in my library with a buy button but the pirated copy was separate and it let me play it fine, weird but it worked.

 

[Gatdam Animal Person]

Any method to sync or share game account passwords with my Steam Deck? Whenever I switch between devices, I must input my 100-long password manually. Something like a copy&paste with my phone would be ideal.

 

[Stasi]

Another challenger appears

Its apparently a pre-production unit and I'm assuming the final design which is unfortunate because it look a bit jank to me. Its also fucking huge.

Looks like the same chip as the ROG Ally so I'm not sure what this thing is offering other than the detachable controller gimmick. The controller to mouse thing is pretty neat but I don't know who would seriously be using that thing, if you want a portable device to play FPS games with a mouse just get a laptop?

 

[Betonhaus]

Its apparently a pre-production unit and I'm assuming the final design which is unfortunate because it look a bit jank to me. Its also fucking huge.

I like the size and detachable controls and it sounds like it'll have a bigger battery which is nice, but the reviews sound like they are hoping to complete a worrying amount of software refinement in the two months before it launches - plus games seem to treat the controls as a janky keyboard/mouse/joystick mashup which is very worrying. The Asus one seems a lot more refined, and it has a connecter that in theory gives it eGPU support.

Luckily I'm not in a position to buy one. but i do think this formfactor has merit - with it you can have a midrange gaming desktop you can easily plop into a dock by your tv to do couch gaming, and bring it along anywhere with a keyboard and mouse.

 

[LowLowHighLow]

Yeah, pretty much. Any Steam Deck owner could easily tell you how the whole experience of the system is very much designed around using Steam. If you aren't a technical person, you can still figure out how to buy and install games directly from Steam, but running anything else will be some level of nightmare. Even installing pirated games is a big hassle.

Late to the party, sorry, but couldn't agree more. I was a hardcore pirate before the Steam Deck. Continued pirating for the first few weeks, but the whole process is so tedious and sometimes doesn't even work (especially great when installing a heavily compressed game for hours), that I quickly realised that it's not worth it. To give you an idea:
1. Download it
2. Copy it onto a thumb drive
3. Plug it into your SteamDeck and go to desktop mode
4. Add installer to Lutris (plus creating a new wine prefix, that needs keyboard input which is a pain in the ass when you only have the virtual keyboard available)
5. Run the installer
6. Installer won't run? Try another wine version and go back to 5
7. Install the game (keep the SteamDeck awake the whole time you fool!)
8. Installer crashed (hopefully at 99%)? Try another wine version and go back to 5.
9. Installer keeps crashing? Try bottles, heroic, or maybe install directly via Steam.
(10. Copy over crack)
11. Add the game's exe to Lutris (again keyboard input from hell)
12. Use BoilR to get your new game in the Steam Lib, hoping to NOT screw your lib (yep, happened to me for god knows why)
13. FINALLY RUN THE GAME - Whoops, doesn't work? Try another Wine version. Still not working? I guess you forgot to add some winetricks/protontricks, so please go back to the awful, non-communicating UI for that and try again. No luck? Congrats! You successfully wasted hours of your life. Well, sucks to be you I guess. Now have much fun with cleaning up that mess for nothing.

To be fair: this happened only a few times, most of the time it was working fine, however it's still too cumbersome for my taste, compared to hitting the "install" button in the nicely integrated Steam UI. And you could reduce the overall risk of a non-working game even more by going for repacks specifically made for Linux.

The worst part about it is that I actually started buying games on Steam only, before that (when not pirating, which happened rarely) I made sure to always buy it on GOG, but for these games you need to go through a similar process, with the addition of the obvious step 0: buy the game - or in other words: pay to go through that god awful process. (although that's only part of the truth, because you can add your GOG account to Lutris directly, which would skip some steps, but I still had to deal with step 6 onwards and stuff wasn't working for some reason)

That at least was my experience from months ago - has it changed in the meantime?

 

[TOTAL NIGGER DEATH]

has it changed in the meantime?

1-download bottles from flathub
2-download ProtonUpQt from flathub
3-open protonup select bottles flatpac click add version then add lutris ge and ge proton
4-fire up bottles and set up a new gaming bottle
5-go to the setting part of your set up bottle and change the runner to lutris ge or proton ge depending on which compatibility layer you want to use
6-Install your yarr harr game anywhere you want
7-on your set up bottle click add shortcut and point it to your exe
8-click the triangle icon and play your game

 

[ShitLurker]

@LowLowHighLow just a suggestion that may make your life a bit less miserable. I set up AnyDesk in the Deck and my desktop allowing me to remote desktop into the deck from my rig which makes file manipulation a lot more comfortable. You can also share a folder from your desktop and copy stuff from there into the deck, it's how I've moved all of my roms and had no issues and how I originally set up Octopath until a few weeks later it decided to stop working. Transfer speed ain't the best mind you, but I find it more comfortable.

 

[ZMOT]

especially great when installing a heavily compressed game for hours

please tell me you're not trying to run fitgirl installers on the deck

 

[TVB]

@LowLowHighLow Are you using it properly?