What will you do with a Steam Deck?
Aside from toilet-based X-Com tournaments, of course
As you can see from our coverage of the Steam Deck, Valve's portable PC has us intrigued. It's designed to let you leave your desktop behind, while taking your library with you on the go. It could be just one room over, or on long trip, but all your games and friends will still be available to you.
With that in mind, if you get one, what do you plan to do with it? Will it be an extension of your desktop gaming, taking your progress with you? Do you hope you’ll work out how to appreciate different types of game on the device? Can you imagine using the dock and accessing the underlying OS? Tell us below.
I asked myself this the other day. I was explaining the concept of the device to my partner, and until that moment I hadn’t really thought about what I could do with it, other than pick it up and marvel at it. I don’t really bother with mobile gaming, and though that means I’m an ideal candidate to try it out, I’m still not convinced I’ll be as comfortable using it on a train or plane as I am reading a book. I’ll try to Doom my way from Dundee to Glasgow one weekend, but ultimately I prefer to be passive when I’m travelling. I read. I watch stuff. I enjoy the view.
But it also struck me that it might be the device that finally lets me share my Steam library with her. We game in fundamentally different ways. I’m on my PC; she’s on her phone. The only crossover we have is when we pick up Minecraft together where I’m at my PC and she’s in the living room using a controller. I have considered building a gaming PC for her, but that still means finding space in the living room to put it, and working out the best way for her to control things. So far it’s always been a bit of a faff.
She’s more used to controllers and mobile screens. And until now, something like that, that could also have access to and play almost every game in my Steam library, proved cumbersome. Laptops are too wobbly, Steam’s LAN sharing has a tiny bit of lag, and Steam Mobile is just a bit too cramped.
But the Deck? It has a number of in-built control methods that don’t require relearning what she already knows. It doesn’t require a new office chair, keyboard, or monitor, and there's all the games. I don’t need to share or stream or mess about. They’re there for her to explore.
So, for me, I’ll be using it to help others access PC gaming without having to walk them through the whole process. I didn't think about that when I bought it, but it feels like the most obvious choice for now.
What about you?