- Our full embargo has lifted.
And in just six days,
the Steam Deck will ship to end users
in a state that can only be described as unfinished,
which puts me in an awkward position as a reviewer.
On the one hand, I want to be optimistic.
The kind of zeal
with which Valve is tackling this project
is like nothing I've ever witnessed
in all my time covering technology.
They're on a mission to change the industry,
come hell or high water,
and it's no secret that I'm rooting for them.
Every major player in the console gaming space,
looking at you, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony,
has made enough blatantly anti-consumer moves over the years
that I can't help, but cheer for a disruptor.
On the other hand
I can't review the hypothetical Steam Deck of tomorrow.
One with Windows drivers,
an improved UI and better game compatibility.
If it's shipping as is, I have to evaluate it as is.
And I'm gonna be doing it a little differently
than you might expect.
See, this thing has the capability
to be treated like a science fair project.
You can tweak it, break it, reformat it, start over.
And Valve is embracing that, good guy Valve.
But most people aren't gonna do any of that.
So today I'm gonna be focusing
on the out-of-box console experience.
So ready or not, Valve, here I come.
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- Now I could have spent the last couple of weeks
laser focused on running countless benchmarks
on the Steam Deck,
but really the bottom line is this,
at its starting price of US$400 dollars
the hardware in the Steam Deck is literally impossible.
The internals of this thing,
put it in the same performance class as ultrabooks
that cost twice or even up to three times as much.
And if it's a title in Steam's game library
the Deck is almost certainly capable
of running it at 60 FPS,
if you're willing to turn down the details.
And that colossal back catalog is both its greatest strength
and its biggest question mark.
I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit though.
Firing up the Steam Deck cold takes just a few seconds.
Now let's get logged into a Steam account,
we need to be online for this obviously,
and take a tour of the interface.
At launch, all the basics are pretty well covered
and I was surprised
at how self-explanatory just about every menu was.
Home, here, contains your recently launched games,
news, and recommended picks from your library
based on the taste of gamers with a similar profile.
One surprisingly jarring feature for me on this page
was the Friends tab.
I mean, it's a pretty simple feat of games
that your friends are playing and recent events.
You can see mine is empty because I don't have any friends.
And you can chat with them to play together
or view a game that you don't already own in the store.
That's just pretty normal stuff, right?
But what it serves to highlight
is the Steam Deck's online first design.
And I couldn't help feeling looking at this.
Like the Switch is suddenly this relic
of a different gaming era.
The rest of the main menu is access
to using the Steam button.
You can hold it, by the way,
for a comprehensive list of useful shortcuts or records.
Then from here,
you can use any of the four methods of navigation,
joystick, D-Pad, touchpad, or touch screen,
to arrive at your destination.
And wherever that destination is
there's a pretty good chance
that you're gonna find some,
let's call them, growing pains.
All right.
Let's pretend I'm a brand new customer
who doesn't own any Steam games,
and I head straight for the store.
No, not that store,
although they do have excellent water bottles
and those pads there.
To Valve's credit, this has already improved a lot.
In fact, it was part of a big long list
of improvements that Valve sent me,
just minutes before we sat down to film this video.
But fortunately I caught this one already.
I had this whole thing written up
about how the closest thing
to a Steam Deck verified page in the store
was the Steam OS slash Linux heading
under the Categories tab,
that frankly reminds me of the reasons
that Nintendo introduced their seal of quality program
back in the eighties.
Like honestly, "Climb Fall Human Guys."
(crew laughs) Really?
I wonder if it's a "Fall Guys" rip off.
One of the new and trending games was like,
"Elf Wives Cheat to Ride My Meat."
(crew laughs)
Fortunately, that nest has been papered over
with a proper, Great On Deck header
that allows you to browse titles
that are verified to run flawlessly by category,
popularity, ratings, discounts, all the usual fair.
And this is hugely important,
because for those who haven't been closely following,
Steam Deck news,
it runs a modified version
of Arch Linux called SteamOS.
And game compatibility relies either on the developer
to build a Linux native version of their game
or this super cool compatibility layer called Proton
or Steam Play.
So this is great
but there's a bit of a navigation problem here, Valve.
Where on earth is the comprehensive list
of Deck verified games?
You've got this wonderful page on your website,
outlining the four different tiers of compatibility:
verified, playable with tweaks or workarounds,
unsupported, and unknown.
But nowhere on the official site,
or more importantly in the store,
can I just browse a comprehensive list
of every game that works on the Deck.
And whatever the reason is for this obfuscation,
I don't care.
It's a terrible user experience.
My first Google hit for a workaround
was this list on DigitalTrends from a few days ago,
which led me down a rabbit hole
to steamdeckverified.avery.cafe,
a totally credible sounding site
that scrapes the SteamDB database for verified status flags
and then makes them easily searchable.
Big props to the community maintainers
of both of these projects.
But my gratitude towards them doesn't change the fact
that neither of them should be necessary
if Valve was on top of these things.
I'm sure they're gonna get this sorted out in time.
But considering that Valve's core competency is
supposedly, selling games through digital storefront,
it just struck me as a little ironic
that I encountered at everything from slow page loading
to titles not highlighting as I was scrolling,
making it so that I had to navigate out of the store
and come back to it and figure out where I left off,
to this confusing compatibility error message that I got
while trying to download the demo
of a Steam Deck verified game.
I mean, given the importance of selling games
to balance out Valve's aggressive hardware pricing,
I hope that the plan is
to get this in order as soon as possible.
Or maybe the plan is
just to allow me to buy additional copies of games
that I already own.
While I'm at it, by the way, one more gripe,
is that while I don't mind the store reloading
if I haven't looked at it in a while,
if I'm quickly switching back and forth between my library,
it would be really nice if it remembered what page I was on.
It's really frustrating.
Heading into the library,
things take a turn for the better.
I installed a one terabyte micro SD card
and found that while I didn't always get a prompt
for which storage device I wanted to use
it is super simple to transfer games
to the internal SSD and vice versa.
And depending on the game,
I saw download speeds over wifi
of anywhere from 30 to 40 megabytes per second
and closer to 60 to 70,
with spikes to a hundred,
using a USB type C dongle.
That's those Zen2 cores going to work.
Love it.
And the game library,
inspired by Steam Big Picture, is delightful.
Mostly.
In here, we'll find a mish mash of games
that I bought years ago,
ones that I picked a it more recently to enjoy on the Deck,
and pretty much every other unknown status game
that I tried was a big fat negatory.
The good news is that,
according to the third party resources,
the number of verified games
has been absolutely skyrocketing,
including many games that I would actually wanna play
while I wait for some of my favorites to arrive.
And more good news,
every verified game I tried,
with the exception of Feds,
which I had some crashing issues with,
was a smooth enough experience
that I would simply never even know
that I wasn't on Windows.
Smoother, actually, in some cases.
- Let's talk about some really cool stuff
the Steam Deck does better than a Windows handheld.
Say I'm on the bus gamin' away.
And boom, we're at my stop.
Look at that sleep speed.
Now I'm walking down the street ready to continue,
and, bam, ex-Sparx, sure.
But I'd like to see a Windows PC do that.
How about sleep battery drain?
In our rough estimation,
it appears that the Steam Deck loses about 10%
of battery every 24 hours in sleep.
It's not quite Apple level,
I mean, what is?
But it's miles better than most Windows laptops.
Okay, so now I'm in my game here, right?
I'm just farming some wild boars or something.
And I wanna hang out in voice chat
without going through the hassle
of installing Discord in desktop mode or whatever.
Steam Menu, Friends, Voice Chat,
and man, let me put it this way.
I accidentally gave Linus a call in the middle of the night
while playing around with this menu,
and we were both blown away by the progress Valve has made
with audio compression in recent years.
And adding icing to the cake,
he described the mic quality on the Steam Deck as mid-tier,
which is high praise indeed for a microphone
on a $400 handheld that's a couple of feet from your face.
Here's a quick sample of the Steam Deck's microphone
through Steam Voice Chat.
And here's a quick recording
of the Steam Deck's microphone through Discord.
The one challenge we ran into was,
during intense scenes
the games audio could break through Valve's attempts
at canceling it out.
But the solution to this was as simple as either,
boosting the call volume or lowering the game volume,
resulting in a really excellent social experience,
all without a Nintendo Gold, Xbox Gold, PS whatever.
Thank you very much, Valve.
- Honestly, though, as a friendless person, nice,
it's the quick access menu over here,
these three dots, that impresses me the most.
Whether you're in a menu or mid game
the quick settings menu is full of all kinds of goodies.
You got your notifications.
Yeah, no, nothing really that interesting there.
A way to more quickly access your friends.
And you've got your quick settings.
In here, you can adjust screen brightness
and you will want to do it this way.
Not a huge fan of Valve's auto brightness,
I think it needs some work.
You can adjust your rumble and haptics,
which by the way are still unamazing,
'cause they don't have dedicated hardware for it,
but both of them are greatly improved through updates
since our hardware review.
And you can prioritize your connected controllers,
toggle your wireless radios, all that good stuff.
Bluetooth audio, by the way,
for those who are bitter about years of Nintendo apathy,
was completely painless
with both my LG Tone Free FP8s and my AirPods Pros.
And I, I didn't try much else.
Then there's the boring tab,
the battery tab that, sorry, did I say boring?
I meant the opposite of that.
This is the coolest one.
And it is time for the rest of the console industry
to sit up and take notes.
That right there is an integrated performance monitor
based on MangoHud.
And it's time for a bit of a side story.
You could argue that Microsoft has good coverage
of the consumer spectrum,
Windows for enthusiasts and tinkerers
and Xbox OS for normy gamers.
But what they don't do a good job of is bridging this gap.
And when I contacted them asking for a temperature readout
for the Xbox series X, for example,
they acted like I was from the moon.
An FPS counter?
Why would you want that?
More like, what are you trying to hide?
This is in stark contrast to Valve's approach here,
which appears to be,
well, I don't know, man.
I mean, it's your thermal diode.
I assume you want values outputting, right?
Damn straight.
I mean, why pretend that a performance issue isn't real,
creating confusion among consumers
when you could just give the enthusiasts
the tools that they need to diagnose it for you.
And better yet, probably solve.
I mean, it's beyond the scope of the video today
but The Phawx is a wizard when it comes to tuning FPS,
thermal and power limits in these handhelds
to optimize performance and battery life,
to the point where he was actually able
to beat Valve's estimates.
So if you wanna learn more about why this tab is so cool
you can go check out his shows, all right?
The dumbest part of this traditional console opacity is
that enthusiast grade diagnostics
are such an obviously, powerful business tool.
And when Steam Deck 2 comes out
it's gonna be trivially simple
for gamers to compare performance,
which is a powerful upsell mechanism
that it is baffling to me
that everybody else doesn't wanna leverage.
So this is the proof that you can build something
for the hardcores under the hood,
and then also keep it clean
for the normies that never wanna look at any of that stuff.
I actually get a lot of BMW vibes to be honest,
great hardware,
fantastic out-of-box experience,
definitely some quirks,
but also a ton of thought that goes into weird edge cases.
For example, I ran an update,
and while the Deck was rebooting,
I went out of network range.
So it got a little confused for a few seconds
when it turned back on,
then it kind of went, oh, okay,
I guess we don't have network.
Just dumped me in the profile selection screen.
I clicked on it and boom, I was on the homepage.
I mean, Valve has had a much better offline experience
than many other platforms for years.
And that work is paying off in spades here.
One of the biggest challenges that they face
with the Steam Deck is handling cloud saves
with a portable device.
So to address this, they introduced a technology
that allows seamless saving across devices.
And that sounds great for the future.
Gotta run to the can take your Deck with you,
all done, pick up where you left off on your desktop.
For the moment though,
hmm, things are a little more glitchy.
To demonstrate,
let's abruptly suspend a game session here.
The Deck goes to sleep.
We go to launch that same game on desktop
and, oops, we get a prompt warning us
that we could lose progress if we continue.
Waking the Deck, closing the game,
and putting it back to sleep resolves the issue,
but it's not particularly elegant for the moment.
And there are still quite a few rough edges.
Here are a couple of navigation annoyances, for example,
the keyboard doesn't roll over horizontally, ugh.
Oh, and my precious quick access menu,
this one drives me absolutely crazy.
As you are scrolling through the sub menus here.
Okay?
If you go all the way down,
it doesn't go into the next parent menu, obviously,
'cause that would be stupid.
But if you go up, it just carries all the way through.
Some consistency would be nice here,
but I'm sure Valve is gonna see this
and fix everything that I've talked about
before any customer actually gets the device in their hands,
which leads us perfectly into a huge discussion point.
- We've almost completely glossed over
some massive elephants in the room.
We've hardly even touched on game compatibility,
especially with third party launchers
and anti cheat schemes,
and that's for good reason.
We just don't feel like it should be our focus today.
It's not perfect today, no doubt.
Much of both of our Steam libraries
are either entirely incompatible or have issues.
But the Steam Deck needs to be evaluated
for what it is not what we wish it could be.
It's a console, which means it's compatible
with the games that it's compatible with.
But unlike any other console in history, it's fluid.
Using the compatibility tool like Lutris,
means it's entirely conceivable
that a gamer could flip over to desktop mode
on the Steam Deck
and fire up a Anno 1800 using the touch pads.
But unless they're willing to put in the work
and maybe tolerate some inconveniences,
like the fact that multiplayer doesn't seem to work at all
despite a gold rating on ProtonDB,
it's just not gonna be the kind of experience
that most gamers are after,
which is why we feel
that most people should probably,
look at Valve's verified list, or somebody else's,
and make their own decision.
It's an easy one for us.
We're in.
If you're on the fence but have a gaming PC,
fear not,
because for games that don't yet run natively
or through Proton,
Steam Remote Play on the Deck
is probably the best, most responsive,
game streaming setup I've ever used,
is straight up outstanding
and we don't say that a lot.
But we'll also be looking at,
some of the more hacky use cases in more detail
in the future,
once Valve's had a little bit more time
to not complete the Steam Deck.
Ah, yes.
We're back to that.
What might surprise you
about our its incomplete take is that Valve agrees.
Obviously they've been hard at work refining the experience
and the lead up to the consumer launch.
Nobody wants to embarrass themselves.
But they also have no intention whatsoever of stopping here.
It's frustrating because it means
consumers are expected to take whatever Valve offers today
and trust that someday they'll live up to the vision.
But it's also encouraging,
because it means that looking at it like a console,
once we've worked through,
the generous 400 some odd game launch titles,
there's hope that it's going to be better for years to come.
And honestly, I'm hopeful.
- And with that in mind,
I wanna immerse myself in the Steam Deck experience,
and I'm gonna be switching to it
as my only computer for a month,
starting today.
During that time, I hope to explore the desktop experience.
Browser games?
Apparently controller support is coming to a Chrome update,
which sounds super cool.
Third party game stores?
GOG, for example, has outright said,
we're not gonna support it
but maybe there could be work arounds
for non-validated games.
I wanna look at the Windows experience.
Actually Windows might end up being a separate video.
I don't know about that.
So it's incomplete, but I'm not complaining.
I mean, I spent my whole life as a gamer,
asking for someone to take the guardrails off my console
and let me do whatever I want with it,
understanding,
that there might be some hiccups along the way,
and someone finally did it.
So if you're like me
you can see that Valve took the rougher path here
but, damn it, that's our path.
And I couldn't be happier.
So keep your pre-orders, ladies and gentlemen,
because you're going to absolutely love this thing.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe go check out some of our early Steam Deck coverage.
We're gonna have that links down below.