Steam Deck: Cool or Nay?

Well fellas, it’s that time of the blog cycle that I want to crank out a BEEFY article, and I know just what to do it on!

Valve has done it again. Gaben and his crew of programming monkeys have a habit of breaking the top of the trending charts when they release new products. This happened with Half Life Alyx, and happens any time Half Life 3 is hinted at. (Even when a confirmation of the game is “confirmed” in a non Valve game). Well, as I said at the beginning of this paragraph, Valve has done it again. They announced what could possibly be the biggest gaming announcement since the 5th gen consoles finally started being sent out. Steam is creating a product to compete with a true titan of the gaming industry, Nintendo.

That’s right, Valve is tossing it’s hat in the ring with the mobile console gaming industry, and they’ve already made some pretty big promises. Let’s get right into the Steam Deck!

What We Know

What we know at the moment is pretty scarce, other than it will have the capabilities to play your entire steam library. We also know that Steam is allowing pre-orders, likely to avoid scalpers, for a small fee of 5 bucks. The Steam Deck also shares a resemblance with the Nintendo Switch (go figure). Though, the placement of some buttons is a bit funky. Here’s a picture of the Steam Deck

We also know that there are going to be at least three confirmed versions of this console. Most of the changes between them are pretty minor. Time to break it down. I think it goes without saying that each tier up has all of the features that come before.

The Stock

The Stock version of the Deck pretty much comes with a carrying case and 64 gigs of memory. It’s a bit underwhelming, and comes out to cost a whopping 400 bucks. That’s a pretty big purchase for a console. To put it into perspective, the Nintendo Switch cost 300 bucks on release. The only upside of the upcharge that I see is that people aren’t going to have to run to their closest GameStop to pay 60 bucks per game, and you’d have access to your entire Steam Library. For me, that would be a little over 200 games. Seems pretty solid.

The Middle Man

This is like the middle class version of the Deck, it comes with a meh 256 gigs of storage on an SSD (Solid state drive for those that don’t know) ((Basically SSD is an extremely fast way of storing memory, fast loading, all that fun stuff)). It also comes with an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle. I’m gonna be 100% transparent with you, I have no idea what that means, but it probably means you’d get a special avatar, a profile background, and a profile border. But this could literally mean anything with the vague wording.

Richy Rich, Kid Billionaire

This is a $650 largely untested product (since we have a rough release estimate) with 512 gigs of SSD storage, anti-glare glass, an exclusive carrying case, an exclusive Steam Community Profile, and a virtual keyboard theme. I… Uh, don’t know what to make of the last 3 here. It seems a bit funky. But I’ll get to that…

Oh, here are the options without my weird titles.

Now.. I’ll get to it now.

So overall, I think that the only one that’s worth getting is the middle of the road Deck, but even then it’s probably best to wait for a sale, or wait for an updated storage add on. 400 bucks is a shit ton of money for a 64 gig Switch, like, that’s one game. Maybe. The 650 dollar one is far too expensive. It’s 250 bucks more expensive than the baseline Playstation 5, and it’s a largely untested product. Valve is immaculate at creating games and running an online marketplace, but making consoles is a different matter altogether.

Steam Deck, This Time, the Overview

So, is it worth getting at launch? I think not. I’m sure that it’ll be a great system after they work through some kinks, but for a baseline model, 64 gigs is not even close to adequate storage for a gaming console. Not even base Xbox 360s are that low on storage.

While it shows promise, and is probably the only company that could get big papa Nintendo to take notice and ramp up the quality of their products, it probably can’t stand up to them out of the gate, not with the system specs that we know of now.

Well, that’s it, check out these articles for some more information on the Steam Deck, don’t just take my word on it, go. Read, learn, and formulate your own opinion. :)

Steam Marketplace

PC Gamer's take (aka better than mine)

The Verge (talks about other Steam Machines compared to the Deck)

IGN (Fixing the storage thing)

Here's a vid on it!